Front Lines of Modernism: Remapping the Great War in British Fiction

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Front Lines of Modernism

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Remapping the Great War in British Fiction

Mark D. Larabee

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Front Lines of Modernism

front lines of modernism Copyright © Mark D. Larabee, 2011.

First published in 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the World, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–10808–0 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Larabee, Mark Douglas, 1964– Front lines of modernism : remapping the Great War in British fiction / Mark D. Larabee. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–230–10808–0 1. English fiction—20th century—History and criticism. 2. World War, 1914–1918—Literature and the war. 3. World War, 1914–1918—Cartography. 4. Maps in literature. 5. Cartography in literature. 6. Geography in literature. 7. Literature and history— Great Britain—History—20th century. I. Title. PR888.W65L37 2011 823 .91209358403—dc22 2010035296 A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library Design by Integra Software Services First edition: March 2011 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

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All rights reserved.

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To Julie and my parents

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List of Figures

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction: Unsettled Space

1

1 Military Mapping and Modernist Aesthetics: Blunden, Aldington, and Ford

13

2 In Flanders with No Baedeker: Beaman, Forster, and Ford

55

3 The Persistence of Landscape: Montague and West

91

4 Fluid Front Lines: Conrad and Woolf

133

Conclusion: The Presence of Landscape and the Meaning of History

179

Notes

191

Bibliography

197

Index

215

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Contents

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0.1 1.1 1.2 1.3 2.1 3.1

The trenches near Fricourt Part of 1915 British trench map of Loos area, France Panorama sketch and range-taker’s card A simple example of perspective Penn treaty belts La Rendición de Breda, o Las Lanzas (The Surrender of Breda, or The Lances) (1635), by Diego Velázquez 4.1 The Gulf of Siam in 1889 4.2 Lines of position

2 14 18 20 71 102 150 153

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List of Figures

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I am especially grateful to Jessica Burstein for her scholarly generosity, advice, and insightful responses to my work over several years. I thank Herbert Blau and Robert Abrams for their discerning and thoughtful suggestions for revision. Raimonda Modiano commented helpfully on an earlier version of part of this work. I owe particular thanks to Brian Richardson for guiding my earliest research on space and place in literature and encouraging my scholarship since then. Thank you to Kristin Bluemel and the readers at Space Between for their responses to an article draft, as well as permission to reproduce that material here. I am likewise grateful to the editors and readers at the Journal of the History of Ideas for their comments and permission to republish. I have benefited in countless ways from my wonderful colleagues in the English Department at the U.S. Naval Academy, who have been so generous with their time and expertise. I also want to thank the Naval Academy Research Council for their support of my research. I owe a great deal of thanks to many library and museum staff members for their help with archival materials: at the Special Collections Division and Interlibrary Loan Unit of the University of Washington Libraries, the Geography and Map Collection at the Library of Congress, and the Museo Nacional del Prado. Thank you to Flo Todd for the many books and articles she secured through interlibrary loan at the Naval Academy’s Nimitz Library, and thank you to Brendan Beers for his graphics work. I am grateful to those at Palgrave Macmillan who gave their advice and suggestions, particularly Brigitte Shull, Lee Norton, Jo Roberts, Heather Faulls, and the manuscript reader. Thank you to the copyeditor, Sandhya Ghoshal, Integra Software Services, for her thorough copyediting. This book honors the service of two brothers who lived through the times it describes. My grandfather Wilber N. Larabee, too young for the First World War, served in the Oregon National Guard. Alfred E. Larabee, a granduncle, served in the U.S. Army during the First World War and again in the next.

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Acknowledgments

xii

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Acknowledgments

Permissions c Edmund Blunden, Excerpts by Edmund Blunden from Undertones of War ( 1928) are reproduced by permission of PFD (www. pfd.co.uk) on behalf of the Estate of Edmund Blunden. La Rendición de Breda, o Las Lanzas (1635), by Diego Velázquez, is reproc Museo Nacional duced by permission of the Museo Nacional del Prado.  del Prado—Madrid – (Spain). Parts of the introduction and chapters 1 and 2 have appeared in the Journal of the History of Ideas 71.3 (July 2010) and are reprinted here by permission c 2010 by Journal of the History of Ideas. Part of of the editors. Copyright  Chapter 2 has appeared in The Space Between: Literature and Culture, 1914– 1945 6.1 (2010).

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I thank my parents for encouraging my reading, and showing me the value of perseverance, when I was growing up. I give special thanks to my wife, Julie, for her steadfast love and support and for reminding me how to keep all things in perspective.

W

hen Lieutenant Bernard Adams of the Royal Welch Fusiliers was killed at the Somme in early 1917, he left behind a memoir in which he attempted to articulate the experience and meaning of the war. In the first lines of his book, Nothing of Importance (1917), a friend asks, “ ‘I want to know the truth; what is it like?’ ” Adams writes, “There was a long silence,” confessing that nothing can adequately explain what he has seen (xv). Nevertheless, the rest of the memoir consists of a minutely detailed effort to answer the friend’s question. A key moment in this effort occurs when Adams describes a map of the front lines, which he reproduces in the text (see figure 0.1). “I wish I could convey the sense of intimacy with which I am filled when I look at this map,” he exclaims. “It is something like the feelings I should ascribe to a farmer looking at a map of his property, every inch of which he knows by heart; every field, every copse, every lane, every hollow and hill are intimate things to him. [ . . . ] So do I know every corner, every turning in these trenches [ . . . ]” (103). Grounding his understanding of the war in a vision of the ground, and reimagining the landscape through the agency of the map, Adams relives his personal history and captures for his reader intimate glimmers of what it meant to be there. This book follows his lead by examining how topographical description works in literary engagements with the seemingly overwhelming, incomprehensible, and inarticulable event that was the First World War. In particular, I want to explain how its British participants and observers dealt in writing with the epistemological limitations and representational possibilities conditioned by the physical characteristics of the battlefields. I will show not only how authors attempted to portray the war in the fullness of its meaning, but also how they sought to repair the emotional and cultural damage that it wreaked. It might appear, symbolically at least, that the time for such a historicist literary-cultural study has passed its peak. The last surviving British veteran of the war, out of over six million who served, died in 2009.1 The aftermath

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Introduction: Unsettled Space

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Figure 0.1

The trenches near Fricourt. Bernard Adams, Nothing of Importance, facing p. 103.

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of that service is well known: common knowledge tells us that “the war to end all wars” sowed the seeds for the dissolution of several empires, the rise of Fascism and Communism, revolutions in Russia and China, a Second World War, the Holocaust and Stalin’s genocides, the Cold War, and wars in the Middle East and Asia, not to mention a countless number of other conflicts and violent revolutions, purges, and ethnic cleansings. Now, however, the single event that arguably did more than any other to shape the course of the twentieth century and its tragedies will be recognized at Remembrance Sunday ceremonies without the presence of any of its eyewitnesses. Yet despite the passing of the last living Great War veterans, and the higher death toll, greater physical destruction, or closer temporal proximity of later events in the twentieth century, interest in the First World War continues unabated. Indeed, that interest seems only to have intensified, if we are to judge by the spate of war histories that have recently appeared, including Niall Ferguson’s The Pity of War (1998), John Keegan’s The First World War (1998), John H. Morrow Jr.’s The Great War: An Imperial History (2004), David Stevenson’s Cataclysm: The First World War as Political Tragedy (2004), David Fromkin’s Europe’s Last Summer: Who Started the Great War in 1914? (2004), Dan Todman’s The Great War: Myth and Memory (2005), G. J. Meyer’s A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, 1914–1918 (2006), and David A. Andelman’s A Shattered Peace: Versailles 1919 and the Price We Pay Today (2008). Hew Strachan writes in The First World War (2004)—yet another of these books (and one of the most highly esteemed in a strong field)—the typical claim that “it was the war that shaped the world in which we still live” (xvii). Thus, the Anglophone public evidently subscribes ever more firmly to the belief, expressed by Paul Fussell in The Great War and Modern Memory (1975), that the First World War “detaches itself from its normal location in chronology and its accepted set of causes and effects to become Great in another sense—all-encompassing, all-pervading, both internal and external at once, the essential condition of consciousness in the twentieth century” (321). Given the commonly assumed magnitude of the cultural impact of the war, surely the upcoming centenary of its outbreak will occasion a fresh round of assertions about the central role it has played in the creation of the modern world. The truth and further implications of Fussell’s claim are borne out by other recent events in literary production, such as the marked resonance of the Great War as a setting for popular fiction. The contemporary British author Sebastian Faulks, who some friends initially thought was “insane” for wanting to write a novel set in the First World War (because, ostensibly, “war was a subject for decrepit old men in Aldershot bungalows,” they claimed, and therefore “outside the British Legion library, it would have no sale at

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all”), saw his novel Birdsong (1993) top international best-seller lists, achieve extraordinary popular and critical praise, and earn him recognition as the British Book Awards Author of the Year (x). The novels of British author Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy (1991–1995), based on the story of Siegfried Sassoon and the doctor who treated him for shell shock, have likewise proven best sellers and garnered the Booker Prize and the Guardian Fiction Prize. Across the English Channel, Sebastien Japrisot’s best-selling French novel A Very Long Engagement (Un long dimanche de fiançailles [1991]) won the Prix Interallié and has recently (2004) been made into a motion picture. What continues to draw these popular authors and their readership to the First World War must include the extraordinarily complex and compelling intersection of literature and war at the heart of the British experience of that conflict. Particular circumstances of class and education (making the regular officer corps largely the product of public-school education) and mass literacy (leading to a familiarity with a national literary canon throughout the British Army) resulted in what Fussell has described as “the unparalleled literariness” of British soldiers in the Great War (156). Consequently, even “hardly educated” private soldiers carried the Oxford Book of English Verse in their knapsacks, and their letters home invoke Bunyan, Marvell, Cowper, the Romantic poets, Housman—the pantheon of classic British literature (155–61). Soldiers of all ranks went on to write poems, memoirs, and fiction that, in turn, have joined that pantheon and thereby enriched British culture that much more. These literary products have also proven indispensable to the memorialization of their authors and the comprehension of their experiences. The written work of Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, and Edmund Blunden, among many others, has, in fact, come to define the First World War in powerful and evocative texts whose explanatory capacities exceed those of Army records and official histories. Meanwhile, in the world of academic literary studies, the First World War proves a perennial topic of interest among the members of a broad spectrum of scholarly groups, from the Modern Language Association through the Modernist Studies Association to the recently constituted Ford Madox Ford Society. Scholars have paid increasing attention to the relationship between literary modernism and the first global war of the century of modernity. This book differs from previous efforts by other scholars in attending specifically to topography, by which I mean both physical and imaginative settings, and the literary methods of describing those settings. I place such authors as Ford Madox Ford, Joseph Conrad, and Virginia Woolf alongside stylistically and thematically more conventional writers such as Edmund Blunden and C. E. Montague. Some of the authors whose works are

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studied here served as junior officers on the Western Front (Ford, Blunden, Montague, Richard Aldington, and Ardern Beaman); others served as civilians in more distant theaters (E. M. Forster) or witnessed the war’s effects from the perspective of the home front (Conrad, Woolf, and Rebecca West). Juxtaposing their representations of the war shows how currents of experience and meaning in literary topographies cross the boundaries of the experimental and the traditional, as well as those of the home front and the front line, and male and female authorship. The works under consideration here are drawn from inside and outside the canon of British modernism, as I thereby aim at the congruencies and divergences of multiple front lines—those of the trenches, the limits of canonicity, and the epistemological boundaries induced by the physical terrain. The settings of these texts are primarily on the Western Front, which reflects the overwhelming dominance of that theater and its conditions on the British literature of the war, despite the worldwide deployment of British and Imperial forces. The time frame examined ranges from the decade preceding the Great War to 1929, at which point, according to Samuel Hynes, the “Myth of the War” and the idea of “post-war” had come into existence and modernism had become a dominant art form (A War Imagined xii–xiv). The end of the 1920s is also the high-water mark of memoirs and novels responding directly to the conflict: Blunden’s Undertones of War (1928) and Ford’s Parade’s End tetralogy (completed 1928); Richard Aldington’s Death of a Hero, Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, Graves’s Good-bye to All That, and English translations of Ernst Jünger’s In Stahlgewittern (Storm of Steel) and Erich Maria Remarque’s Im Westen nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front) (all 1929); and Sassoon’s Memoirs of an Infantry Officer and Frederic Manning’s Her Privates We (both 1930). Focusing on this time frame permits an emphasis on the variety of responses to the conditions of wartime topography within the context of literary modernism, especially as the phenomenal popularity of All Quiet on the Western Front truncated that variety to Remarque’s henceforth-dominant “message of shattered illusions” (Strachan 339). The texts examined in what follows span the genres of memoir, fictionalized autobiography, and the novel. With a few exceptions, poetry is excluded, for the reason that the short lyric typical of much of Great War poetry did not provide authors as much scope for developing the themes of topographical description that appear in extended works of prose. In order to relate literary topographical descriptions to larger cultural predicates and trends, the historicist approach used here situates literary works within a context supplied by such materials as military cartographic manuals, newspaper and magazine accounts, visual artworks, diaries, letters, book reviews, encyclopedia entries, and tourist guidebooks. The specific goal of this broadly conceived approach

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is to demonstrate how topographical descriptions in literature allowed authors to comprehend, articulate, and respond to the seemingly incommunicable experience of the war. This book shows how modernist strategies of displacement, by which I mean the transposition of events and context, rooted in skepticism about transparent correspondences between events and their portrayal, furnished authors with representative methods newly adequate to their subject. Modernism gave these authors formally appropriate ways to answer the question posed by Bernard Adams’s friend—what is “the truth” about the war? “What is it like?” Furthermore, modernism provided ways to turn a search for meaning into a process of personal and cultural reconstruction and reconciliation. In this study of topographical description, the key critical terms “space,” “place,” “landscape,” and “topography” mark important related concepts and practices. “Topography” signifies a number of contradictory operations, as J. Hillis Miller points out in Topographies (1995): “a description in words of a place,” “the art of mapping by graphic signs rather than words,” and “the name for what is mapped, apparently without any reference to writing or other means of representation” (3). I use “topography” to refer both to physical configuration and to the older, deeper meaning preserved in the word’s etymology: topos, or place, and graphein, to write—hence, the writing about place. Because the word “landscape” encompasses both the terrain and its representation, I usually qualify that term when necessary by referring to “physical landscape” when I wish to specify the physical layout of the trenches and no-man’s-land, as opposed to painterly descriptions or genre. Fully articulating the theoretical distinctions between “space” and “place,” especially as informed by philosophical and scientific developments in the decades leading up to the Great War, is a book topic unto itself, and a number of critics have undertaken such works.2 I only loosely differentiate between space and place, preferring to focus instead on topographical acts, that is, literary descriptions of the observed spaces and places of the Great War. Therefore, by “space” I usually mean to refer, in the classic Cartesian-Newtonian manner, to the volume extending from the observer and containing the objects and ground that are the subject of mapping, observation, and pictorial representation. I typically use “place” in its simplest sense, that is, when thinking about the front lines (or other locations) as an environment or a dwelling. In neither case do I intend the absence of the other term to indicate a shift in the way I am conceiving of a primary author’s topographical representation. Beyond these definitions lie historic contexts that are more important to this study than what we have seen to be contested distinctions between theoretical terms. Such contexts include the foundational legacy of positivism, for

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instance, and the impact of scientific progress on the understanding of space and place in the years leading up to the war. In the nineteenth century, a number of technological, bureaucratic, and geopolitical developments seemed to herald the achievement of the dream of rationalized space. The standardization of weights and measures began with the adoption of the metric system in France in 1799, took global root in 1875 through the signing of the Convention of the Meter (creating an international bureau of weights and measures), and culminated in 1889 in the official sanctioning and distribution of thirty standard meter lengths, and kilogram weights, that would constitute the world’s physical prime standards of weight and measure. The International Meridian Conference of 1884 established Greenwich as the prime meridian and designated regular time zones (which were formally confirmed at the International Conference on Time in 1912). Worldwide dissemination of this increasingly standardized knowledge was assisted by the efforts of the Royal Geographical Society (established in 1830), the Scottish Geographical Society (1884), and the National Geographic Society in America (1888). Throughout this period, then, both specialists and the public understood spatial representation to have been based on certain rational and positivist principles. As Denis E. Cosgrove has noted with regard to representations of global space and place in Apollo’s Eye: A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in the Western Imagination (2001), nineteenth-century spatial surveys depended on “Enlightenment assumption[s] of transparent correspondence between actual form and patterns and their scientific representation in models and maps” (206). These assumptions included a reliance on such timehonored positivist representational techniques as the cartographic graticule and orthogonal perspective—part of the Cartesian and Newtonian heritage of absolute space, a scientific basis that affirmed the existence of space as an infinite void, a res extensa, in which objects occupied positions independent of the subjectivity of the observer. The one-to-one correspondence between threedimensional spatial forms and two-dimensional representations was accepted as a given, a certainty mediated and validated through the mathematically ordered and logical perspectival worldview. This understanding of space underwent a profound challenge as further scientific discoveries cast doubt on such positivist assumptions toward the middle and end of the nineteenth century. As David Harvey claims in The Condition of Postmodernity (1990), “The categorical fixity of Enlightenment thought was increasingly challenged [after 1848], and ultimately replaced by an emphasis on divergent systems of representation.” In the world of mathematics, for example, he writes, “the discovery of the non-Euclidean geometries [ . . . ] shattered the supposed unity of mathematical language” (28). The Michelson-Morley experiment in 1887 proved that light does not

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travel at a definite speed relative to a fixed frame of reference. Henri Poincaré demonstrated in 1901 the existence of “other new spaces that could not be accounted for by any geometry,” as Stephen Kern explains in The Culture of Time and Space: 1880–1918 (1983), while Albert Einstein’s theories of relativity (1905 and 1916) proved that “absolute space has no meaning,” given the demonstration of space and time as relative to each other and dependent on the motion of the observer (133, 136). Consequently, it is tempting to agree with Henri Lefebvre’s declaration in The Production of Space (1974) that “around 1910 a certain space was shattered” (25). Critics typically read Lefebvre as referring to the destruction of those modes of spatial representation grounded in Euclidean perspective, which dovetails with Woolf ’s familiar observation in “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” (1923) that “in or about December 1910 human character changed” (396). However, the case of military topography indicates that in some quarters the foundation of such positivist thinking survived scientific and cultural developments at least as far as August 4, 1914. Certain authors were more invested in this foundation than Lefebvre generally acknowledges, and it was their experience in the war that led them to reconsider the validity of inherited modes of topographical description. All of the authors considered here dealt in varying ways with fundamental difficulties in seeing what was happening in the spaces of the front lines and then describing that spatial vision for readers. These were unprecedented problems. In the Great War, a combination of factors created conditions under which, for the first time in military history, armies of millions of men fought continuously within a few thousand yards of each other but were mutually invisible. Ernst Jünger, in Storm of Steel (1920), reports with surprise of his first battle, “It was quite unlike what I had expected. I had taken part in a major engagement, without having clapped eyes on a single live opponent” (33). How did this curious circumstance arise? First, the continuing development of rifled, automatic weaponry gave individual soldiers the power to kill enemies at such distances that their targets could barely be seen, if seen at all. In the Napoleonic Wars, the one to two hundred yard range of muskets, and the massed lines of marching soldiers in conspicuous uniforms, meant that battles took place with opposing armies in clear sight of each other. In the Great War, however, rifle and artillery shells had ranges of several thousand yards; furthermore, most artillery fire was aimed blindly at positions plotted on maps. As Wyndham Lewis relates in Blasting and Bombardiering (1937), his memoir about his experience as an artillery officer, “A gunner does not fight. He merely shells and is shelled. He discharges a large metal cylinder, aiming it by means of a delicately-adjusted mechanism, to fall at a certain spot which he cannot see, in the hope that he may kill somebody

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he hopes is there. [ . . . ] The gunner rarely if ever sees the enemy, except prisoners” (131). Additionally, the sheer volume of shells and bullets—especially from the machine gun (which could fire six hundred rounds per minute, as opposed to a rifleman’s fifteen)—induced soldiers advancing across open ground to avoid stopping to engage in hand-to-hand combat with any enemy they might encounter. Except for what John Keegan terms “ ‘him or me’ bayonet thrusting” in The Face of Battle (1976), the closest thing to “single combat [ . . . ] was perhaps the game of ‘bombing up the traverses’ [i.e. around the blind corners of occupied trenches], of which the most striking feature, so characteristic of the First World War, was that one did not see one’s enemy” (229, 242). If such a “game” was not currently under way, one could not be sure of who might be around the corner of the trench; as Keegan further points out, the same trench could hold enemy troops without those of one side seeing the other (252). Therefore, even at comparatively close ranges the enemy typically remained unseen—if more lethal than ever before. In a further consequence of the dramatic expansion of weapon ranges and volume of fire, soldiers spent most of their time in the protection of positions below ground level, either in dugouts (up to forty feet below ground) or in the vast system of connected trenches built at a nearly uniform depth of ten feet from trench floor to parapet top.3 Systematic entrenchment began on the Western Front in September 1914 and led to nearly continuous lines of trenches along the 475 miles from the English Channel to Switzerland, totaling some 25,000 zigzag miles of front-line, support, and reserve trenches on both sides. Except when actually attacking “over the top” or when conducting the twice daily “stand-to” (when, at dusk and at dawn, troops mounted the fire step and peered over the parapet to watch for an enemy attack), soldiers therefore spent nearly all of daylight hours out of sight from the enemy. For safety reasons, soldiers kept their view of the enemy indirect if possible, mediated by such instruments as mirrors and trench periscopes, which permitted soldiers a view over the parapet without risking themselves as a target for snipers. A December 6, 1914, article in the London Times explains that this effort of concealment and protection resulted, behind the front line on both sides, in “perfect labyrinths of burrows of various types. The principal feature of the battlefield, therefore, as has been often pointed out, is the absence of any signs of human beings” (“Invisible Armies” 3). The individual soldier’s visual experience of warfare was mostly restricted to the bit of sky seen from the shelter of a trench. In David Jones’s poem In Parenthesis (1937), for example, the troops can see nothing but a “strip of sky above them. These reeking sack walls block all lateral view,” Jones writes, “and above, nothing is visible save the rain-filmed, narrowing ribbon

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of sky” (85). Fussell has convincingly demonstrated the importance of the sky to the common soldier—as the only sight “that had the power to persuade a man that he was not already lost in a common grave,” and the reason for the extraordinary prominence of sunrise and sunset in war diaries and fiction (51–63). Beyond this value of the piece of sky that the soldier could see from his trench, what were the epistemological ramifications of this restricted view of the world? First, living in a trench distorted comprehension of the landscape. “To be in the trenches,” Fussell explains, “was to experience an unreal, unforgettable enclosure and restraint, as well as a sense of being unoriented and lost.” Meanwhile, “[t]he German line and space behind [were] so remote and mysterious that actually to see any of its occupants [was] a shock” (51, 76). In the words of Modris Eksteins, the “panorama of devastation” made the Western Front the birthplace of surrealism before the term had been coined (146). Geographer Michael Heffernan concludes, “The progressive and optimistic values of the Victorian and Edwardian eras were, it is claimed, shattered for ever on the killing fields of Flanders and Picardy,” casting doubt on the scientific basis of promised progress, and making the war’s revelation of scientific potential “the dark side of the machine age” (504). The war, in these critics’ views, called into question not only the results of science, but also the ability to portray through science the fullness of reality. Combat had become an uncanny engagement with an anonymous enemy, who seemed like strange, omnipresent and omnipotent beings. Aldington explains in Death of a Hero what it was like to fight such unseen adversaries: You did not see the men who fired the ceaseless hail of shells on you, nor the machine gunners who swept away twenty men to death in one zip of their murderous bullets, nor the hands which projected trench-mortars that shook the earth with awful detonations, nor even the invisible sniper who picked you off mysteriously with the sudden impersonal “ping”! of his bullet. [ . . . ] The sentry gazed at dawn over a desolate flat landscape [ . . . ]. Five to ten thousand enemies were within range of his vision, and not one would be visible. For days on end he might strain his eyes, and not see one of them. (265–66)

Or, to take another example, Siegfried Sassoon reports in Memoirs of a FoxHunting Man (1928), “The landscape was in front of us; similar in character to the one behind us, but mysterious with its unknown quality of being ‘behind the Boche line.’ We could see the skeleton villages of Fricourt and Mametz, and the ruinous cemetery [ . . . ]. But the enemy was invisible” (372). Even aerial observation and reconnaissance photos did not reveal the presence

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of human beings on the ground.4 In memoirs and fiction, this absence of information typically freights the enemy as “such very ‘unknown,’ mysterious, invisible beings,” in the words of British veteran H. H. Cooper—as though endowed with superhuman powers of concealment, movement, and lethality (Fussell 76). Second, the differentiation between the visible and the invisible subverted the idea that combat could follow a rational, comprehensible course. When Jünger writes in Copse 125 (1925), “Shell-hole and trench have a limited horizon. The range of vision extends no further than a bomb-throw; but what is seen is seen very distinctly,” the distinctness of what can be seen only underlines the absence of knowledge about what cannot be seen—either beyond the lip of the parapet or beyond the range of the bomb-throw (263–64). What little the soldiers could see, furthermore, resisted interpretation and description; countless accounts of the war feature detailed elaborations of confusion when attempting to take stock of the battlefield.5 More important than the chaos and lack of knowledge inherent in any combat situation, however, was the failure of vision to supply the knowledge that should, theoretically, have cleared up that confusion and offered grounds on which to describe experience. What happens when authors attempt, through works of the imagination, to attribute meaning to a reality that could scarcely be seen? How do the ingrained skepticisms of modernists and soldiers caught up in military bureaucracies intersect? I organize the results of these authors’ efforts, and the related problems of vision, interpretation, and portrayal, into four major representational modes: mapping, verbal description, visual art, and globalizing geography. Despite this categorization, intended for the clarity of argument, the texts I examine provide opportunities for us to reconsider the critical demarcations that typically separate modernist and traditional forms in relation to the war, as well as the critical trends that have tended to emphasize the relations of power facilitated by maps and landscapes as cultural products. Ultimately, this aspect of the present study promises to offer the most productive consequence of the chapters that follow. The works read here serve notice that the solidification of critical opinion around the boundaries of stylistic distinctions or ideological motivations thereby neglects such questions as those of knowledge and the limits of representation—questions, I would argue, that cross and interrogate those boundaries and indicate that much more work remains to be done. In turn, it falls to us to resist the immobilization of critical consensus into its own front lines if we are to gain a fuller sense of what the Great War meant to its eyewitnesses, and what it continues to mean today.

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Introduction

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Military Mapping and Modernist Aesthetics: Blunden, Aldington, and Ford The general public must cultivate the map habit of thought [ . . . ] to see the daily details in perspective, and help them to maintain that national sanity and justified optimism which were essential to our winning the war. Halford Mackinder’s presidential address to the Geographical Association, January 6, 19161 [I]t all sounds such a ridiculously easy matter to those who read. Map maniacs stab inaccurate maps with pins; a few amateur strategists discourse at length, and with incredible ignorance [ . . . ]. H. C. McNeile (“Sapper”), No Man’s Land (1917) (90) [I]n a number of cases in the war zone in France [ . . . ] parties fully equipped with large scale maps walked right through towns several times without being able to find them. This was due to the fact that the map showed a landmark that had been absolutely wiped out. J. K. Finch, Topographic Maps and Sketch Mapping (1920) (77)

T

he Western Front in the First World War was, at its time, by far the most thoroughly and efficiently mapped battleground in history. The war came during a golden age of cartographic technology, when industrial-age techniques of material production combined with Victorian standards of analytical rigor to create or improve such advances as trigonometric surveying techniques, land-based and aerial photography, stereographic projection, multicolor lithography, and mobile printing presses. The high level of cartographic accuracy and utility that resulted from these advances proved especially valuable given certain tactical exigencies that had developed

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CHAPTER 1

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in the progress of military technology, such as the need to aim indirect artillery fire against entrenched defenders from a distance of several miles. Using refined systems of contour lines and grid references based on Cartesian spatial coordinate structures, army cartographers sought to depict the shape of the terrain and the location of enemy positions on it as precisely as possible, thereby achieving an unprecedented rationalization and ordering of space over thousands of square miles of ground (see figure 1.1). A broad variety of British organizations and individuals pursued these goals, creating a wealth of cartographic materials for battlefield use. Specialized army field units carried out surveying, and large governmental and military bureaucracies worked exclusively on map production. Additionally, all regular officers in the British Army received instruction in map reading, topographical mapmaking, and panoramic landscape sketching in order to supplement and correct the mass-produced maps issued to them. Furthermore, the virtual immobility of the front lines in France and Flanders meant that the same ground underwent repeated surveying and mapping

Figure 1.1 Part of 1915 British trench map of Loos area, France. [Loos] Sheet 36cNW3 and Parts of 1, 2, & 4, Provisional Edition No. 3. From the Geography and Map Collection, Library of Congress. The officer whose work made this updated map possible earned the first Military Cross for topographical surveying (Chasseaud, Topography 95).

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during four years of conflict. By the end of the war, consequently, the British Ordnance Survey, War Office, and field survey units had published a combined total of thirty-four million maps of the Western Front, or about 365,000 maps per mile of front line from 1914 to 1918 (over four times and eight times the rate of German and French armies, respectively) (Chasseaud, Artillery’s 499). Not only were these maps systematically produced, scrupulously corrected and updated, and extraordinarily accurate, but their sheer number testifies to the ubiquitous objecthood of the map as it was produced and circulated. Yet for all this massive effort tuned to the pitch of industrialized scientific exactitude, the conditions of modern warfare rendered the very act of observation suspect and revealed profound gaps between cartographic representation and the reality of the trench landscape. Maps frequently bore no resemblance to the war-shattered ground, the very place names and symbols that constitute the currency of cartographic knowledge proving to be sheer fiction when incessant artillery barrages reduced buildings and landmarks— or even entire towns—to piles of rubble. As maps had by this time come to be seen as the infallible product of positivist inquiry, mathematically exact perspectivalist principles, and an assumedly transparent relationship between representation and reality, cartographically trained officers frequently had any natural skepticism piqued when they found that maps failed to live up to their epistemological promise. In what follows, I examine a series of literary responses to these conditions, written by officers who were also authors: soldiers who were trained to read and make maps, required to correlate maps to what they personally observed, and sensitive to the aesthetic and artistic consequences of the breakdown in what I shall describe as a cartographic logic of visualization. This argument pivots on a shift from maps—as purportedly objective products of the cartographic logic of visualization and the apprehension of knowledge exterior to the self—to mapping, in its subjective capacities as a method of creating knowledge and, ultimately, as a way of carrying out an emotional reconstruction of the self. This shift is complex in that it involves several related elements: first, the perceived inadequacies of military mapping under the conditions that prevailed on the battlefield; second, tensions between objective cartography and subjective personal experience; and third, varying authorial strategies of dealing with these inadequacies and tensions, ranging from an emphasis on the compensatory aspects of subjectivity to a recasting of mapping as an enabling project. The primary accounts under consideration here span genres, appearing as memoir, autobiography, essay, and fiction. This generic dilation is counterposed by the common fact of rank: each of these authors wrote as junior officers in infantry companies,

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leading troops across battlefields with maps in hand and later working to articulate through literature their experiences in the landscapes of the war. For Edmund Blunden, a pastoral poet dealing with the decidedly nonpastoral conditions of the front lines, the inadequacies of maps constitute a corollary to the inadequacy of traditional pastoral landscape as a means of ordering representations of the countryside in wartime. In his autobiographical narrative Undertones of War (1928), which articulates an elegy for landscape, maps become purely aesthetic objects when he empties them of epistemological value. Richard Aldington, Imagist turned infantry officer, uses his combat experience to attack Baudelairean conventions of urban topography, as well as prewar avant-garde techniques of representation in general, for the purpose of cultural indictment. In his novel Death of a Hero (1929), the experience of mapping the front reveals ironic truths about the prewar topography of London, in both its physical and psychological dimensions. Ford Madox Ford, a self-proclaimed impressionist, documents in his novel No Enemy: A Tale of Reconstruction (1929) a third variety of topographical engagement. In this novel, Ford deploys a subjective, generative mapping of the landscape—supplementing the toponymic and taxonomic functions of objective cartography, replacing positivist military seeing, and leading to an artistic transcendence of the war’s trauma. “An ‘Eye for Country’ ” Peter Chasseaud has copiously documented the operation of an army of dedicated cartographers who served within the larger British Army: the thousands of specially trained surveyors, cartographers, and printers either attached to staffs or employed in five highly active field survey companies (later battalions). Field survey units and the Overseas Branch of the Ordnance Survey together produced ten million of the thirty-four million British maps published in total (Artillery’s 499). Blunden, Aldington, and Ford did not take part in this professionalized activity of mass-produced cartography, but like all regular British officers, they were expected to carry out certain rudimentary cartographic tasks—principally, drawing field sketches and panorama views by hand, without any specialized surveying equipment. In fact, the British Army placed great emphasis on the ability of officers to work with maps on the field of combat. “All officers must be able to read a map, and all officers should be proficient in field sketching,” announces the anonymous author of Map Reading and Panorama Sketching (1917), a British military manual (5). This manual goes on to explain that officers must be able to do more than simply read a given map and find their location: “[t]he regimental officer is called upon not to make military maps, but to supplement

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them by military sketches of limited areas—enlargements, eye-sketches, or traverses, such as can be made either with the simplest of instruments or without any at all. He must in addition be able to correct and add such information to the published map as will assist the Intelligence Staff in the field” (55). The British Army’s official textbook on such matters, the General Staff ’s Manual of Map Reading and Field Sketching (1912), concurs with these assessments and formalizes a taxonomy of required aptitudes: “[m]ap reading,” “[m]ap enlarging,” “[a]dding topographical information to an existing map or to an enlargement,” and “[a] certain amount of sketching on blank paper” in order to create sketch maps and perspective drawings (5). The products of this last kind of effort took two basic forms: the panorama sketch and the range-taker’s card, which were essential reconnaissance and tactical planning tools (see figure 1.2). The purpose of the panorama sketch was to record the topography of enemy held terrain, and the disposition of strongpoints on it, preferably from a high point of ground from which a subsequent assault could be directed. The range-taker’s card served primarily as a means for aiming artillery, providing bearings and ranges with which to generate firing calculations. Making these sketches required adhering to a rationalized conception of space, one firmly rooted in late nineteenth-century positivist and perspectivalist models. The global standardization of weights and measures, the standardization of the globe itself through the establishment of the prime meridian and time zones, and the national and international coordination of clocks, among other factors, all contributed to a public understanding of spatial representation founded on the rational principles and assumptions organized by the Cartesian worldview. Military cartography proceeded in strict accordance with this understanding. First, opinions and impressions were to be thoroughly suppressed in the quest for pure factuality based in the primacy of personal observation. When adding notes to sketches, for instance, the Manual of Map Reading and Field Sketching states, “In making a statement, [one should] distinguish between facts known to [oneself ] and alleged facts based on information received, e.g., a marginal note about a river: ‘Fordable for infantry at (7),’ would be wrong if not ascertained personally, and should be ‘Farmer Schmidt of (4) states fordable at (7)’ ” (85). Such injunctions enhanced the reliability of sketches (according to this manual and others) by suppressing the subjectivity of the mapmaker and creating an aura of empirical handling of facts by an impartial conductor of spatial observation. Furthermore, these directives establish an epistemological protocol permitting only certain categories of knowledge. Under this protocol, the role of narrative is to establish first-order knowledge, to be distinguished from such

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Figure 1.2 Panorama sketch (above) and range-taker’s card (below). General Staff, Manual of Map Reading and Field Sketching plates 19 and 19(a) (n. pag.).

second-order knowledge as “information received.” Also, there is only knowing and not knowing, exemplified by the instruction that solely knowledge established by the mapmaker is counted to be true; other knowledge is at best “alleged,” and preferably considered “wrong if not ascertained personally” (85). Finally, there is only saying and not saying, signaled by the nature of Farmer Schmidt’s utterance: a statement of fact. In this scheme, there is no

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room for Farmer Schmidt to say that he cannot say, or know that he does not know. The exclusion of these other epistemological possibilities, with their shades of doubt, dovetails neatly with the overall emphasis on the factual techniques of firsthand observation in the objectivity of military cartography. The emphasis on verifiable and utterable fact has an additional pictorial corollary in the way that the acts of observation and representation had to follow expressly anti-artistic conventions. “Landscape sketching trains a man to become observant,” notes the author of the Map Reading and Panorama Sketching: The painter who, in his sketching, is always looking for the beautiful in the landscape will naturally, when not at work, see more readily than the layman the artistic possibilities of the country side [sic]. A man who sketches trying to discern and show points of military importance will similarly grasp more readily in the course of his daily work many little points of military value—he develops an “eye for country.” (73)

For the officer, in contrast to the artist, cultivating “an ‘eye for country’ ” demands emotional detachment and clinical precision in order to be militarily effective. One might think that a degree of artistic talent would facilitate topographical sketching, but in the words of the 1912 Manual of Map Reading and Field Sketching, “it is better almost that the artistic sense should be absent, and that instead of idealizing a landscape, it should be looked at with a cold, matter-of-fact military eye. Thus the sketcher would note rather the capabilities of the country for military purposes than it[s] beauties of colouring or the artistic effects of light and shade” (75). After all, for such sketches to serve a military purpose they must reproduce, as accurately as possible, the precise position of topographical features and enemy positions if artillery fire and ground assaults are to reach their targets. The well-trained military eye must be able to estimate heights and distances in observed terrain, convert such estimations using numerical scales, and compare them to the distances and contour lines arrayed on a map or sketch, either one that is given or one that the observer is in the process of creating. The imposition of epistemological categories and the prohibition of artistic sense necessarily amounted to a suppression of subjectivity in the construction of objective maps. Yet the tension between observational objectivity and the ultimately ineradicable subjectivity inherent in the project of military cartography leaves its trace in the fundamental difference between the panorama sketch and the range-taker’s card. The panorama sketch is purely informational; it conforms to an objective apprehension of the knowledge that positions the observer as the passive recipient of prima facie evidence about the world in the form of points in the terrain existing independently

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Figure 1.3 A simple example of perspective. General Staff, Manual of Map Reading and Field Sketching 78.

of the observer. This characteristic appears prominently in an example of perspective in the Manual of Map Reading and Field Sketching, which models the sketching techniques needed to render relative size (see figure 1.3): the entire composition is organized around a vanishing point conspicuously placed squarely at the center of the drawing. The range-taker’s card, in contrast, places the observer at the physical center of the sketch and arrays the world around him, in order to create an instrument for the observer’s use in taking action in and against the world. Because the panorama sketch (informed by the example of perspective) is the intermediate step in the creation of the range-taker’s card, the locus of knowledge about the world moves inexorably from the landscape to the observer. This movement symbolically acknowledges the primacy of the human subject in this relationship despite the effort to restrict cartographic observation to an objective, positivist, and rigorously controlled exercise carried out according to scientific principles. In the fiction we will examine shortly, authors who worked with maps on the front lines found that the conditions of the battlefield revealed similarly intractable problems surrounding the task of representing topography in strictly objective terms. As we have noted, the skills expected from officers constituted something more than a set of sketching techniques, and instead amounted to the

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modern, industrialized apotheosis of models of Cartesian spatial philosophy and Renaissance perspectivalism. Henri Lefebvre calls these models a “logic of visualization.” By this he means that the logic governing the form of architectural space, especially, tends toward visual reinforcement of the rules of social production organizing that space (as when the “arrogant verticality of skyscrapers” has for its purpose making “an impression of authority” on the observer) (98). Erwin Panofsky similarly writes of a “visual logic” according to which, for example, a Scholasticist would have taken for granted the parallel between the architectural order of a Gothic cathedral, in its apparatus of hierarchically arranged elements, and the order of the literary manifestatio (58–59). In these senses, Lefebvre writes that “any particular ‘logic’ of this kind is always merely a deceptive name for a strategy”: a strategy by which “[s]pace commands bodies, prescribing or proscribing gestures, routes and distances to be covered” while concealing itself in logic. Hence, for example, “monumental buildings mask the will to power and the arbitrariness of power beneath signs and surfaces which claim to express collective will and collective thought,” and therefore, monumentality is an architectural mode appropriate to Fascism (128, 143). Reversing the telescope of Lefebvre’s logic of visualization makes his analysis appropriate for addressing the problem of battlefield vision. Rather than concentrating on how the rules of social power govern the particular shape of space and its observation, I would like to consider as a logic of visualization the rules of observation, perception, and representation by which spatial forms are observed. Now one may raise the objection that such rules are also socially constructed and therefore part of the same logic that governs the organization of the space under examination. Lefebvre anticipates and supports this objection when he asserts the subordination of the observer to the space observed: “space ‘decides’ what activity may occur,” he writes, while “[i]nterpretation comes later, almost as an afterthought. [ . . . ] The ‘reading’ of space is thus merely a secondary and practically irrelevant upshot, a rather superfluous reward to the individual for blind, spontaneous and lived obedience” (143). Consequently, any reading of space necessarily conforms to the structure of that space. However, shifting the focus from the intentions of the creators of space to the consciousnesses of the observers of it (or “readers” of it, as Lefebvre would say), can demonstrate, first, how the Great War was the locus of spaces that disrupted and frustrated a given logic of visual comprehension and depiction. Consequent literary techniques of visualization then amount to acts of resistance against both this logic and its breakdown, ultimately recasting mapping as an opportunity for carrying out artistic strategies of compensation and transcendence in the face of the experience of battle.

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The logic underlying techniques of military mapmaking provided a means, primarily, of addressing questions of seeing—specifically, whether one particular location on earth was visible from another. Officers were expected to address this “problem of visibility,” as one American topographical manual describes it, in order to plan movements and assaults and to prevent being seen or fired upon by the enemy (Sherrill 47). Certain cartographic techniques arose that permitted a trained observer to answer the question of mutual visibility by evaluating a map through the use of contour lines, for example, and the extraction of “sections” or “profiles” (horizontally viewed slices of terrain).2 Panorama sketches involved other problems concerning sightlines: chiefly, the accurate portrayal of receding effects and relative heights and sizes. Here again, the conventions of military cartography included techniques for controlling perspective, minimizing distortion and achieving a lifelike representation of objects in the Cartesian res extensa.3 In the experience of actual combat, however, problems of visibility stymied the ordering regulations of this logic of visualization. Because of the increased range of weapons and extensive entrenchments, observers had to stay concealed, and the enemy seemed invisible and uncannily powerful. The danger posed by randomly dropping artillery shells as well added to a sense of disorder on the battlefield. Despite these limitations, soldiers relied on maps for holding out the promise of serving as the enlightening interpretive tools for spatial observation. Count Alfred von Schlieffen, the architect of the strategic plan according to which Germany invaded Belgium and France, correctly foresaw that the size of the modern battlefield would prevent commanding generals from personally directing troop movements from a hilltop, as in previous wars. Therefore, maps would have to mediate between the attempted organizing consciousness of observers and the reality of the terrain, serving generals as the primary tools for planning infantry assaults and organizing artillery barrages.4 Not only generals relied on the epistemological capacity of maps as mediating texts. Through the information maps conveyed and the patterns of their distribution, cartographic products gave more junior soldiers important clues for understanding the nature and progress of a war that was otherwise too vast and chaotic to be observed productively by an individual. Officers depended on maps to chart troop locations and movements, for instance, and to lay out and coordinate the details of trench assaults in their sectors. In order to overcome the circumstances limiting soldiers’ direct vision, maps nevertheless had to remain true to the logic of visualization that ensured their representative accuracy. Yet the same conditions that diminished the reliability of personal observation also undermined the promise of maps. First, even the best maps frequently could not be correlated effectively to a ruined landscape, and this fact became evident the closer one got to the front

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lines. At home, civilians could mark up their copies of The Times War Atlas, or maps printed in newspapers, with the locations of battles and troop movements they had read about, taking for granted the transparent association of representation and reality and remaining ignorant of the actual conditions on the battleground. In Sassoon’s Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930), for instance, the father of a disabled soldier exhibits misplaced pride in his son’s actions; the narrator asks, “I wondered whether he had ever allowed himself to find out that the Gommecourt show had been nothing but a massacre of good troops. Probably he kept a war map with little flags on it; when Mametz Wood was reported as captured he moved a little flag an inch forward after breakfast. For him the Wood was a small green patch on a piece of paper. For the Welsh Division it had been a bloody nightmare” (127). Similarly, H. C. McNeile describes in No Man’s Land (1917) how the reality of soldiers killing and being killed seems almost unimaginable “to those who sit at home, and regard war from arm-chairs as a movement of little flags on a large-scale map” (287). At issue here, clearly, is not any delay or errors involved in topographical information reaching home, but rather the complacent, mistaken reliance on maps as symbolic representations of the war’s human consequences. Commanding generals were closer to the reality but in the safety of headquarters well back from the front lines. Without portable radios with which to communicate with their forces, they had to situate their command centers at the nodes of telephone and telegraph communication systems—as in the ideal world of figure 1.3, where perspective law literally aligns with the communication networks of road, railway, and telephone or telegraph. At distant headquarters, studying maps served as a substitute for seeing the battlefield first hand. However, even the generals’ maps could not portray some of the crucial problems that the front line troops experienced, such as the failure of indirect artillery barrages to cut the enemy’s belts of barbed wire, thus dooming the infantry assaults that the generals had so confidently mapped from their distant posts. Sassoon writes in Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, consequently, “The big bugs back at Brigade and Divisional H.Q. were studying trench-maps with corrugated brows” in anticipation of the Somme offensive. “They were too busy to concern themselves with the ant-like activities of individual platoon commanders” (66). In Robert Graves’s autobiography, Good-bye to All That (1929), this officer-author describes how one day his company received an order from Brigade headquarters to build two fortifications “at such-and-such a map reference.” The soldiers cannot comply: “Moodie, the company commander, and I looked at our map and laughed,” Graves reports. “Moodie sent back a message that he would be glad to do so, but would require an artillery bombardment and strong reinforcements because the points selected [ . . . ]

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were occupied in force by the enemy” (191). Generals, equipped with only a map-sense of the distant, only partly visible world, seemed profoundly out of touch. For soldiers in the front line, who unlike English civilians or commanding generals actually had to move through a landscape with maps in hand, connecting topographical representation with the ground frequently proved impossible. The assumedly transparent association between representation and reality broke down entirely when, for example, entire villages were obliterated and the “woods” still marked on maps became indistinguishable from the muddy moonscape surrounding them. As Montague explains in The Western Front (1917), “You walk on for three miles and may not observe that you have passed through Pozières, so similar are raw chalk and builder’s lime, raw clay and powdered brick, when weeds grow thick over both” (“The Somme Battlefield” n. pag.). In Henry Williamson’s novel The Patriot’s Progress (1930), signs such as “Site of La Boisselle” or “Site of Pozières” mark nothing but piles of trash and rubble (95, 98). Like the signifiers of maps and signs, even place names no longer pointed to the realities on the ground. British troops only exacerbated this disconnection when they famously created alternatives for Continental place names that proved difficult to pronounce. Poperinghe was shortened to “Pop,” Ypres became “Wipers,” Auchonvillers was “Ocean Villas,” Ploegsteert was “Plugstreet,” Wytschaete was “Whitesheet,” et cetera. The effect of this systematic renaming was not only to appropriate foreign terrain, but also to cast further doubt on the supposedly transparent relationship between physical place and its cartographic denotation. Belgians had lived in Ypres, and the British now lived in Wipers. Was it the same place? The signifying failure of names and signs, along with the labyrinthine nature of the trench system, proved so disorienting that soldiers tended to rely on human guides as much as—or more than—maps. It did not help that, in 1915–1917 at least, British security practice dictated that maps distributed to front line troops show only German trenches, not British ones (Chasseaud, Topography 7). The most detailed and accurate maps were useless, in other words, without the experiential knowledge amassed by individual soldiers and transferred from one to another. Consequently, soldiers relying on the promise of maps found themselves falling back on their own experience, which, as we have seen, was limited by the truncating effects of weapon ranges and entrenchment on the power of vision. The “purely” subjective therefore became both the first and last resort in dealing with the compromised objectivity of topographical knowledge. An especially concise and expressive example of the breakdown of the cartographic logic of visualization appears in a 1915 entry in T. E. Hulme’s

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“Diary from the Trenches.” “It’s curious how the mere fact that in a certain direction there really are the German lines, seems to alter the feeling of a landscape,” he writes. “You unconsciously orient things in reference to it. In peacetime, each direction on the road is as it were indifferent, it all goes on ad infinitum. But now you know that certain roads lead as it were, up to an abyss” (164). Hulme points to several aspects of the problem of visual observation, as we have discussed them thus far. First, there is an opposition between “fact” and “feeling”—or, more precisely, between fact and perception, if by “feeling” Hulme means the personal response to external stimulation. Second, the “fact that in a certain direction there really are German lines” is a fact based on a negation of information: those lines cannot be directly seen from a soldier in his trench, and the soldier’s knowledge of what he sees is paradoxically influenced by what he cannot see. This negative fact does not simply “alter the feeling of a landscape,” but “seems” to alter it; uncertainties about what the landscape contains undermines the certainty of any knowledge about physical place. Whereas before, one might orient one’s perception of the landscape to a cardinal point (after all, to “orient” oneself originally meant to face to the Christian east of dawn and resurrection), now orientation is conducted according to the location of death and destruction. Finally, the presence of enemy trenches abruptly shatters the classic Cartesian illusion of such infinitely regressing orthogonal parallels as those exemplified by roadways. Hulme’s assessment neatly encapsulates the breakdown of the logic of visualization that structures cartography on the foundation of positivist Victorian scientific principles, Renaissance perspective techniques, and the Cartesian philosophy of space. For Hulme, Victorian positivism here confronts a case where the operative fact is one rooted in uncertainty: the knowledge, or lack of knowledge, of something that is undoubtedly there but whose precise location cannot be determined. The landscape, instead of being a purely physical terrain bound to unalterable dimensions by the rules of Renaissance perspective, becomes something colored and shifted by the alteration—itself uncertain and only seeming—of the facts of what it contains. Finally, the Cartesian assumption of space as an infinite void in which objects occupy positions independent of the subjectivity of the observer is compromised by the effect, on the observer’s mind, of the paradoxically unseen presence of the enemy. Instead of conceiving of a homogeneous res extensa stretching equally and “indifferent[ly]” in all directions, the observer becomes aware that certain directions are abruptly truncated by epistemological voids. Blunden, Aldington, and Ford were in a unique position to evaluate more fully the breakdown of the cartographic logic of visualization that Hulme identifies, for three reasons. First, as officers (unlike Hulme) they

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underwent cartographic training and so received a full measure of the classical perspectivist and positivist techniques of spatial representation. Second, as participants in combat they had the opportunity to apply those techniques in the conditions of the modern battlefield—conditions that laid bare the limits of knowledge, the inadequacies of observation, and the failure of mimesis in graphic representation. Finally, confronted with a firsthand knowledge of the breakdown in the logic of visualization, as artists they had the means to formulate systems of mapping that countered the discourses of power and, instead, pursued a conception of mapping as a creative, redemptive, and humanist project. Comparing the work of these three authors allows us to construct a spectrum of artistic responses to the conditions of cartographic representation in the Great War, and it is to their varied accounts that we can now turn. Edmund Blunden’s Aesthetic Cartography Edmund Blunden joined the Royal Sussex Regiment as an eighteen-year-old second lieutenant in early 1915. He was at the front by May 1916 and went on to spend two years on the Somme and at Ypres. Having been gassed, he was invalided to a British training camp in March 1918 and then discharged from the army in 1919. From 1924 to 1927 he taught English Literature at the University of Tokyo, and during this time, he recorded his experience of trench warfare in his autobiographical Undertones of War. He was a Tutor of English at Oxford in the 1930s, redeploying his knowledge of the First World War by teaching map reading to soldiers there during the Second. According to Fussell, Blunden carried out this task “elegantly”; clearly, his wartime engagement with cartography seems to have awakened a special sensitivity to topographical representation (Great War 255–56). In Blunden’s preface to the 1956 edition of Undertones of War, he reveals how much the conception of his memoir owes to two kinds of spatialization of knowledge. First, in his words, “The book was written in Tokyo in 1924 and after, without books or papers but with the two maps I had kept, covering the regions we knew” (x). It is astonishing, really, to think that he wrote this richly evocative and highly detailed narrative several years after his direct experience, with no memory aids except a pair of maps. Such is the power that topographical representations wield, not only as containers of information but also as catalysts for the imagination. In a “preliminary” appearing in the first edition of the book, he writes, “I have been attempting ‘the image and horror of it’ [ . . . ] in poetry. Even so, when the main sheaves appeared fine enough to my flattering eye, it was impossible not to look again, and to descry the ground, how thickly and innumerably yet it was strewn with the

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facts or notions of war experience. I must go over the ground again” (viii).5 That Blunden should refer to mapping and the visualization of topography as sine qua non for remembering his war experience invites us to examine more closely the processes of topographical observation and representation at work in the book. Undertones of War demonstrates examples of an inability to see, and a consequent failure of knowledge, that follow the pattern established in many firsthand accounts of the war cited previously. Blunden writes typically of one assault in the Somme battlefield, “The singular part of the battle was that no one [ . . . ] could say what had happened, or what was happening” (100). At night in the front lines, it was often difficult to know where one was and where the enemy might be: “If one went forward patrolling,” he writes, “it was almost inevitable that one would soon creep round some hole or suspect heap or stretch of wired posts, and then, suddenly one no longer knew which was the German line, which our own” (71). He also records the effects of the soldier’s limited horizon. “The south!” he exclaims of the ongoing Somme offensive, “what use thinking about it? [ . . . ] No one seemed to have any mental sight or smell of that vast battle [ . . . ]” (73). He explains elsewhere, “What the infantryman in France knew about the war as a whole was seldom worth knowing, and we had little time or taste for studying the probable effect upon us of events beyond the skyline of immediate orders” (206). Not only are one’s orders the suitable limit of one’s knowledge, but events beyond one’s own horizon are hardly worth knowing—if they can be known at all. (Additionally, the use of the word “skyline” here underscores the general sense of epistemic limitation imposed by the limits of one’s vision.) Furthermore, the continuing alteration of the ground makes it difficult to reconcile a vision of terrain at one point in time with its appearance at another. When Blunden returns to Ypres after an absence, for example, at first he fails to recognize where he is because the landscape has changed that much (231–32). This is not to say that under these circumstances one does not keep trying to see. At one point, when Blunden’s superiors deem his observers’ reports of the front lines insufficient, a staff officer is dispatched, “requiring instant conduct to a point in the front line where the authentic eye could examine a mass of new earth reported by Sergeant Clifford in the German support line.” This “Divisional eye” inspects the terrain himself and is satisfied, but Blunden’s own efforts are less fruitful (189). Earlier, he had been sent with another officer “to clear up” a part of the battlefield: [S]miling Geoffrey Salter and myself sat on the chalk-heaps in the most easterly sap [that is, access trench] of our incomprehensible line—was it Pêche Street, or Louvercy?—with orders to record what could be seen of the battle. A moorland

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overwhelmed in a volume of tawny and blue smoke, thunderously murmuring, in which innumerable little lights in ones, twos, threes, white, green, red, purple, were thrown up like coloured waterdrops, was not easy to tabulate. Salter’s pencil travelled at speed, but in vain. The battle died away into ordinary bad temper. The situation remained obscure. (120–21)

Here, with pencil in hand and given a suitably elevated vantage point, Blunden and his fellow officer witness how the actualities of combat exposed the epistemic limitations of observation and representation. The quickest pencil and (one may presume) the appropriate attention to the rules of perspective and symbology in map sketching prove fruitless in the “incomprehensible line.” Blunden responds to these conditions by orchestrating a retreat into an aesthetic treatment of mapping that turns cartography into an appreciation of such sensually appealing details as “thunderously murmuring” sounds and mesmerizing colors. The tone of Blunden’s aesthetic response, appropriately dignified and restrained, typifies that of the entire text. Additionally, his conclusion that “[t]he situation remained obscure” shares the same sense of an aestheticized response to the uncertainties of reality that John Dowell exhibits in Ford Madox Ford’s novel The Good Soldier (1915), when trying to untangle the motivations of his adulterous circle: “It is all a darkness,” in Dowell’s repeated phrase (14, 179). Yet Blunden’s attitude toward this epistemic darkness reflects less a sense of bewilderment than one of acceptance or recognition of the artistic possibilities inherent in the moment. By detailing the beauties of the physical landscape, Blunden here transforms the breakdown of objective mapping into an opportunity for subjective appreciation. Blunden has prepared us for such a moment from the beginning of his narrative. In an early chapter entitled “Trench Education,” he reproduces in the text a map another fellow officer drew for him to illustrate the trench dispositions (9). Then, ordered to battalion headquarters to produce an enlargement of a trench map of the front lines, Blunden finds himself called upon to do map work himself. Ignorant of the reason for the order—in preparation for a “raid,” that “one [word] in the whole vocabulary of the war which most instantly caused a sinking feeling in the stomach of ordinary mortals”— he declares, of these “perturbations I felt no tremor as I finished my map, in colours, and enjoyed my tea, and the genteel conditions” (36). Later, he writes, “I fancied myself as a map-maker, but the sign which I used for trees annoyed my critics: ‘Damn these Q’s of yours!’ ” they would say (64). Still later, apparently having either corrected his technique or mollified his critics,

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he records how he improved his standing in the eyes of his commanding officer through his cartographic skills: “When I evolved a large and well-filled map of the sector, he more than made up for his recent reproof of me [ . . . ] on a mistake about guides” (72). Such episodes make clear that maps, as informational texts, have dubious value for Blunden. In one sense, cartography is simply one of many arbitrary and pointless tasks carried out at superior officers’ whims and for purposes left unexamined, such as daily requests to know “how many pipe-fitters [ . . . ] hairdressers, chiropodists, bicycle repairmen” were in the company (Fussell 47), or how many men “had got varicose veins or married their deceased wife’s sister” (Sassoon, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer 66).6 When Blunden makes maps himself, however, they become purely aesthetic exercises and a mechanism for psychological compensation. Blunden capitalizes on the sense of the maps’ ironic distance from the real world they represent at the same time that he takes refuge from the dread consequences of the word “raid” in the colors of his maps and the abstract shapes of their symbols. Blunden finds insupportable discrepancies between the reality of terrain and its topographical representation. During an early respite from the trenches, he is ordered to supervise the equipment at “a bombing school store near a little place called Paradis.” Upon his nighttime arrival in this refuge from the front lines, he discovers that he cannot find his lodging “in the map reference given” to him (46). After a few days, he receives an order recalling him to his battalion and the trenches, but, in his words, “So engaged had I become in my walks abroad down the pollarded lanes, piecing out the local life and turning my map into realities [ . . . ] that I scarcely reckoned on so quick a recondemnation.”7 Soon, however, his attitude toward the representative capacity of maps evolves into one of wry dismissal as he becomes more aware of the gap between representation and reality. First, he becomes cognizant—or at least more expressive—of how the details of mapmaking conventions belie their own innocuousness. Of the area around Richebourg l’Avoué (in the Somme), for example, he writes, “The maps so far issued were very simple, and showed our communication trenches as innocuous arrows with their names, as Fry, Cadbury, Factory, Pipe, and the rest; the German lines admitted thereupon looked very agreeably thin, with economical crosses for barbed wire here and there” (66).8 Already, just after his first major engagement, Blunden is demonstrating an awareness of an ironic distance between symbolic conventions and their referents. Deadly enemy fortifications and barbed wire entanglements are only “admitted” on the map, as if their presence is something not spoken of in good company; symbolically marking their locations with “agreeably” delicate lines and a scattering of minimalist crosses seems an absurd act.

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In the next attack in which Blunden participates, his awareness of these differences between map and terrain expands into the recognition of the larger failures of cartographic logic. He acknowledges, for instance, that misreading a map is an expected part of the process of moving over the landscape, writing of how his battalion at one point “moved [ . . . ] southward, and came without unusual event and with the usual misreading of the map to the flimsy outlandish village of Monchy-Breton (known, of course, as Monkey Britain), near St. Pol.”9 Blunden helps prepare for an assault along the Ancre by (paradoxically, if hopefully enough) “making all clear with the map” that a fellow officer had drawn of the destination trenches (86); when the battle takes place, however, he confesses, “we could make very little sense of ourselves or the battle” (97). Maps fail their purposes; he records that “[n]ot one man in thirty had seen the line by daylight—and it was a maze even when seen so, map in hand” (95). After this assault, Blunden takes a more skeptical view of such materials. Assigned the role of Field Works Officer, he writes, “One’s fine fancy was smothered with the succession of typewritten decrees, SECRET or CONFIDENTIAL one and all, the collection of maps and diagrams with their gaudy green and yellow and matter-of-fact symbols; my artistic appetite accepted as its chief nourishment the eternal design— to dump ›»→ ” (107).10 Maps, adorned with quaintly “matter-offact symbols” laying out the route to supply or ammunition dumps, are fit only for the rubbish heap if relied upon for any kind of precise locating information in battle. Blunden’s recognition of the epistemological inadequacies of maps parallels his awareness of the inadequacies of conventional pastoral rhetoric as a mode of landscape description. Fussell centers his discussion of Undertones of War on this latter aspect of its composition, calling the work “[a]n extended pastoral elegy in prose” (The Great War 254). For Fussell, Blunden “deploys the properties of traditional English literary pastoral in the service of the gentlest (though not always the gentlest) kind of irony,” relying on pastoral conventions to depict how thoroughly “violated” the landscape is by the war. “Very soon he indicates that he has perfected the form of vision with which he will see the war,” Fussell tells us; “with ironic mock-wonder [ . . . ] he will invoke all the beloved details of literary pastoral as a model and measure” (255, 261). Blunden’s irony hinges on exploiting the gap between the torn ground and the images and tropes used to describe it: the mists, nightingales, flowers, and meadows of rural England. In this respect, Blunden’s use of the pastoral to portray the distance between representation and reality echoes his ironic invocation of maps to depict that distance. More importantly, however, for Blunden maps are not simply emblems of epistemological failure but also are artifacts that can be reappropriated for different ends. Specifically, as we have seen, this reappropriation takes

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the form of a shift from maps as epistemological objects to exclusively aesthetic ones. Fussell points out that Blunden’s duties as Intelligence Officer at Brigade Headquarters in Ypres “consist[ed] largely of drawing beautiful maps of the countryside,” maps whose beauty becomes an end unto itself (263). In the passage from Undertones of War just cited, for example, when Blunden writes that his “artistic appetite accepted as its chief nourishment the eternal design— to dump ›»→ ” he both comments ironically on the map’s epistemological fitness and notes how it becomes a commodity of artistic consumption. In this context, maps have an aesthetic value that transcends their worth as tools of knowledge. Later, Blunden describes what he finds in a captured German trench: “maps in violet and green and scarlet, and letters in slant hand with many an exclamation mark” (137). The emphatic correspondence of the German soldiers may not have helped them hold the line against the British assault, but the colorful markings on their maps make these artifacts aesthetically equivalent to their British counterparts in terms of their potential to nourish Blunden’s “artistic appetite” (107).

Richard Aldington’s Ironic Mapping Blunden found the gap between maps and perceived reality as significant as that between pastoral and military landscapes, going on to document both the setbacks to mapping as an epistemological project and the availability of maps as objects for aesthetic contemplation and consumption. While Blunden demonstrates what happens to maps and mapping under the conditions of battle, does military mapping have an aesthetic or epistemological application in the contrary direction—to the landscape of the home front? Aldington’s Death of a Hero offers an instructive occasion of just such a reverse mapping, positing that the experience of war provides a topographical instrument with which to evaluate the physical and psychological landscapes of home. Like Blunden, Aldington (born 1892) was an officer, trained in military topography, whose three years of war service gave him ample material to consider these questions. He enlisted in May 1916 at the age of twenty-four; after initial training he arrived in France in December. He spent the first months of 1917 in the front lines not far from Loos in France, returning to England in July for officers’ training. Commissioned as a signals officer in November 1917, he returned to France in April 1918. In October he took part in the last offensive of the war, receiving a promotion to acting captain and participating in the assault on the Sambre Canal, where he found himself on November 11. He took leave in England and returned to France in early December, being demobilized in February 1919 (Copp 29–33). Throughout

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this time, he gathered experiences that would appear in fictionalized form in Death of a Hero, a novel perhaps remembered most for its bitter denunciation of the conduct of English civilians and useful to us as an extended example of another sense of what mapping can accomplish as an artistic practice. Death of a Hero tells the story of Captain George Winterbourne, whose death at the front Aldington acknowledges in the opening lines of the novel. Winterbourne has killed himself a week before the armistice, apparently over the domestic complications resulting from an adulterous affair, by standing up in front of a German machine-gun post. The story is narrated by one of Winterbourne’s companions in officer candidate training, who provides extended flashbacks of the protagonist’s life: his prewar estrangement from his parents (over his insistence on painting artwork for a living), his association with avant-garde artists, his marriage to Elizabeth Paston and his affair with Fanny Welford, his enlistment and commissioning, his return to London and experience there of having his front line service misunderstood and belittled, and the circumstances of his death. The narrator blames middle-class culture for Winterbourne’s fate, and the book is best known as “[a] savage debunking of the entire concept of heroism” (Hager and Taylor 191). The novel is also in part a roman à clef, as it incorporates characters based on Ford, D. H. Lawrence, T. S. Eliot, and Wyndham Lewis as Winterbourne’s circle of artistic acquaintances. Death of a Hero also records a number of moments of cartographical failure and disorientation that we can now understand as typical of the wartime sense of space. In this novel, however, these moments participate in a larger economy of irony that serves as an organizing structure for the text. One such episode occurs when Winterbourne enters a shelled village with a fellow soldier: “They got into the ruined streets of M——, and were promptly lost,” Aldington writes. “The town was blasted to about three feet of indistinguishable ruins. A wooden notice-board over a mass of broken stones, said: ‘CHURCH.’ Another further on said: ‘POST OFFICE.’ Evans [the officer present] got out his map, and they stood together trying to make out the direct way to the section of trench they wanted” (309). This is a supremely ironic moment, for the notice boards reproduce in the landscape exactly what the map advertises; the written signs bearing the words “church” and “post office” preserve the terms of the original representative system but take on a completely different valence of signification under these conditions. That the buildings themselves no longer stand does not undermine the validity of the one-to-one correspondence of truth assumed to exist, in general, between signs in a landscape and markings on a map. (After all, the same

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letters spelling “church” appear in the same sequence on both the notice board and the map). On the contrary, these particular circumstances demonstrate how the process of mapping is susceptible to imbrication with the mechanism of irony to produce another kind of correspondence—one that is equally true (if only artistically so). The “mass of broken stones” once was a church, or post office, Aldington reminds us, and the ironic gap between what the notice board advertises and the pile of rubble on which it stands only increases the pathos induced by contemplating the ruins of the town. A further layer of irony exists in disguising the obliterated town’s name as “M——,” obliterating the letters as though the reduction of the town to indistinguishable piles of bricks had not endowed the situation with enough anonymity. This episode reveals both an ironic truth of maps and the “truth” of war, in other words: as a form of ironic destruction that hollows out the landscape and leaves behind only signs marking the voids. Another instance of interrupted connections between visualization and reality occurs near the end of the novel, when Winterbourne returns to London after seven months in the front lines. Leafing through his prewar artwork, he fails at first to recognize some sketches and paintings he had made, and then he deliberately destroys them. Shutting his eyes, he involuntarily visualizes the ruined village in France where he spent much of his time; he tries to sketch it but fails. “He persisted with his sketch,” the narrator informs us, “but the whole thing went wrong. He got tired of blocking lines in, and irritatedly rubbing them out. And yet that scene existed so vividly in his memory and he could see exactly how it could be formalized into an effective pattern. But his hand and brain failed him—he had even forgotten how to draw rapidly and accurately” (365). Trained as an artist, Winterbourne understood perspective and how to render landscape “formalized into an effective pattern,” but even as the experience of the war gave him extraordinarily vivid subject matter, it is seen to dissolve both his cognitive and technical abilities for turning visualization into representation. Beyond these exemplary instances of irony, however, the key to understanding this novel—especially Winterbourne’s suicide—lies in realizing how utterly disconnected Winterbourne becomes from his lovers and friends in England. Aldington renders this alteration through the device of topographical representation, which first appears in a crucial passage that takes place around 1912 and involves Winterbourne’s artistic circle, a gathering of “queer-Dicks [or] more or less honest cranks,” meant to represent in part the prewar set of Ford, Lawrence, Eliot, and Lewis (110). As Aldington introduces these acquaintances, he offers two contrasting views of the same London landscape: one using prewar sensibilities and another determined by the topography of the trench lines.

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Sunday in London. [ . . . ] Gigantic wings of Ennui folded irresistibly over millions. Vast trails of automobiles hopelessly hooting to escape. Epic melancholy of deserted side-streets where the rhythmic beat of a horse’s hoofs is an adagio of despair. Horrors of Gunnersbury. The spleen of the railway line between Turnham Green and Hammersmith, the villainous sordidness of Raynes Park, the ennui which always vibrates with the waiting train at Gloucester Road Station [ . . . ]. (111–12)

This is the modern metropolis, rendered in what has become, for scholars of modernity, the now-familiar terms of alienation and despair signaled by the telltale words “ennui” and “spleen.” Upon closer examination, however, Aldington’s characterizations seem rather misapplied. Gunnersbury, Hammersmith, and Raynes Park are train stops on the way to Hampton Court, which, with its thousand-acre park and lush gardens—where Winterbourne falls in love with Elizabeth—seems hardly a place with which to associate ennui and spleen, let alone “horrors” or “villainous sordidness.”11 The brute mechanical power of a locomotive might conceivably be linked with the concept of Baudelairean spleen (or decadence in Huysmans), but then why would both mechanical transport and a carriage horse—whose hoofs beat “an adagio of despair”—both have such negative connotations? The effect of Aldington’s characterizations (participating in his overall economy of irony) serves to undermine the premise that the modern landscape, seen through the interpretive lens of prewar modernism, is one of alienation and melancholy. Not only does Aldington reject the topographical conventions of the Baudelairean metropolis, but he also implicitly mocks the representative aims of prewar avant-garde visual art. (This is not to say that Aldington was a committed traditionalist, having characterized Death of a Hero as “a jazz novel” and declared himself “all for disregarding artistic rules of thumb” [viii].) Winterbourne meets the fourth of his “queer-Dick” acquaintances, the Suprematist painter Mr. Upjohn: Upjohn produced two pictures in illustration (the word is perhaps inaccurate) of his theories. One was a beautiful scarlet whorl on a background of the purest flake white. The other at first sight appeared to be a brood of bulbous yellow chickens, with thick elongated necks, aimlessly scattered over a grey-green meadow; but on closer inspection the chickens turned out to be

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Aldington begins by describing the prewar London landscape along Baudelairean lines and in terms of an associated nineteenth-century spatial sensibility:

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Upjohn berates Winterbourne for failing to recognize the merit of these paintings. (Upjohn: “can’t you SEE that the proportions of DecompositionCosmos are exactly those of the Canopic vase in the Filangieri-Museum at Naples? [ . . . ] You’re too stupid, George. What I mean is the proportion and placing and colour-values [of Op. 49. Piano] are exactly in the best tradition of American-Indian blankets [ . . . ]” [114–15].) But Aldington, of course, criticizes Upjohn. Why would Aldington attack avant-garde representational techniques and Baudelairean conventions of metropolitan topography? Perhaps the beginning of an answer lies in the contrast between the London landscape just cited and its appearance to the narrator as Winterbourne and Upjohn next walk through it: They were walking up Church Street, Kensington, that dismal communication trench which links the support line of Kensington High Street with the front line of Notting Hill Gate. How curious are cities, with their intricate trench systems and perpetual warfare, concealed but as deadly as the open warfare of armies! We live in trenches, with flat revetments of house-fronts as parapet and parados. The warfare goes on behind the house-fronts—wives with husbands, children with parents, employers with employed, tradesmen with tradesmen, banker with lawyer, and the triumphal doctor rooting out life’s casualties. Desperate warfare—for what? Money as the symbol of power; power as the symbol or affirmation of existence. Throbbing warfare of men’s cities! As fierce and implacable and concealed as the desperate warfare of plants and the hidden carnage of animals. We walk up Church Street. Up the communication trench. We cannot see “over the top,” have no vista of the immense No-Man’s Land of London’s roofs. We cannot pierce through the house-fronts. What is going on behind those dingy unpierceable house-fronts? What tortures, what contests, what incests, what cruelties, what sacrifice, what horror, what sordid emptiness? (118)

Clearly, Aldington is using the conditions of the front as a way of explaining the conditions of life at home; in effect, he is remapping the landscape of London using the topographical forms of the military front and the conditions of visibility in the trenches. Additionally, his imposition of front-line topographical terms on the London landscape reverses a widespread practice of designating trenches. British soldiers often gave trenches names drawn from London topography, as an easier and less formal way to label and discuss them than by such

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conventionalized phalluses. The first was called Decomposition-Cosmos, and the second Op. 49. Piano. (113)

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alphanumeric codes as “SS 51.” Fussell records that “Picadilly was a favorite; popular also were Regent Street and Strand; junctions were Hyde Park Corner and Marble Arch” (42–43). By reversing this practice, Aldington further emphasizes the blurring of the boundaries between home front and front lines. All human life is a form of warfare, Aldington’s narrator claims—he later discusses the “Hindenburg Line” of interpersonal relations—and we might therefore profitably analyze this omnipresent (if “concealed”) conflict in terms of the battles raging most obviously in France (118, 199, 202). Thus, streets are trenches of various forms, and house-fronts are the parapet and parados separating the trenches from the no-man’s-land of parlors and offices where the fighting takes place. Just as soldiers cannot “see ‘over the top’ ” of the trenches, the inhabitants walking in London cannot see the violence occurring behind the house-fronts. Furthermore, that this episode occurs in 1912 lends the passage additional significance. This matter of timing makes a difference, for it determines that this remapping of London using the topographical contours of the battlefront takes place not in Winterbourne’s mind, but in the narrator’s. In effect, Aldington invites his readers to reinterpret retrospectively the social conditions of England using the reality of the war experience. What this means, in turn, is that Aldington asks us to understand how spiritually empty, and how morally bankrupt, is the topographical vision of Baudelairean spleen and ennui. Aldington criticizes the prewar vision of landscape as a false horror. Both views of London are relentlessly negative, but the real horrors of war reveal the “despair” of the prewar metropolitan experience to be a pale shadow of the infinitely greater despair incurred by a European civilization wrecked and one million subjects of the British Empire killed. Baudelaire’s vision of urban space was not anticipatory, in other words, but naïve and complacent: poeticized “ennui” amounts to nothing compared with the experience of war. Alternatively, to borrow a musical analogy, the prewar idea of urban alienation was not the preliminary appearance of a motif, but merely a grace note before the contrasting dissonance of the war experience. Furthermore, by extension, the methods of artistic prewar visualization espoused by the circle of intellectuals—Mr. Upjohn’s “Suprematism” and even, perhaps, Aldington’s own Imagism—are revealed as bankrupt in the face of what the process of visualization undergoes in war. The contrast between these two versions of London, the retrospective mapping of the war experience over the prewar metropolis, redeploys the spatial modality of war topography to interpret civilian life, and, by extension, the epistemological limitations of all human observation of human subjects. Not only is all modern human existence

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warfare, Aldington tells us, but the conditions of actual warfare give us the tools to understand just what it means not to be able to “see ‘over the top.’ ” In the rest of the London landscape passage, Aldington adds to his claim that “[w]e cannot pierce through the house-fronts” into the sordid miseries of human conflict within, any more than we can see the physical constituents of a building. He continues, “We cannot pierce through the pavement and Belgian blocks, see the subterranean veins of electric cables, the arteries of gas and water mains, the viscera of underground railways. We cannot feel the water filtering through London clay, do not perceive the relics of ruined Londons waiting for archaeologists from the antipodes, do not see, far, far down, the fossillised bones of extinct animals and their coprolites” (118). Here, Aldington directly contradicts a central point of the canonically modernist aesthetic, what T. S. Eliot finds indispensable to the artistic interpretation of the present: that “historical sense [ . . . ] not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence” (“Tradition” 100). In another of Eliot’s famous claims, this sense emerges as the “continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity [ . . . ] a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history” (“Ulysses” 372–73). These formulations, like Pound’s technique of historical juxtaposition in such works as the Malatesta Cantos, share a palimpsestic sense of space alternatively elaborated through Freud’s vision of Rome in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) (Standard Edition 21: 69–71). Drawing on his own personal experience in the war, however, Aldington argues that such archaeological attempts at vision may not work so easily. For Aldington, then, the war provides a supreme controlling metaphor for the difficulties in seeing that are at the center of all human efforts. This conclusion may seem at first to be at odds with my assertion that the reality of the war experience illuminates the differences between life at home and at the front, and between life before and after the war. If war also contains a metaphor for the difficulties of seeing, then the realities of war are less relevant than the ways that the metaphor reshapes perceptions and draws parallels. Yet Aldington’s articulation of these themes within his overall economy of irony permits just such contradictions, allowing him to have his account both ways. The inadequacy of visualization, in its manifold forms, organizes the rest of Death of a Hero, including Winterbourne’s motive for suicide. The narrator attributes the protagonist’s depression to the ongoing, seemingly irresolvable entanglement of a love triangle involving Elizabeth and Fanny—made intractable and apparently hopeless given the further entanglement of the war. However, Winterbourne’s despair stems less from these social circumstances than from the profound failure of all the parties to see and understand

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clearly. Both Elizabeth and Fanny cannot empathize with Winterbourne over the terrible conditions he undergoes at the front, being unwilling or unable to imagine his existence there. Aldington similarly portrays Winterbourne’s intellectual circle as completely ignorant of the horrors of the front and dismissive of Winterbourne’s suffering; Winterbourne finds he has nothing to say to any of these people, knowing that he cannot make them see the topography of war. As we have noted, Winterbourne can visualize that topography but cannot sketch it for others to see, and he deliberately brings about his death because for his part he cannot see an end to the war. The dynamics of seeing literally in front of oneself—over the top—and seeing ahead are here the same problem, and there are multiple versions of the failure to see involved in Winterbourne’s death. First, he has given up hope, in that he cannot imagine the war ending; second, he has no way of knowing—no one has—that the war will end in one week. Third, he might be physically unable to see at the moment that he springs to his feet in front of the machine gun (introducing doubt over how intentional his death truly is): “Something seemed to break in Winterbourne’s head,” Aldington writes. “He felt he was going mad, and sprang to his feet. The line of bullets smashed across his chest like a savage steel whip. The universe exploded darkly into oblivion” (392). Whether literal or metaphorical, in each of these versions of the failure to see, just as in the other instances of the breakdown of visualization in the book, challenges to the dynamic of seeing constitute an important ingredient of the novel’s narrative trajectory and economy of irony. However debilitating the wartime collapse of the cartographic logic of visualization may have been for Aldington the soldier, for Aldington the author the epistemological inadequacy of maps and the frustration of personal observation provided fertile ground for his ironic literary topography of the war. Maps to nowhere and notice boards on piles of rubble, as seen in the episode at the town of “M——,” speak inadvertent truths about the pathos of the war. The peculiar vision-impeding topography of the trench-covered landscape serves as a tool, in the novelist’s hands, to hypostatize the hidden sordidness of prewar London social conditions. Finally, the blasted landscape of France and Flanders exposes, through a literary mechanism of symbolic contrast, the poverty of the Baudelairean convention of urban alienation and the avant-garde celebration of visual fragmentation. In Aldington’s economy of irony, pseudo-objective maps are the devaluated coin of the realm. Ford Madox Ford’s Divided Mind We might summarize Blunden’s topographical sensibility as a response to the wartime breakdown of the conditions under which landscape plays two

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roles: as a field for the deployment of pastoral motifs and values, and as the subject of military cartography. In Blunden’s reaction, as we have seen, regarding maps as aesthetic objects becomes a way to transmute mourning (as in the “pastoral elegy” Fussell discerns in Undertones of War) into a form of artistic “nourishment.” This move then expropriates maps from the rhetoric of knowledge and into the realm of valuation and aesthetic production and consumption. Aldington’s reply to the breakdown of the cartographic logic of visualization, on the other hand, eschews mourning for an economy of irony; his strategy supplants Blunden’s attention to maps, as objects, with an appropriation of the process of mapping as a means to comprehend phenomena both inside and outside the war experience. Ford Madox Ford takes yet another approach in No Enemy, reinterpreting his cartographic experiences in the war and using visions of landscape as a reconstructive tool. While these authors did not explicitly write in response to one another, the methods of all three make up a dialectical sequence: marking a shift in what maps signify and what mapping accomplishes, moving from histories of loss to an account of creation, and resulting in a vision of landscape that resolves itself as combination, refiguration, and transcendence. Although Ford arrives at an engagement with topographical representation that differs in important respects from the work of Blunden and Aldington, he had wartime experiences somewhat similar to those of the other two authors. Like Blunden and Aldington, Ford (born 1873) served in the British Army as an officer; he enlisted in the middle of 1915 at the age of forty-one and then received a commission as second lieutenant in the Welsh Regiment (Special Reserve). He was in France beginning in late July 1916; deemed too old for the front line, he instead served with battalion transport in both the Somme sector and the Ypres Salient until September. At that time, he returned to his battalion’s home base in Wales (at Kimmel Park, near Rhyl), and then carried out various noncombat assignments in France and Britain until his discharge in January 1919.12 Unlike the other two authors, Ford spent his service outside the front line. Nevertheless, as many histories of the war point out, the support and reserve areas could be just as stressful and dangerous; Ford was bombarded, gassed, and shell-shocked and therefore shared with Blunden and Aldington many of the same personal and psychological consequences of the war experience. Like his fellow authors and soldiers, Ford had occasional difficulty reconciling perception and representation. In his essay “Arms and the Mind,” written in September 1916 while in the Ypres Salient, he writes: Now I could not make you see Messines, Wytschaete, St Eloi; or La Boisselle, the Bois de Bécourt or de Mametz—altho[ugh] I have sat looking at them for hours, for days, for weeks on end. Today, when I look at a mere coarse map

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of the Line, simply to read “Ploegsteert” or “Armentières” seems to bring up extraordinarily coloured and exact pictures behind my eyeballs—little pictures having all the brilliant minuteness that medieval illuminations had—of towers, and roofs, and belts of trees and sunlight; or, [ . . . ] of men, burst into mere showers of blood and dissolving into muddy ooze [ . . . ]. —But, as for putting them—into words! No: the mind stops dead [ . . . ]. (37)

In his inability to articulate his experience, Ford resembles Winterbourne in Aldington’s Death of a Hero. That Ford does, in fact, give words to his visions might seem to contradict his declaration. Yet how accurately, he implies, can such a description as that of soldiers “burst[ing] into mere showers of blood” produce for the reader the effect that observing such a sight must have induced in the observer? Moreover, if this one sight resists representation, he asks, then what words can one write to bridge the gaps between the letters “Ploegsteert” on a map, the experience of seeing Messines Ridge or the blasted remnants of Mametz Wood, and the imaginative grasp of someone who was not an eyewitness to such scenes? In a companion essay, “War and the Mind” (1917), Ford readdresses this problem by distinguishing between the “mind at rest” (“that of the Impressionist in Letters”) and the “official observer’s mind: say the mind of the Battalion Intelligence Officer.” Speaking of his own experience in the former case, Ford writes that “No Man’s Land and what lay beyond No Man’s Land always remains in my mind as blue—a blue grey mist; a blue grey muddle of little hills—but fabulous and supernatural.” As an official observer, on the other hand, “one saw the earth, brown, reddish-brown, sandy, dusty, veiled by thistles [ . . . ]. Or, from high points like [ . . . ] Kemmel Hill or the Scarpenberg, in Belgium, one saw Martinpuich on high in bristling and ragged tufts of trees; Pozières with trees torn leafless, big and coloured bits of wall and the white lines of trenches in the chalk, below the feet” (42). Thus, the observer’s mind, when divided into two instruments of perception, can simultaneously be conscious of both impressionistic and strictly factual elements of the same landscape. Representing those variously apprehended perceptions still posed a difficulty, as the accepted medium of representation remained the objective map (whose objectivity, as we have noted, had been called into question). Ford writes in this essay of having periodically gone from the front line to division headquarters to update trench maps, explaining, “I know that the lines that I made with blue, yellow or red pencils, on the map that showed Pozières, Welch Alley, Bazentin le Petit or Mametz and High Wood . . . those lines which represented Brigade and Divisional boundaries, new trenches, the enemy’s new lines, MG emplacements and so on, represented nothing visual

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at all to my intelligence.” He insists, “No: the mind connected nothing from the maps,” for “the visualizing mind” cannot associate such a typographic and topographic designation as the letters “Pozières” on an objective map with the experience of seeing the place (43). Nevertheless, in these two essays, Ford works out a method for addressing the differences between perception and representation—a method founded on the notion of a compartmented mind. At this point, however, the full application of this method was still stymied by the resistance of cartographic objectivity to reconciliation with subjective observation. It would take several years for Ford to refine his solution farther by reformulating what mapping accomplishes. The same structure of a compartmented mind and the assimilation of both impressionistic and factual topographical elements appear in No Enemy, but with a crucial shift in the way its author understands the capacities of mapping. No Enemy is a strange book. Ostensibly, it records the fictional history of a poet-turned soldier named Gringoire, who has served as a British officer in France. Surviving the war, he returns to England and retires to the bucolic setting of a farm cottage, from which he tells his war stories through the fictional device of a narrator, Gringoire’s friend, whom Ford calls only “the Compiler.” The overall pattern of Gringoire’s wartime service and his subsequent retirement to the country parallel Ford’s experience, and details of Ford’s personal history appear in Gringoire’s account. Yet the existence of Gringoire and the Compiler together complicates the autobiographical element of the work, and the precise relationship between Ford, Gringoire, and the Compiler is far from clear. Furthermore, the text consists of fragmentary episodes arranged out of chronological order, rather than a consistent narrative; to add to the resulting disjointedness, the device of the Compiler disappears in the second half of the book. Finally, No Enemy exhibits an element of pastiche, as Ford drew on several pieces of writing—a half-dozen essays and some poetry—that he had published elsewhere (Skinner xi–xii). Comprising autobiography and fiction, and both poetry and prose, No Enemy consequently defies easy generic classification. Ford himself seemed uncertain about exactly what the book was, preferring to think of it as both “reminiscences of active service under a thinly disguised veil of fiction” and something “betwixt & between” a novel and “a serious book.”13 A similar uncertainty over the book’s status emerges in the variety of critical characterizations of the work. Charles G. Hoffmann calls it “semi-fictional autobiography,” while for Gene Moore it is one of Ford’s “quasi-autobiographical memoirs.”14 According to Ambrose Gordon Jr., “No Enemy is about war directly, although it may not be a novel. Then again it may; it all depends. [ . . . ] [It] is, I submit, after all a novel (and a most readable one) if we judge

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the matter not by whether a story is being told or whether—supposing there is a story—it is true, but by the form of the book and the quality of its writing” (29). Samuel Hynes asks, “How are we to name the genre of such an odd book? A fiction with two narrators but without a narrative; an autobiography without a self; [ . . . ] a patchwork of fragmentary impressions of war remembered and of peace achieved?” (“Genre” 139). Perhaps the relative critical neglect of No Enemy results, to a certain extent, from these uncertainties, for this text resists comparative analysis as either a war novel or a thinly disguised autobiography in the style, for instance, of Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of an Infantry Officer. Critics seeking to explain the generic and structural oddities of No Enemy tend to see the work as demonstrating the similitude between an impressionistic, fragmentary text and the way that war is experienced. Elissa Greenwald asserts that in No Enemy “the typical aspects of Ford’s narrative technique— impressionism, progression backwards and forwards in time—provide the only accurate way to depict the war” (143). Hynes similarly argues, “Chronology implies causality, and causality implies meaning and order. The war seemed to Ford to have neither; and so he set out to write a book without a narrative.” For Hynes, the discontinuities of the book represent a preparation for the greater discontinuities of Ford’s 1924–1928 war tetralogy, Parade’s End (132, 141). The book’s structure supports such claims, being organized visually and spatially rather than chronologically, as Hynes observes. The text has two parts, entitled “Four Landscapes” and “Certain Interiors.” The sequence of these landscapes and interiors seems to have no bearing on their collective import. Apparently regardless of the arrangement of this sequence, this “Tale of Reconstruction,” as it is subtitled, presents in part Gringoire’s invocation of landscape as a sanctuary from the war. (Ford uses the word “sanctuary” repeatedly in the book.) Gringoire’s four landscapes do, in fact, appear in chronological order, but the idea of order seems to critics to have nothing to do what the landscapes tell us about Gringoire’s reconstruction of the self. I propose, however, that Ford relates these landscapes according to a certain order, after all—not in the sense of a sequence, but in the sense of a logic that orders the description of what one sees and what one maps. This logic is the logic of cartographic visualization, which determines what Gringoire can and cannot see, and the rules by which he is to represent what he can visualize. On one level, and in certain episodes, Ford rather straightforwardly rejects that logic and its associated rules. For instance, when a French government minister asks Gringoire to write propaganda pieces, and he replies that to do so he would need some rest, Gringoire invokes the conventions of

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Quand on est poète one requires—one requires a little reëntrant [that is, a gully], with water—a little stream, indicated by a wavy line in blue pencil; copses, indicated by dotted-in round o’s with tails to them; rushes, indicated by hieroglyphs like the section of a hairbrush; a gingerbread cottage, for which the symbol is a hatched in square.—One requires those. And also one requires a temporary respite from the attentions of one’s friends and of destiny. For that, as far as I know, military topography has no symbol—unless it be a white handkerchief on the end of [a bayonet]. (81)

The catalogue of topographical symbols, though extensive, has no icon for the psychological component of the landscape Gringoire desires to inhabit. In this respect, cartographic science is as limited here as it is for Edmund Blunden’s friend Geoffrey Salter, whose swift-moving pencil utterly fails to capture the essence of the battle on the moorland. In another episode, Ford characterizes trusting in a map as naïve and dangerous folly. A British staff officer gets 160 soldiers killed—nearly an entire company wiped out—by giving them marching orders from one point to another via an open road in plain sight of enemy artillery. It turns out that the staff officer had simply read a map: “He would have an ordnance map and a pencil,” Gringoire tells us. “The map would show the contours, but probably it would not show the German trenches or the German artillery emplacements. He would rule a pencil line from Locre to Armentières, [and] he would see that the Dranoutre-Neuve Eglise road was nearly level” whereas another road was steeper, longer, and unshaded (119). Giving order for the company to take the first road, he inadvertently sends them into the field of view of a German gunner, who “would see a solid cube of wet-brown, moving slowly along a perfectly visible road. He would see it with his naked eye,” and he opens fire with devastating effect (120). The staff officer merely followed the protocols of the cartographic manuals; he left out the important information of the enemy location, but his principal mistake was to trust map-derived knowledge in the first place. While these examples might lead us to draw the conclusion that Ford simply positions maps as thoroughly discredited signifiers, the sequence of landscape observations in No Enemy tells a more nuanced story about what maps mean and what mapping can accomplish. The culminating landscape in the book (to which we shall turn shortly) takes place in a moment of mapping—when Gringoire ascends a hill to record what he sees according to the protocols of military cartography that I have outlined. In this exemplary

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cartography as singularly unfitted for depicting a solution to his emotional needs:

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and extraordinary moment, Ford’s reading of space exceeds the boundaries of the cartographic logic of visualization by making room for multiple varieties of mapping and knowledge despite the institutionalized strictures of military cartography. The key to our understanding of Ford’s engagement with the cartographic epistemology of landscape lies in his articulation of the status of landscape in relation to the observer. In part one of No Enemy, Gringoire experiences several profound moments of suddenly noticing the landscape before him, as if its essence had just been revealed. As the Compiler puts it, “So Gringoire had four landscapes, which represent four moments in four years when, for very short intervals, the strain of the war lifted itself from the mind. They were, those intermissions of the spirit, exactly like gazing through rifts in a mist” (14). Paul Skinner agrees that these are moments of clarity “when the overwhelming dominance of the war on the individual consciousness recedes, and landscape is seen as and for itself ” (xv). In other words, according to these formulations, landscape is a preexisting physical phenomenon whose essential nature becomes clear when the war’s oppressive presence no longer impedes the perception of an observing consciousness. A number of critics considering the relationship between spatial perception and representation have argued an opposite idea, however—namely, that landscape does not antedate its observation but is instead the product of human action (of which, I might add, observation forms a crucial part). When Henri Lefebvre declares, “(Social) space is a (social) product,” he argues that physical space exists in a dialectical relationship with the cultural forces that create and react to it (26). J. Hillis Miller likewise writes, “The landscape is not a preexisting thing in itself. It is made into a landscape, that is, into a humanly meaningful space, by the living that takes place within it. This transforms it both materially, as by names, or spiritually, as by the ascription of some collective value to this or that spot” (21). W. J. T. Mitchell points out that landscape is both the method of representation and what is represented, that it is something called into being, “already artifice in the moment of its beholding, long before it becomes the subject of pictorial representation” (“Imperial” 14). Thus, for each of these critics landscape is the product of cultural forces, human experience, and the artifice of representation. Such interpretations alert us to the possibility of a similar dynamic at play in Ford’s portrayal of Gringoire’s landscape observation. Despite the narrator’s explanation that the four landscape visions mark the momentary absence of an intermediary obscurity, a closer examination of the text makes it clear that landscape is also something that Gringoire creates rather than merely recognizes. The first and third of the four major landscape visions do couch observation in metaphorical terms of parting mists or lifting curtains.

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However, the second landscape pairs the idea of a veil lifting from a physical landscape with the construction of an imaginary one. Imaginary landscapes assume an even more important role in the fourth landscape, which is for us the key topographical moment of the book in that it directly cites the techniques of military cartography. In this final example, we learn that the series of four major landscapes does not culminate in the revelation of physical space, but instead in an explication of created psychological space. The first moment of landscape revelation occurs, as the narrator tells us, on “the day in 1915 when Kensington Gardens suddenly grew visible.” Gringoire watches some drilling Guardsmen and “motor transport wagons going cautiously down the Broad Walk—parts of the familiar train of the war. And then, suddenly, there were great motionless trees, heavy in their summer foliage, blue-gray, beneath a very high sky; there was the long, quiet part of the palace; the red brick, glowing in the sun, the shadows of the windows very precise and blue.” His awareness suddenly shifts from the men and materials of war to the trees, the architecture, and an imagined vision of “courtiers and royalties” from a bygone era promenading on the lawn. Almost immediately, however, “the curtain closed again; the weight once more settled down. The trees again became the foreground and there was the feeling that Gringoire could never get away from”—that is, a feeling of impending doom. The landscape is once again obscured by the danger of invasion and specter of national humiliation that “was still, and was strong, in the air” like a mist (15). The second moment repeats the terms of an interposed curtain deployed in the first moment. While waiting for a train at Dunmow, in Essex, Gringoire learns from the stationmaster of Lord Kitchener’s sudden death (drowned on June 5, 1916, when the cruiser Hampshire, on which he was bound for Russia on a state visit, struck a mine in the North Sea). Torn from his thoughts about training soldiers, Gringoire reacts with a sudden evacuation of thought: “No war: an empty mind [ . . . ].” The narrator explains, “And so the veil lifted for a second. The flat lands of Essex were there, stretching out; flat fields; undistinguished beneath a dull sky. He speculated on the crops; on the labour it took to the acre to put in those cabbages; on the winds that must sweep across the comparatively hedgeless spaces. The ground looked like a good clay,” and so on—in an evaluative consideration of the landscape before him that encompasses local habits of mind and methods of corn and potato farming (19). Again, here as in the vision of Kensington Gardens, the obscuring presence of the war lifts for a moment to reveal the true landscape, one of crops and growth and weather, until the consciousness of the conflict closes in again. The third moment takes place in the Somme in July 1916, when Gringoire strides through thistles, presumably (he later concludes) disturbing masses of

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flies feeding on hidden corpses. The flies attract “an innumerable company of swallows” that surround him at waist height; “ ‘They were so near,’ Gringoire said, ‘that they brushed my hands, and they extended so far that I could see nothing else. It is one of the five things of the war that I really see, for it was like walking, buoyantly, in the pellucid sunlight, waist-high through a sea of unsurpassed and unsurpassable azure. I felt as if I were a Greek god. It was like a miracle.’ ” Once more, though Ford foregoes any mention of a “veil,” “curtain,” or “mist,” it is clear that the swallows blot out any vision of corpses or anything warlike—“ ‘I could see nothing else,’ ” Gringoire says. “ ‘It is one of the five things of the war that I really see’ ” (24). A vision has suddenly emerged with a miraculous clarity, endowing the observer with a feeling of power over his situation, as the oppressive presence of the war seems temporarily suspended. Before the appearance of the fourth landscape, then, the reader is prepared to consider these moments as the enactment of a miraculous or heavenly respite from the war through an act of apprehending the physical terrain in a moment of insight. However, two more landscapes intervene, confusingly enough, contradicting the terms of the first three. Gringoire watches some British observation balloons ascend into the sky over the Ypres Salient and considers the possibility of getting a better view by climbing nearby “Mt. Vedaigne” (historically, Mont Vidaigne, one of a series of low hills dominating the otherwise flat terrain). He decides to remain in camp instead. “It was then,” the narrator tells us, “that Gringoire related a psychological anecdote that gives the note of this book”: I suddenly began to see bits of a landscape that has pursued me ever since— until now here I sit in it. Not quite a landscape; a nook, rather; the full extent of the view about one hundred seventy yards by two hundred seventy—the closed up end of a valley; closed up by trees—willows, silver birches, oaks, and Scotch pines; deep, among banks; with a little stream, just a trickle, level with the grass of the bottom. You understand the idea—a sanctuary. (33)

Gringoire sees, or foresees, the landscape of a part of postwar England to which he will retire. Again, as in previous examples, the vision involves a miraculous or heavenly respite from the war, here coded as a “sanctuary” from danger. Yet this landscape episode introduces an important distinction: Gringoire is not describing what he sees, but what he imagines himself to see. The mist or curtain of the war does not briefly lift to reveal a preexisting landscape in momentary clarity; rather, Gringoire creates the vision of a landscape. These distinctions also characterize Gringoire’s subsequent mental return,

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while physically on the Somme, to the episode at Dunmow Station. Before, Gringoire’s vision of the Essex countryside also induces a brief daydream about gardening in Kent someday. Now, however, we learn the particulars of the view: south to the sea, with the coast of France on the horizon in clear weather. This imaginary view then superimposes itself on the real view of the Somme: “There was a rhomboid of deeper, brighter green, of a green that was really alive, beyond the gray-green of the field they were in. It existed in front of the purple of scabrous flowers on the great shoulder that masked the battlefield. It wavered, precisely as you will see the coloured image cast on a sheet by a magic lantern, then slowly, it hardened and brightened [ . . . ].” This view is “just country,” a key phrase to which Gringoire repeatedly turns to describe the “sanctuary” he now envisions (35). This double vision of both an imagined and a perceived landscape sets the stage for what happens in the fourth landscape: the virtually simultaneous interpretation of the same landscape on different mental planes. This fourth landscape occupies the central pages of No Enemy and both the physical and psychological high points of the account. Gringoire climbs Mt. Vedaigne to analyze the view and make note of enemy positions in order to brief his superior officers about the terrain into which his division has just arrived. (Ford had been assigned to just such a mission himself [“Last Words” 227].) Taking with him a map, a field telescope, and writing materials, he is to prepare a comprehensive report for a general who will meet him atop the mountain later that day: For each point of the compass, he “set” his map [ . . . ]. And he saw, without seeing, and memorized without associations—just names attaching to dark patches in a great plain. Over a particularly large fir tree was Armentières; over an oak, lower down the slope and to the right were the slag heaps and Béthune; further to the right still Bailleul; the flash of gilt above a steeple meant the ten block letters Poperinghe; an immensely distant series of dull purple cubes against a long silver gleam was, in printed capitals DUNKIRK . . . You see, his mind was just working in the watertight compartments of his immediate professional job. He wanted to make—and he did make by 11:00 a.m.—four cards, like the range cards one makes for musketry: a central point where one stood, and arrows, running out like rays from that centre, towards Ypres, in capitals, or Wytschaete in block letters. He wanted the general to be able to stand on each point, look down on the card, follow the direction of the arrow, and identify the place. (40)

Initially, in this passage perceptual impressionism precedes translation into military terms. Gringoire goes on to carry out expertly the objective, perspectivalist exercises in landscape perception and representation detailed in

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the British Army training manuals, admirably exercising that “cold, matterof-fact military eye” prized by military topographers (General Staff 75). First Gringoire “sets” his map, orienting it to align true north on the map with geographical north. Then he compares his map to what he sees, aligning “the flash of gilt above a steeple” or a “series of dull purple cubes” with printed names, and he even prepares a range-taker’s card for the general to use in connecting visual perception and geographical fact. Yet these actions represent the working of only one part of Gringoire’s mind, which Ford explicitly describes as being compartmented into three consciousnesses. The first compartment belongs to Gringoire as the Acting Intelligence Officer. This mind carries out the toponymic functions of objectivist and perspectivalist military cartography, assigning names to places and then reinscribing that toponymic association through the device of a rangetaker’s card labeled with the names of towns that appear to the eye as “dark patches in a great plain” (40). Furthermore, when he goes “to each of the points of the compass, to make sure that he had registered positions truly,” he accomplishes the positivist project of recording the homogeneous, absolute space of Newtonian physics in the best tradition of the army’s topographical sketching manuals (41). A second part of Gringoire’s mind, that of the Infantry Officer, then emerges to carry out another function of military cartography— the taxonomic. The Infantry Officer catalogues and classifies the parts of Mt. Vedaigne, dividing the landscape features into the militarily useful and useless. He considers “the garden, the hedges, the copsewood, the timber, and the slopes; considering them as cover, as sites for trenches and noticing the fields of fire, the dead ground, the trees that would be dangerous in falling about if the place were shelled,” et cetera. He “dismisse[s]” a cottage surrounded by vegetable beds as “too frail to be of much use for cover” and therefore “obviously” having “no topographical value” (41). In this activity, Gringoire’s second mind busies itself with what the author of Map Reading and Panorama Sketching describes as the “many little points of military value” in the landscape—points whose determination represents the epitome of the anti-artistic “ ‘eye for country’ ” (73). Through the activities of the first two parts of his mind, Gringoire successfully resists any artistic appreciation of the aesthetic value of those topographical features as he pursues the perspectivalist logic of objective military cartography. After these two parts of Gringoire’s mind have accomplished their tasks, alternating places in what Ford characterizes as “surface” and “secondary” minds, and as “conscious” and “subconscious” awarenesses, a third part of the mind—that of the poet—takes over (41–42). “And, after that,” Ford writes, “it was just emotions. The landscape became landscape, with

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great shafts of light and shadows of clouds; the little white cottage with the green shutters, a little nook that should be inviolable [ . . . ]. The range of hills was no longer a strategical point or a tactical position” (44). Here, as in Gringoire’s vision of an imaginary garden in Kent that he sees superimposed on the terrain of the Somme as if “cast on a sheet by a magic lantern,” the mind of the poet creates an imagined landscape as he contemplates a real one (35). While the Acting Intelligence Officer and the Infantry Officer execute the toponymic and taxonomic functions of cartography in order to master the landscape, appropriating it for the exercise of military power, the poet carries out a generative act of mapping that serves to reconstruct the self by displacing the traumatic experience of the war to an imagined space of peaceful refuge. This mapping act is the “reconstruction” referred to in the book’s subtitle; mapping thus exerts a power for good, in the midst of a war whose destruction is made possible by the fact-based protocols of mapping that Gringoire both exercises and overcomes. Gringoire goes beyond questions of whether maps adequately represent reality to stake the claim that maps can create their own emotional and transcendent reality blessedly immune from the grip of topographical facts, of trenches and sight lines. This is the sanctuary Gringoire imagines through mapping, and this is the achievement of Ford’s narrative: “an ‘eye for country’ ” that creates an entirely new country. The arrival of the general for whom Gringoire has been waiting brings about a sudden mental shift that only apparently signals the reassertion of fact over emotion and of physical over imagined landscapes. The narrator explains, “immediately the mind went back to its original position: Dunkirk and Ypres became circles named in large capitals; Wytschaete and Kemmel were again in block lettering. One said: ‘The sea is just visible in that direction,’ and it was just a geographical fact.” The ambiguous antecedent of the word “it” is crucial here. For the sight of the sea to be “just a geographical fact” implies, on the one hand, that the sea has become fact again. However, this phrase also implies that while one might have to utter such a statement to a general as “The sea is just visible in that direction,” that statement represents a conversational reversion to the terms of cartographic factuality that in no way affects the simultaneous presence of the imaginary, emotional landscape that the poet has generated (45). On top of Mt. Vedaigne, fact and emotion simply coexist. Furthermore, Ford’s comparison of map and landscape does not call into question the epistemological reliability of maps. Gringoire the poet does not lament the inability of the range-taker’s card to portray reality adequately. Nor does Gringoire’s shift from emotion to geographical fact occasion an ironic

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commentary on the difference between generals and poets in the way they view landscape. Instead, Gringoire’s generative mapping turns cartography into a redeeming act. In Gringoire’s momentary flashes of insight, emotion transforms the landscape, and the landscape transforms the observer. “[J]ust emotions” (44) aligns with “just country” (35, 63) when “landscape [becomes] landscape” (44) and a new space of the imagination comes into being. In this generative moment, the poet can therefore envision “the little white cottage” and the “Kentish garden” of his anticipated future with an equanimity undisturbed by the presence of the war (44). A contrasting moment appears in Ford’s No More Parades (1925; the second book in the Parade’s End tetralogy). There, Christopher Tietjens thinks back to a moment nineteen months before, when he—like Gringoire—was atop a hill in Belgium waiting to show a visiting general the landscape spread out before him. Then, he watched the German shelling of Poperinghe with outrage at the thought of the civilians being killed in the town. “Now,” it is after “having lost so much emotion” that he sees “the embattled world as a map . . . . An embossed map of greenish papier mâché” (494). In the absence of emotion, the world becomes map-like. Yet in this vision he also sees the blood of a dead soldier he had known “blurring luminously” over the landscape, he sees in the distance “a territory labelled White Ruthenians” and wonders “Who the devil were those poor wretches?” and he struggles to believe that he has control over his “uppermost mind” (494). In this instance, fact and emotion collide to the extent of calling his sanity into question. For Gringoire to engineer his equanimity and the coexistence of fact and emotion in No Enemy, however, he depends on the division of labor made possible by his consciousness of possessing a compartmented mind. Through this device, Ford can supplement the toponymic and taxonomic functions of institutionalized military cartography with a generative function. Ford consequently renews, and fulfills in his fiction, his claim in “War and the Mind” that one observer can perceive the same landscape with two separate minds and thereby reconcile methods of observation that would otherwise be at odds. Furthermore, in No Enemy Ford resolves the problem stated in that essay— that “the mind connected nothing from the maps” (“War and the Mind” 43). In “War and the Mind,” the fundamental gap between maps and reality renders the coexistence of “the visualizing mind” (43) and “the official observer’s mind” (42) precarious and unsustainable. In No Enemy, however, Ford shifts his attention from maps—as decidedly compromised assertions of epistemological reliability—to the process of mapping. The Acting Intelligence Officer, the Infantry Officer, and the poet can all map out the terrain of their respective choosing, and the poet’s imagined landscape can appear

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[I]t merely amounted to saying that when you are very busy with a job, you do not much notice what is going on around you. [ . . . ] And, in the end, that is the basic idea that underlies these records of four landscapes. Gringoire was simply trying to state—or rather to illustrate—the fact that, during the whole of the period [of the war] he only four times achieved a sufficient aloofness of mind to notice the landscape that surrounded him. (60–61)

The narrator focuses on the “aloofness of mind” that he claims is necessary to achieve a heightened state of awareness about the landscape. More useful to our purposes, however, is what happens to the landscape when that state of mind is achieved: the essence of topography, “just country,” that is created when the observer’s psychological state permits (63). The narrator writes, “the essential call, of the land, of the war, was not the humanity that England contained—but just the country.” Gringoire intervenes to explain himself, claiming that the landscape becomes “just country” when it stops being constituted of “heaths, moors, crags, forests, passes, named rivers, or famous views,” when it becomes “just fields, just dead ground, or fields of clover that have never heard and will never hear the crepitation of machine guns” (63). At first it may seem that Gringoire simply differentiates between landscapes that have undergone the destruction of war and those that have remained untouched. It soon becomes clear, however, that the difference is one brought about by a shift in the manner of observation. In other words, the physical ground is the same, but the way of looking at it changes the landscape that the physical features of ground constitute. The meaning of “for” in “an ‘eye for country’ ” thereby alters from “directed toward” to “in the service of creating.” Ultimately, this process of imaginative topographical creation provides the solution to the trauma of the front lines.15 The circumstances of the war gave perceptive author-soldiers the opportunity to build something from the wreckage of the shattered Cartesian spaces of observation and representation, as we have seen from the three principal texts examined here. While demonstrating some initial similarities, however, these works differ in significant respects. First, Undertones of War, Death of a Hero, and No Enemy share certain formal characteristics, in that they are first-person accounts (mediated in the latter two works by narrators who are

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superimposed over the real one without having to “connect” with anything written on the range-taker’s card that the poet holds in his hand. At one point the Compiler attempts to sum up how and why Gringoire experiences these moments of topographical epiphany. He offers a “psychological speculation,” one that “wasn’t very profound” (60):

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friends of the protagonists). Second, all three texts incorporate autobiographical elements, modulated by attempts to construct a literary meaning out of a war that by 1928–1929 had generally come to be understood as essentially meaningless. Finally, in each text the relationship between observer and landscape, however compromised by the breakdown of the logic of visualization, provides a key for constructing meaning. These authors all squarely engage the failed objective epistemological capacity of maps, mitigating that failure through a variety of recuperative strategies: Blunden’s appreciation of maps as purely aesthetic, nourishing artifacts; Aldington’s redeployment of mapping as an artistically revelatory instrument; and Ford’s dialectical synthesis of these results into a reconstruction of the self based on an alternative form of mapping—emotional and subjective, rather than positivist and scientific. The deeper distinctions between the topographic sensibilities demonstrated in Undertones of War, Death of a Hero, and No Enemy lie therefore on the level of objectivity and subjectivity, whose tensions inflect both military cartography and the artistic projects of all three authors. I have claimed that these three texts constitute a dialectic without each author necessarily having responded to another directly. All three authors were soldiers trained in objective methods of seeing institutionalized and articulated by manuals of military topography. As we have noted, however, objective seeing failed in the actual conditions of war as the circumstances of the battlefield shrank the observer’s field of vision, made the act of seeing hazardous, and demonstrated the speciousness of the purportedly transparent relationship between maps and reality. Blunden and Aldington respond to the epistemological failure of objective mapping with narrative strategies of subjectivity: Blunden turning to the aesthetic and compensatory aspect of an emphatically subjective observation of the landscape, and Aldington using the irony revealed by subjective observation to indict the objectivity of the mapping process. Both Blunden and Aldington position their varieties of topographical subjectivity in direct opposition to the bankrupt objective epistemology of military mapping. In No Enemy, Ford reaches a third conclusion that reintroduces subjectivity into topographical representation and thereby re-legitimizes the epistemological promise of maps. Ford shifts the attention of his narrative from maps to mapping, supplementing the objective dimension of mapping’s toponymic and taxonomic functions with its subjective capacities for generation. This latter aspect of mapping consequently allows for both an emotional reconstruction of the self after war and the creative application of a multiplicity of epistemological conditions that, for Blunden and Aldington, tend to be compromising. Farmer Schmidt, in the Manual of Map Reading and Field Sketching, can only either know that the stream is fordable or not know this fact, and he

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can either say it or not say it. The autobiographical narrator of Undertones of War, on the other hand, can know that he does not know what is happening in front of his “incomprehensible line,” and he can say to his reader that he cannot say what is happening (120). However, the uncertainties of the landscape under observation leave him no apparent choice for his own conduct but to retire into an aesthetic appreciation of what he sees rather than an objective representation of it. In Death of a Hero, characters either know all too well about the trench experience (Winterbourne), or they know nothing at all (everyone else). In their discussion of the war, the other characters only speak and Winterbourne only listens. For Aldington’s protagonist, who does not know that the war is about to end, not to know how his love entanglements will end leads him to end his own life. For Blunden and Aldington, then, an awareness of the uncertainty of knowledge and the inability to speak place limitations on understanding and conduct. Gringoire can know that he does not know, and he can say that he cannot say, and—most importantly—he can hold these contradictions simultaneously without penalty, through the device of the compartmented mind. He simply accepts that to say “The sea is just visible in that direction” signifies the transmission of what is “just”—that is, what is merely—“a geographical fact,” while the emotional truths of an imagined landscape are incommunicable to the general with whom he is speaking (45). Gringoire knows that the physical layout of the terrain is suitable for defensive purposes, or it is not, and then “[t]he range of hills [becomes] no longer a strategical point or a tactical position” to be evaluated on these terms (44). The Acting Intelligence Officer “saw, without seeing” (40), but what here is cast as limitation is resumed as advantage through the poet’s parallel capacity—for he too can see what is not visible. Seeing “the green country, the mists, the secure nook at the end of a little valley” pitches vision over the horizon and into the future of a life beyond war and beyond the maps of the front line (44). Ford, through Gringoire, thereby overcomes the epistemological collapse of military cartography through orchestrating the coexistence of maps, whose objectivity has been compromised, and admittedly subjective observation. In so doing, moreover, Ford follows the particular trajectory that some philosophers have detected in the course of knowledge about knowledge. In Geoff King’s analysis of the Enlightenment reappropriation of the world through techniques of perspectivalism and Cartesian spatial abstraction, he notes, “Michel Foucault charts this shift in terms of a movement from an epistemology based on resemblances [as in the system of celestial hierarchies] to one founded on notions of taxonomic order” (140). (In military topography, for example, this notion emerges as the taxonomic classification of landscape according to military value.) Stanley Cavell has located one uniquely modern

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moment in a further shift, claiming, “Classical epistemology has concentrated on the knowledge of objects (and, of course, of mathematics), not on the knowledge of persons. That is, surely,” he continues, “one of the striking facts of modern philosophy as a whole, and its history will not be understood until some accounting of that fact is rendered” (68). The shift in spatial sensibility chronicled in the topographical accounts of the war by Blunden, Aldington, and Ford—the turn from maps to mapping, from the representation of space, through the experience of place, to the examination of the self—participates in the larger species of epistemological turn Cavell describes. In their treatment of subjectivity, mapping for these authors shifts from an epistemology of objects to that of persons: as aesthetic refuge, as ironic commentary, and as self-reconstruction. That these three authors should center cartographic sense on human knowledge in the midst of a massive, dehumanizing struggle over the exhaustively mapped spaces and places of no-man’s-land is especially ironic. Given that the Great War abounds in ironies, though, it should perhaps come as no surprise (and may prove a consolation) that the context of such destruction should also be viewed as the scene of individual redemption.

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In Flanders with No Baedeker: Beaman, Forster, and Ford [The British] have long since surrendered at discretion to the value of [Karl Baedeker’s] unfailing exactitude; and Fliegende Blätter has a picture of an English paterfamilias finding the picturesque castle on the right and the foaming waterfall on the left, instead of vice versa as asserted by his infallible Baedeker, and exclaiming to his flock, “Why, this scenery is all wrong!” —Review of Baedekers in Travel (1908)1 [In Richard Ford’s Gatherings from Spain (1846)] you have a picture of human life which is none the less exciting because it has ceased to be true to actual fact. After all, the best guide-books to read are guides to nothing but themselves. And so we may rule out the actual facts as irrelevant to our pleasure. —Review of Baedekers in the London Times (1925)2

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hree weeks into the Great War, a list of German casualties in the London Times included this improbable notice: “It is reported that Herr Karl Baedeker, the publisher of the famous guide-books, has been killed in action” (“German News” 5). The most famous Karl Baedeker (1801–1859) had started publishing in Coblenz in 1827. By 1914, the family business had passed to his youngest son, Friedrich (Fritz). The man killed in 1914 was Fritz’s son, also named Karl, while the guidebooks still appeared under their founder’s name (Mendelson 394–95, 401). Evidently the Times had confused one Karl with another. Yet this report, however erroneous with regard to the youngest Baedeker, metonymically foretold a more widespread trauma—for the books themselves would become war casualties. In January 1916, Findlay Muirhead (coeditor of Baedeker’s English-language volumes with his brother James F. Muirhead) announced a new series of guidebooks

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CHAPTER 2

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to replace the German ones, which, it was supposed, would have no postwar readership in Allied countries (“British Baedekers” 3). More importantly, the war called into question the Baedekers’ positivist methodology of narrative physical place. Certain prewar fiction records the stakes of this methodology, and several postwar texts chronicle its apparent demise. In between, Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier (1915) proleptically encodes the war’s challenge to Baedekers. Writing on the cusp of the war and before his military service, he posits an alternative method of topographical representation, one based on material signifiers and relational knowledge, asserting the inscrutability of experience and the inadequacy of narrative deixis. The key to his method is a belt of wampum beads. This key, when recontextualized to the war and the trajectory of the Baedekers’ literary reception, unlocks a larger story about the position of the modernist material object in the topographical contours of modernity’s Great War. “Infallible Baedeker” Much of the Baedeker story has become familiar thanks to the seminal work of Paul Fussell, continuing through that of James Buzard, Edward Mendelson, and Rudy Koshar, among others.3 As they have observed, Baedekers were in their heyday before the war, providing highly popular travel guidance in an age of burgeoning travel. According to Mendelson, Karl Baedeker had seen how guidebooks of the early 1800s typically offered either simple lists of tourist destinations without any historical or practical context, or overly elaborate discussions of what to see and how to feel when seeing it. “Karl Baedeker chose a middle way,” Mendelson explains; “he gave his readers precisely the information they needed to find their way cheaply and conveniently, and precisely the information they needed in order to appreciate what they saw. He trusted them to provide their aesthetic and emotional responses for themselves” (389). Additionally, Baedeker addressed the reader traveling without a human guide, by giving crucial data on foreign customs, transportation fares, room and meal rates, tipping, and a wealth of like subjects. For example, the 1913 edition of Northern Germany begins with twenty-seven pages of advice on languages; currency; passports and customs; railways; motoring and cycling; sample itineraries; hotels; mail, telegraph, and telephone services; and a nineteen-page essay on North German architecture and painting from Romanesque to rococo (xi–xxxviii). Baedekers owed their phenomenal popularity, however, to more than the scope of their information. Early evaluations attributed their success to an empirically based, objective narrative framework. Karl Baedeker personally verified the accuracy of his books, researching the first volumes himself. For

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instance, he spent over thirteen hours on two days cataloging the graves in Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris, noting their exact positions (“Baedeker’s Guide-Books” 11). While Baedeker relied principally on his own observations, and his British competitor John Murray assigned one author-traveler to write each guide, Baedeker’s son Fritz went farther by incorporating the work of specialists. Revising and expanding the book series, he employed university professors, historians, artists, Orientalists, antiquaries, and Egyptologists, among many other professionals, to enhance the technical accuracy of his product.4 This reliance on detailed personal inspection lent Baedeker’s product an aura of infallibility, and commentaries before the Great War united in extolling these techniques and results. One review essay in Bookman in 1903, by Charles Harris, praises Baedekers for coming as close as hitherto possible to the “ideal guide-book.” “Such a book must, first of all,” he writes, “be honest.” In order to create “honest” descriptions, he explains, “All statements about facts must be accurate, and be based on the personal observation and experiences of the compilers.” Furthermore, the ideal guidebook formulates a “complete separation” between accounts of the physical location of sites and objects and assessments of their value. “The guide-book is for use on the spot,” he writes. “When it says ‘on the right is this and on the left is that,’ it says enough. [ . . . ] The guide-book should take us to the spot, tell us what objects are to be seen there and the necessary data about them, and then leave the rest to our eyes and our imaginations” (497). James F. Muirhead, writing in Outlook in 1906, traces the conceptual ancestry of Baedekers to Herodotus, whose fifth century b.c. History of the Persian Wars, he believed, exemplified the strengths of an empirical methodology. Muirhead somewhat modestly claims a difficulty in identifying what differentiates Baedekers from their predecessors and, “so to speak, le dernier cri in this branch of literature.” Like Harris, however, he points to the “trend towards the severely practical,” a reliance on personal observation, objective testimony, “use on the spot,” and a conscious effort to avoid embellishments and a literary style (229–30). In 1908, Edwin Asa Dix similarly wrote in the journal Travel that Baedeker’s “methodical German mind evolved a precise and utilitarian system of treatment. He put the hotel first and the scenery afterward. He stated distances and times and prices. He blue-penciled many of the flowery descriptions. He sought to give facts rather than impressions. His aim was to make travel more an exact science and less a venture into the unknown.”5 Dix’s approval indicates the credibility imputed to Baedeker’s project of topographical standardization through the objectivity and discipline associated with scientific expertise. Baedeker’s “unfailing exactitude” consequently held a strong grip on the traveler’s mind. Dix describes a German newspaper cartoon

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(in the satirical journal Fliegende Blätter) depicting an English father encountering a castle on his right hand and a waterfall on his left—“instead of vice versa as asserted by his infallible Baedeker.” In consternation, he declares to his family, “Why, this scenery is all wrong!”6 The chief strength of Baedekers, then, lay in their claim to representational fidelity, a value rooted in Victorian (and Enlightenment) science founded on systematic observation. Baedeker’s example of sober factuality was seen to be so important, and the influence of his guidebooks so widespread, that a number of prewar texts incorporate references to Baedekers as shorthand for their objective, scientifically inspired approach to topographical representation. In a 1913 memoir entitled Travels without Baedeker, for example, Ardern Beaman recounts a journey from India through the Near East to Greece. The word Baedeker appears nowhere except in the title of his book, yet its status goes beyond the merely titular to hover silently over the entire narrative. Beaman contrasts the standard method of Baedekers (emphasizing meticulous preparation for travel, rational organization of itineraries, and informed circumvention of untoward incidents) with his own idea of travel: spontaneous, unstructured, and open to the hazards of fortune. Beaman’s opening lines sum up his travel philosophy. He describes himself at the start of his “Expedition” (so capitalized with tongue in cheek) as being “equipped with high hopes, great projects, forty-one pounds sterling and an incredibly dilapidated suit-case. I had no definite plan of action,” he continues, “my idea being just to wander as far and wide, and for as long a time as the abovementioned shekels would allow” (1). This studied nonchalance is even more striking given the preparations specifically recommended in Baedeker’s Egypt and the Sudân (1908). The guidebook advises bringing “a drinking-cup of leather or metal, a flask, a strong pocket-knife, a thermometer, a pocketcompass of medium size, and an electric or acetylene lamp for lighting caverns and dark chambers.—Photographic materials, dry plates, films [ . . . ] etc., can be obtained in Cairo, but it is preferable to bring a good stock carefully packed from home [ . . . ]” (xiv). Beaman, on the other hand, writes that in his “dilapidated suit-case,” he carries “[i]n addition to the necessities of life [only] a revolver, a packet of cartridges that didn’t fit, writing materials, [and] a small, carefully chosen library of select standard books—so select, in fact, that I didn’t read them then, nor have I yet—some pipes, and a gigantic tin of tobacco” (3). The presence of a revolver made inoperable by the accompaniment of mismatched ammunition mocks the precautions Baedeker urges. Furthermore, while Beaman does not reveal the identity of those “select standard books” that he deprecatingly claims never to have opened, they might logically include the Baedekers announced in the title of his narrative.

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Any reader of Beaman’s who happened to have been familiar with Baedeker’s description of the Sphinx would find Beaman’s entertaining account of visiting that monument even more amusing by comparison. Beaman devotes a lyric page to the splendor and magnificence of the sight, much in the style of Egypt and the Sudân, which reports of the Sphinx that “in spite of all injuries, it preserves an impressive expression of strength and majesty: the eyes have a far-away expression, the lips wear a half-smile, and the whole face [ . . . ] is of graceful and beautiful type” (131). Beaman, however, concludes his chapter with this exchange between himself and his traveling companion (nicknamed “The Doctor”): One wonders if, sometimes when alone with the sympathetic stars and the silent Nile, who share its secret and its sorrow, that scornful expression relaxes, and the proud head bows down beneath the weight of all the ages—a momentary respite from its eternal vigil over the Past. The Doctor, more impressionable than I, was the first to break the silence. “Let’s push on, old chap,” he said. “If I look at that damn thing any longer I shall go dotty.” (27–28)

The Doctor’s remark matches Beaman’s overall tone of jocularity in this book, rendering the earlier passage a parody of Baedeker. The larger point here, however, is that while Beaman implicitly claims to debunk the idea of needing to rely on Baedeker for safe and informed travel, his narrative both draws on and reinforces the way readers saw Baedeker as epitomizing a privileged version of knowledge about the world. Not only do this author’s descriptions mimic the style of Baedekers, but, like the guidebooks, his text offers practical tips under the aegis of an unassailable confidence in being able to discern and describe the objective significance of a place through a reliable medium of transparent narrative.7 In E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View (1908), a near contemporary of Beaman’s Travels without Baedeker, the guidebooks again serve as one pole of a contrasting relationship about the proper way to see the world. Lucy Honeychurch, who arrives in Florence in the care of her chaperone, Charlotte Bartlett, turns immediately to her guidebook. “Taking up Baedeker’s Handbook to Northern Italy,” Forster tells us, “she committed to memory the most important dates of Florentine History. For she was determined to enjoy herself tomorrow” (14). Here, Forster ties touristic enjoyment and self-education to that most scientifically commendable and positivist activity of knowledge, and product of the Victorian mania for cataloging: the memorization of dates.

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Forster entitles the next chapter “In Santa Croce with No Baedeker” (foreshadowing the title of Travels without Baedeker), setting the stage for Lucy Honeychurch’s transforming personal experience of Italian life once she is free of her guidebook. In a description of the urban scene of the morning following Lucy’s arrival, Forster draws a contrast between what one should see—according to Baedeker—and what one does see simply by noting the ordinary sensory details of the world. He begins the chapter with a catalog of sensations: It was pleasant to wake up in Florence, to open the eyes upon a bright bare room, with a floor of red tiles which look clean though they are not; with a painted ceiling whereon pink griffins and blue amorini sport in a forest of yellow violins and bassoons. It was pleasant, too, to fling wide the windows, pinching the fingers in unfamiliar fastenings, to lean out into sunshine with beautiful hills and trees and marble churches opposite, and close below, the Arno, gurgling against the embankment of the road. (16)

Forster’s narrator proceeds to describe workmen on the riverbank and a boat “employed for some mysterious end” (again pointing out the limits of subjective knowledge, as he does in mentioning the “red tiles which look clean though they are not”). He then writes of a crowded electric tram getting “entangled” with a formation of soldiers and a military band. “Over such trivialities as these many a valuable hour may slip away,” the narrator explains, “and the traveller who has gone to Italy to study the tactile values of Giotto, or the corruption of the Papacy, may return remembering nothing but the blue sky and the men and women who live under it” (16–17). Despite the ironic warning of the danger of “such trivialities,” it becomes clear over the course of the novel that the narrator sympathizes with Lucy’s embrace of emotion, instinct, and the zest for life epitomized by the idea of Italy as a liberating sensory experience. When the unconventional Miss Lavish lures Lucy away from her two chaperones, Bartlett and Baedeker, she follows the narrator in distinguishing the prescriptive form of knowledge found in Baedekers (what one ought to see) from the descriptive knowledge gained from experience (what one personally notes). Miss Lavish offers to take Lucy to see the church of Santa Croce: “I will take you by a dear dirty back way, Miss Honeychurch, and if you bring me luck, we shall have an adventure.” Lucy said that this was most kind, and at once opened the Baedeker, to see where Santa Croce was.

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An awareness of the superficiality of Baedekers, how they only “touch the surface of things,” exposes the inadequacies of the books’ prescriptive itineraries and evaluations. Additionally, Miss Lavish’s allusion to emancipation associates the right to vote—that is, to render and register judgment—with a freedom of sensation (incidentally underscored by her surname, which suggests the enjoyment of abundance). As Lucy and Miss Lavish make their way to Santa Croce, Forster continues to invoke the Baedeker as a limited and limiting method of understanding the world, against which he contrasts Miss Lavish’s liberating attitudes. The women get lost in the labyrinthine streets, and Lucy suggests stopping someone to ask for directions. “Oh, but that is the word of a craven!” Miss Lavish replies, “And no, you are not, not, not to look at your Baedeker. Give it to me; I shan’t let you carry it. We shall simply drift” (20). Like Beaman, then, Miss Lavish promotes the wandering pursuit of serendipitous pleasure, drifting in the flow of sensation instead of following the rigorous strictures of Baedeker tourism. Feeling replaces mediated knowledge, and fortuitous experience replaces predetermined cognition. Alongside her unconventional companion, and bereft of her written guide, Lucy embarks on a course leading to spiritual and emotional freedom—for it is “in Santa Croce with no Baedeker” that she has her first extended conversation with the elder Mr. Emerson and George Emerson, her future husband. Temporarily abandoned by Miss Lavish, Lucy reacts by relating the safety of female companionship to the epistemological and moral chaperonage of Baedeker: “Tears of indignation came to Lucy’s eyes—partly because Miss Lavish had jilted her, partly because she had taken her Baedeker. How could she find her way home? How could she find her way about in Santa Croce?” It is bad enough that she cannot remember such facts as who built the church or which frescoes Giotto painted. More importantly, without being able to locate Giotto’s “tactile values” she is unable to deploy her “feeling [of ] what is proper,” and without John Ruskin’s opinion (as furnished by Baedeker) she thinks it impossible to decide what is “really beautiful” in the church. Left without Baedeker’s encyclopedic and dogmatic pronunciations, Lucy is forced to fall back on her own sensations, falling under the sway of “the pernicious charm of Italy.” She studies the posted notices in Italian, watches the Baedeker-carrying tourists, and closely observes two Italian toddlers. At this point the Emersons appear and Lucy explains her predicament. “If you’ve

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[Miss Lavish replies,] “Tut, tut! Miss Lucy! I hope we shall soon emancipate you from Baedeker. He does but touch the surface of things. As to the true Italy—he does not even dream of it. The true Italy is only to be found by patient observation.” (18)

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no Baedeker,” George Emerson tells her, “you’d better join us” (22–25). So begins the relationship between Lucy and George, which culminates in their marriage. Throughout the Italian first half of this novel, Forster relies repeatedly on Baedeker as the symbol of a social conventionality as repressive as the guidebooks’ confident epistemological claims are complete. Forster does qualify this assessment through the character of Mr. Eager, the chaplain of the English church in Rome. Eager leads an independent life of truer, greater knowledge of the world, found through immersion in the local culture. In the narrator’s words, the chaplain “was a member of the residential colony who had made Florence their home. He knew the people who never walked about with Baedekers, who had learnt to take a siesta after lunch, who took drives the pension tourists had never heard of, and saw by private influence galleries which were closed to them.” By divesting themselves of the crutch of Baedeker, these people “thus attain[ed] to that intimate knowledge, or rather perception, of Florence which is denied” to those who follow the formulaic tour itineraries of Thomas Cook and Sons’ travel agents (58). We do not hear Eager’s exact words; we only know that Lucy is aware of his association with Baedeker-less expatriates, and she sees that condition as the key for his access to the popularly unknown treasures of Italy. With a definite sense of self-satisfaction, Eager invites Lucy and Miss Bartlett to a drive through the hills to view the landscape of Florence; like Miss Lavish, Eager offers an alternative way to perceive the world, unmediated by the constricting influence of guidebook tourism. Lucy undergoes an alteration in the way she experiences reality after hearing this counsel from Miss Lavish and Mr. Eager, having her Baedeker figuratively and literally taken away from her. Reading letters from home, she visualizes the countryside of England as “pathetic as the pictures in a gallery to which, after much experience, a traveller returns.” Compared with personal experience of the world, the pictures in this gallery are merely examples of inferior art, just as Lucy’s previous existence in England seems, in her retrospective view, happy but empty. “She recalled the free, pleasant life of her home,” the narrator explains, “where she was allowed to do everything, and where nothing ever happened to her” (65). Such a life is now revealed as equally pathetic, apparently free but in fact uneventful and inauthentic. The Baedeker, as both the symbol and the instrument of respectable living, now seems both exhaustive and shallow—explaining everything but revealing nothing, detailing how to move throughout a place like Florence yet keeping the sensual experience of the city at arm’s length. Forster’s strategy of choosing pictures in a gallery for the narrator’s metaphorical judgment would not have been lost on readers aware that lengthy descriptions of

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picture galleries, complete with instructions for their navigation, formed a mainstay of Baedekers’ touristic technique and cultural criticism. The Uffizi Gallery, for instance, rates fifteen pages and a map in Baedeker’s 1913 Northern Italy (575–90). This volume’s description of the Church of Santa Croce includes deictic descriptions of exactly which paintings to see, and where they are located, in the manner typical of Baedeker (597–601). Thus, the Baedeker epistemology in Forster’s narrative instantiates the meeting point of respectability, artificiality, and an insufficient engagement with the world—all limitations that Lucy now seeks to overcome. The test of the validity of Lucy’s new perception, enabled for her by Miss Lavish’s and Mr. Eager’s rejection of Baedekers, occurs during the drive these characters take to see the view of Florence, accompanied by Miss Bartlett, Mr. Beebe (an English vicar sharing the Pension Bertolini), and both Mr. Emersons. Here, Forster complicates further any conclusions we might have drawn about his assessment of Baedeker epistemology. Mr. Eager explains to Lucy and Miss Lavish the necessity of casting Baedeker aside and the superiority one achieves without its strictures. But his explanation turns condescending; Lucy calls herself a tourist, and he replies, “we residents sometimes pity you poor tourists not a little—handed about like a parcel of goods from Venice to Florence, from Florence to Rome, living herded together in pensions or hotels, quite unconscious of anything that is outside Baedeker, their one anxiety to get ‘done’ or ‘through’ and go on somewhere else” (69). Given Eager’s attitude, we now see that his rejection of Baedekers may not be the mark of sophistication he takes it to be. When the Italian driver kisses the girl with him, momentarily losing control of the carriage and jostling the occupants, the ensuing confrontation with Eager reveals the source of the latter character’s sense of ill-treatment. Eager complains, “He is treating us as if we were a party of Cook’s tourists” (72). The driver, however, does not care about the English party at all; his attention is on the girl. Forster thereby sets up Eager’s prudish moralizing for mockery, linking it to Eager’s misapprehension of the Italian’s behavior and need to be differentiated. Eager, so enthused by authentic experience as opposed to the artificialities of Baedeker tourism, therefore, does not achieve the “intimate knowledge” of life that he seeks, but merely another kind of “perception,” in the narrator’s corrective explanation (58). Thus, Eager’s technique does not illuminate life as thoroughly as it first seems, and Forster implies that the authentic is unachievable. Acknowledging the limits of perception, he indicates that one can do quite well by settling for the “pleasant”—as in the early scene where the narrator records the delight of seeing “a floor of red tiles which look clean though they are not” (16). Appearances suffice in a world where all perception is necessarily limited—a

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world, for example, where Lucy witnesses a murder and the victim leans toward her “as if he had an important message for her,” but proves unable to deliver it (48). “[S]omething did happen” here, the narrator tells us; “something tremendous has happened,” George Emerson agrees (47, 50). But one can never definitively know, in Forster’s account.8 Ultimately, it seems, in questions of knowledge both the reliance on and the rejection of Baedekers sidestep the fundamental inability to deal with anything more substantial than perceptions, appearances, and subjective responses. Even if Forster seems to express a nuanced view of Baedekers, the lesson that Lucy carries away from her experiences with (and without) the guidebooks emphasizes the moral dimension of those experiences. Baedekers reappear briefly in this context in the second half of the novel, set in England where Lucy comes to terms with her love for George Emerson. There, Miss Bartlett visits the Honeychurches, bringing with her a reminder of the morality and respectability that had separated Lucy from George in Italy. As if symbolically announcing Miss Bartlett’s arrival, a red-covered book mysteriously appears in the garden. Forster informs us that a “red book [ . . . ] lay sunning itself upon the gravel path” (170). The Honeychurches and their guests carry out their Sunday morning routine, while “this book lies motionless, to be caressed all the morning by the sun and to raise its covers slightly” (171). Forster withholds the identity of the book until Lucy picks it up and finds that it is Under a Loggia, Miss Lavish’s loosely disguised account of the pair’s stay in Florence. In delaying this disclosure and emphasizing the book’s red covers, however, Forster invokes an allusion to Baedeker guidebooks. The 1842 Baedeker’s Germany had inaugurated the standard red cover for the series—that “red linen dress which is now so familiar,” in the words of James F. Muirhead (228).9 That the book in question turns out to be Miss Lavish’s novel results in a marvelous moment of delayed recognition and ironic contrast—for while Forster links Miss Bartlett to the voice of Lucy’s Victorian conscience (which recommends marriage to the dilettantish Cecil Vyse), Miss Lavish offers the opposite counsel of pleasure, emotion, and true love (a counsel that champions marriage to George). The abrupt substitution of one book for another draws once more on the symbolic capacity of Baedekers and Miss Lavish’s texts as alternative ways of experiencing the world. Another of the book’s gestures to Baedekers along the lines of this differentiation occurs when Lucy buys one of the guidebooks as she plans a trip to Greece with the Misses Alan. The Baedeker purchase takes place soon after she tries to convince herself that she is not in love with George. Again, the guidebook makes an appearance as a symbol of moral conventionality, to which Lucy briefly hews until she cancels the trip to accept George as her

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husband. That pair returns to Italy—but evidently without a Baedeker—to revisit the Pension Bertolini and begin their life together in the Italy of spirit and emotion, as opposed to a nation that consists entirely of a collection of tourist destinations. Forster’s use of the Baedeker both to exemplify a particular kind of knowledge and to symbolize moral conventionality looks forward to Ford’s reconsideration of the link between morality and knowledge at the start of the Great War in The Good Soldier. For Forster, the Baedeker symbolizes a version of moral uprightness tied to a confident positivism (even though Forster seems opposed to Baedekers, by having Lucy learn to live better without them). Ford replicates this association but chooses the inverse of each of its terms. He makes the adulterous Florence Dowell an avid reader of Baedekers, whose positivist pretensions to objectivity he debunks. In doing so, on the one hand, Ford casts Baedekers in a discrediting light simply—even if only tenuously—by associating them with such an amoral character. More importantly, by critiquing the Baedekers’ access to full knowledge of the world he anticipates many wartime narratives that would assert the indescribable nature of the battlefield landscape. Ford, Baedekers, and Wampum The Good Soldier, which Ford began sometime in the second half of 1913 and finished perhaps as late as October 1914, seems to defy categorization as a war novel. While Edward Ashburnham, the ironically eponymous character, is indeed a soldier in the British Army, the novel’s action takes place before the war and includes few references to army life or military activities. Yet the Great War, while never explicitly mentioned, forms an invisible backdrop. Not only does the narrative’s crucial date of August 4 also mark Britain’s entry into the war in 1914 (whether through Ford’s intention, by accident, or in some combination, as critics continue to discuss), but The Good Soldier also encodes a fundamental turning point in topographical representation before the wartime manifestation of that shift.10 Ford’s imaginative topography features the conflicted relationship between the positivist, didactic, Baedeker-like interpretation and representation of the world and an alternative valorization of premodern material culture. While the novel is justly considered a significant example of modernist form, its modernism therefore consists as much of how it handles the representation of physical space as of the radical fragmentation and narrative ambiguity for which it is most frequently noted. Ford characterizes Florence’s knowledge of the world through her reliance on Baedekers, with whose “sole help,” John Dowell tells us, Florence “could

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find her way [ . . . ] as easily about any old monument” as around the numbered and gridded streets of an American city (41–42). Ford’s choice of the name “Florence” accordingly invites speculation. First, the name offers a coincidental link to Forster’s earlier novel about Britons exploring her namesake city with a Baedeker. Even more importantly, according to Baedeker himself, Florence was celebrated in 1913 for its artistic and intellectual influence on European history. “The Florentines have ever been noted for the vigour of their reasoning powers,” Baedeker claims in what we might construe as a self-reflexive compliment on the kind of positivist reasoning that Baedeker undertakes in his guidebooks (Northern Italy 555). Baedeker in hand, Ford’s character of Florence attempts to research the world and excavate its meaning, not only according to the facts Baedekers contain, but also as a model for how to conduct that research. In the most prominent example of her methodology, she employs a Baedeker and other historical materials to organize a group excursion to the castle at what the narrator refers to as “M——,” identified by biographers and critics as Marburg, which Ford had visited and through which Martin Luther had once passed.11 In the Marburg episode, Florence Dowell initiates her affair with Edward Ashburnham—and through Florence, Ford exposes the positivism epitomized by Baedekers as susceptible to error. Ford tells us that Ashburnham “was quite evidently enjoying being educated by Florence,” who was “clearing up one of the dark places of the earth, leaving the world a little lighter than she had found it”—in the Conradian formula characteristic of the Victorian march of positivist geographical knowledge (43–44). In the castle at Marburg, we see an exemplary instance of this illumination when Florence puts her Baedeker knowledge to use in the room with the pencil draft of Luther’s Protest. There, she exults “with an accent of gaiety, of triumph, and of audacity” as she proudly directs the attention of the group to the document to which (according to Florence) the company owes their moral superiority. She tells Ashburnham, “ ‘It’s because of that piece of paper that you’re honest, sober, industrious, provident, and clean-lived. If it weren’t for that piece of paper you’d be like the Irish or the Italians or the Poles, but particularly the Irish . . . .’ And she laid one finger upon Captain Ashburnham’s wrist” (47–48). Florence’s invocation of a “piece of paper,” as she flirts with Ashburnham and disparages the Irish Catholicism of his wife, Leonora, ironically grounds her initiation of an adulterous affair in the shared Protestantism of Luther’s written statement of faith and the textual knowledge provided by Baedekers. (Both the exhibition of the written Protest and Florence’s staged visit include performative and textual dimensions akin to those components of wampum’s Native use, as we shall see. Still, it is notably the Baedeker that is foregrounded in this scene.)

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The guidebooks become guilty by association, insofar as the narrative positions them as necessary instruments for Florence’s initiation of adultery, and in this respect, the treatment of Baedekers here looks forward to T. S. Eliot’s “Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar” (1920). There, similarly, the only use to which the guidebook is put consists of facilitating Burbank’s sordid rendezvous with Princess Volupine—another seductress in a text casting on Baedekers an unflattering light illuminating the rest of the poem. Both Ford’s and Eliot’s texts implicate Baedekers as signs of superficial historicizing, differentiating the guidebooks from deeper, wiser engagements with the world. Ford reminds us that Florence errs in her reliance on such texts as historical documents and their guidebook intermediaries. Baedekers cannot be trusted, and Ford accentuates the downfall of confidences founded on totalizing descriptions of the physical world when he makes Dowell aware that Florence does not quite have her facts straight. Dowell lets us know in passing that Luther probably did not sleep in what she describes as “Luther’s bedroom.” Nevertheless, Florence persists in reconstructing the (non-)scene, in tones of assurance and with impressive detail that would have made Karl Baedeker proud. Having “told the tired, bored custodian what shutters to open[,] so that the bright sunlight streamed in palpable shafts into the dim old chamber,” she continues her deictic, guidebook-like narrative. “She explained that this was Luther’s bedroom,” Dowell reports, “and that just where the sunlight fell had stood his bed” (47). Florence could not know this for certain, for as Dowell remarks, it was doubtful that Luther actually spent a night there. The inaccuracy of Florence’s readings, however, does not lessen the essential point: it is not simply that Baedekers are by their nature susceptible to error in what they record or how they are read, but that they implicitly claim an unattainable perfection of accuracy, which makes their errors all the more egregious by appearing as purported truths. In this respect, Florence only epitomizes the Baedeker epistemology. For John Dowell, on the other hand, the world is an inherently unknowable place, and he recognizes the deceptiveness of promises made by guides— human, textual, moral, or otherwise. “[T]here is nothing to guide us,” he declares near the outset of his narrative. “And if everything is so nebulous about a matter so elementary as the morals of sex, what is there to guide us in the more subtle morality of all other personal contacts, associations, and activities? [ . . . ] It is all a darkness” (14). Dowell’s sense of place expresses the inability ever to arrive at the kind of clinical, encyclopedic knowledge of the visible world promised by Florence’s Baedeker guidebooks. Yet Dowell does have a guide—indeed, a form of writing, one that not only takes into

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I carry about with me, indeed—as if it were the only thing that invisibly anchored me to any spot upon the globe—the title deeds of my farm, which once covered several blocks between Chestnut and Walnut Streets [in Philadelphia]. These title deeds are of wampum, the grant of an Indian chief to the first Dowell, who left Farnham in Surrey in company with William Penn. (7)

Through the characters of John and Florence Dowell, Ford explores a contrast between Baedekers and wampum: each the result of two fundamentally different methods of inscribing topographical information. These methods distinguish Dowell from his wife in how they perceive physical reality. Furthermore, Ford also highlights a crisis of knowledge underlying any attempt to write and read about place. Through these distinctions, Ford challenges more fully the positivist basis of Baedekers and suggests an alternative way of textualizing landscape. Critical interpretation of The Good Soldier has yet to consider just why Ford cites this wampum, and the more we consider the inclusion of this artifact, the odder it seems. How can a land title be written in wampum—beads made by Native Americans in what is now New England? How and why is Dowell “invisibly anchored” to the world through this particular object? What does “invisibly” signify here? One might easily dismiss this reference as Ford’s addition of a bit of historical color, something (along with a family link to William Penn) to make Dowell’s Quaker origins more authentic. However, wampum presents several conundrums that complicate this scheme: it is a text that cannot be read, describing a place that (in Ford’s novel) no longer exists, used by Native Americans for some purposes (principally, money and land transfer) originally alien to them. Wampum, situated at the intersection of multiple planes of cultural transaction, circulation value, technological progress, and mnemonic inscription, serves as a complex instance of a fundamentally new mode of topographical representation in fiction. When Ford invokes this artifact, he indicates the narrative possibilities enabled when landscape description inheres in non-textual material encoding a verbal content—an unreadable thing that nevertheless becomes the object of an act of reading. The utility of this seeming paradox emerges when considered within the consequences of the wartime reorientation of spatial understanding. Read in this

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account the world’s darknesses, but also turns mystery, opacity, and hidden interiorities into different grounds for knowledge. Dowell chooses something rather peculiar for his alternative topographical guide. As he remarks near the beginning of the novel:

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light, wampum as a landscape descriptor furthers a modernist allegory of place, functioning as a substitute for such traditional positivist accounts as guidebooks. In order to understand Dowell’s peculiar sense of place as a modernist cultural production, it is necessary to assemble a preliminary genealogy of this Native American artifact. “Wampum,” from “wampumpeag” and associated words, is Algonquian for small white, purple, or black discoidal or cylindrical beads, approximately 6.7 mm long and 4.7 mm in diameter, made from marine shells found in the coastal waters of what is now New England. Such beads may have been in use as early as 2500 b.c., later sewn together into strands or garments and circulated principally among the Narragansett, Algonquian, and Iroquois.12 In English, wampum signifies “string of (white) beads,” and the term has been used to refer to the strands, the garments, or the beads of which such constructions are made.13 The first European settlers thought of wampum as money, misunderstanding the root of the Natives’ evident prizing of the beadwork and imposing alien values of currency on a cultural system based on gift exchange rather than commodity transfer (Snyderman 470–71). Such prominent colonial texts as Roger Williams’s A Key into the Language of America (London, 1643) and William Bradford’s History of Plymouth Plantation (Boston, 1856) document the colonists’ lack of awareness of wampum’s many other cultural roles. Strings and belts of wampum were indeed used as legal tender in the American colonies in the seventeenth century and still circulated as such in some areas until the Revolutionary War.14 As Lois Scozzari has noted, however, Native Americans did not use wampum simply as currency in the narrow way Europeans used it. The beads also served as “ornamentations, tribute, ransom for captives, compensation for crimes, presents between friends, prizes for victory in games or sport, fines, incentives to maintain peace or to wage war, payments for services of shamanism, marriage proposals, and, possibly, bribes and rewards for murder[,] [for] burials, and as the insignia of sachems [i.e. Algonquian chiefs]” (60). While Timothy J. Smith has identified forty different uses for wampum, George S. Snyderman has outlined four main areas of wampum’s use: as money or a medium of exchange, a symbolic announcement of war or peace, a certificate of trustworthiness, and a mnemonic text.15 This last use is the most significant for our purposes, for (as Snyderman indicates) wampum played a crucial textual role in a culture rich in modes of oral communication but without any form of alphabetic writing. As a mnemonic device, wampum permitted the recording of specific events or messages through pictorial or geometric arrangements of the colored shells (477, 484, 487). Not only did this text encode a particular message, but its presentation embodied a kind of performative speech act, in that the

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wampum served as a materialized pledge of authenticity or trustworthiness (Scozzari 61). While non-Natives’ lack of understanding of wampum’s complexities changed little from colonial times to the late nineteenth century, by the time Ford was composing The Good Soldier, public knowledge of wampum’s history and functions was expanding significantly. A number of popular documents attest to this trajectory. For example, an 1819 British encyclopedia, which describes wampum as “a sort of shells [ . . . ] used as money,” provided no more indication of wampum’s many nonmonetary uses than Roger Williams had in his seventeenth-century description of wampum as exclusively the “Coyne” of the Indians.16 The same thinking prevails in the 1902 Encyclopedia Britannica, which notes how it was “worn for ornaments in strings and belts” but stressed its use as currency.17 The 1910 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, in contrast, acknowledges a much broader range of functions for which Natives used wampum. While the entry on wampum begins by calling it “the shell-money of the North American Indians,” the explanation also includes its exchange rate and the history of its adoption and discontinuation as legal tender in the colonies. This entry, referencing five anthropological sources appearing in the 1880s, reflects a growing awareness of wampum’s multiplicity of uses: as adornments, as “symbols of authority or power,” and—discussed at the greatest length—as mnemonic textual records open to reading by using specific interpretive techniques.18 A number of events may account for this marked expansion of knowledge about wampum and its textual attributes. First, studies of wampum documenting its manifold uses had begun to be published in dramatically increasing numbers in the latter half of the nineteenth century. One listing of works on shell objects identifies over fifty titles published in English between 1705 and 1906, two-thirds of which appeared after 1848 (Hodge 909). Second, several historically noteworthy wampum belts possessed by the descendants of William Penn were in England at this time. These were thought to be textual records of the 1682 Treaty of Shackamaxon between Penn and Chief Tamanend of the Lenni Lenape—a Native American tribe also known as the Delaware, part of the Algonquian nation and originally located in the mid-Atlantic region of America. Penn family heirlooms, the belts were kept in Pennsylvania Castle on the island of Portland, England. In 1857 William Penn’s great-grandson presented one such belt to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania (see figure 2.1a). Penn’s last surviving heir died within a few decades, and in 1887, Pennsylvania Castle was sold along with its historical contents, including two other wampum belts traditionally associated with the 1682 treaty (see figures 2.1b and 2.1c).19 These belts are doubly important for our consideration of The Good Soldier because not only were they in

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Figure 2.1 a, b, c (top to bottom). Penn treaty belts. Frank G. Speck, “The Penn Wampum Belts” plates III, I, and II.

England at the time of the novel’s composition, but they also record a land transfer (incident to the Treaty of Shackamaxon) not unlike that described by Dowell. In addition to the physical presence of the Penn belts, an account of Penn’s wampum appeared in 1896 in the fictionalized narrative of The Wampum Belt, or “The Fairest Page of History”: A Tale of William Penn’s Treaty with the Indians, by Hezekiah Butterworth (1839–1905). Butterworth was a prolific author, having written scores of travel narratives, hymns, poems, and historical and biographical works for juvenile and popular audiences. Turning his attention to the history of the Penn belts, Butterworth writes in The Wampum

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Belt an account of one such artifact’s symbolic importance far exceeding any monetary value (iv). This book, whose stylized narrative belies its characterization as being intended for a juvenile audience, was published in England as well as in New York. Given the status of the belts and Butterworth’s narrative, Ford’s designation of William Penn as a companion of Dowell’s fictional ancestor thus offers a major clue as to a likely source of the novel’s reference to wampum. A third means by which Ford and his contemporaries would have known about wampum is through the career of E. Pauline Johnson (1861–1913). Johnson, a Canadian of Iroquois descent, was a popular poet of Native American themes and an early performance artist, giving poetry recitals in Native clothing throughout Canada from 1892 to 1909 and in London in 1894 and 1906. Johnson was firmly placed in Britain’s social, artistic, and publishing scenes as someone whose connections to modernist and Great War authors helped make the peculiar status of wampum into a significant cultural phenomenon of this era. She furthered the idea of wampum as a textual instrument through several aspects of her literary work and stage career: in the name of her first book and the subject matter of her poetry, in her assumed Native name and costume, and in her performances and press interviews. Johnson’s first published book was a collection of poetry entitled The White Wampum (London, 1895), which reinforces the textual role of wampum in a number of ways. In her dedicatory introduction to the book, she explains the book’s title: “As wampums to the Redman, so to the Poet are his songs; chiselled alike from that which is the purest of his possessions, woven alike with meaning into belt and book, fraught alike with the corresponding message of peace, the breathing of tradition, the value of more than coin, and the seal of fellowship with all men” (n. pag.). Johnson’s initial assertion here of the principal value of wampum as textual recurs in one of the poems in the volume, entitled “Dawendine,” in which wampum serves as an inscription of a proposed relationship between two warring parties. The White Wampum and its claims of wampum’s textuality gathered considerable critical notice, garnering favorable reviews and widespread publicity in England.20 Theodore Watts-Dunton, a prominent literary critic, wrote an encouraging review of two of Johnson’s poems published in William Douw Lighthall’s anthology of Canadian poetry, Songs of the Great Dominion (London, 1889). Watts-Dunton praises Johnson, “on account of her descent,” as “the most interesting English poetess now living” (412). This review was published in 1889 in the London journal the Athenaeum—whose modernist contributors later included Katherine Mansfield, T. S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf. Furthermore, The White Wampum was published by John

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Lane, who would go on to publish Blast 1 (1914), with its early version of part of The Good Soldier (as “The Saddest Story”), and the first edition of Ford’s novel. In 1894, Johnson conducted a highly successful two-month recital tour of London, giving dramatic readings in exotic native dress. Johnson’s stage and pen name reflected her interest in wampum. For her performances, as for her publications, she assumed her great-grandfather’s tribal name: Tekahionwake, meaning “double wampum.” Perhaps this designation appealed to her sense of asymmetry, dual heritage, or excess. From the start of her touring career, Johnson approved her stage billing as a “Mohawk Princess” of dual cultural citizenship. She played up the exotic appeal of her origins and created a performance costume from native materials, making one sleeve out of beaded buckskin and the other of rabbit pelts. She invariably wore this costume for her entire recital career, but only for the first half of the program. For the second half, she wore a ball gown (Keller 20–21). Publicity bills featured photographs of her in the native part of her performance costume. Through the use of these garments, Johnson invited her audience to “read” her body and performance (again underscoring wampum’s textuality) in two dimensions: on the one hand, that of a Mohawk princess, on the other hand, that of a poet writing in the British formal tradition. During this tour, Johnson was introduced with acclaim to the cream of the London social and literary set, meeting Oscar Wilde and other authors at John Lane’s residence, for example, and holding private recitals.21 She conducted an interview with a representative of the London serial the Sketch in her wampum-decorated London studio. The interviewer asked her what wampum is, and she replied, “Cleverly-woven bands of beads—the history, literature, seal, and coinage of the Iroquois. You have the biggest in your British Museum, and I mean to go and see it. But the art of carving the bead from the shell is lost, and so is the art of reading the wampum. It died with my grandfather, Chief John Smoke Johnson” (P. A. H. 358). By listing some of wampum’s functions, Johnson continues to stress its textual role and the special ability to read it. Furthermore, Ford may well have seen this very belt himself, for at this time he customarily wrote in the reading room of the British Museum (Saunders, Ford 1:43). In 1906 a second London recital tour further expanded Johnson’s popularity and the British public’s potential awareness of wampum. She performed at Steinway Hall to large and enthusiastic acclaim. Watts-Dunton, who was also a friend and mentor of Algernon Swinburne, met her after the performance and later introduced her to Swinburne. More than a dozen newspapers and journals reviewed the performance, all favorably, and the editor of the Daily Express commissioned her to write a series of articles for that newspaper.22 In

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late 1912, all the poems in The White Wampum were republished as part of a larger collection entitled Flint and Feather (for which Watts-Dunton wrote an admiring introduction). Johnson’s death from breast cancer on March 7, 1913, occasioned a series of retrospectives, again bringing her before the public eye just as Ford began writing The Good Soldier.23 Given Johnson’s career and publications, the presence in England of the Penn treaty belts, the display of a wampum belt at the British Museum, and the appearance of information about wampum in scholarly journals and such popular works as encyclopedias and a children’s book, we can surmise that both Ford and his audience would have had some idea of wampum’s textual characteristics and historical background. Thus, when Ford likens Leonora’s and Nancy Rufford’s treatment of Ashburnham to that of “a couple of Sioux who had got hold of an Apache and had him well tied to a stake” (260), he confirms the assumption of an underlying British familiarity with Native American history that, when we recognize it, turns his earlier reference to wampum from an anomaly into a crucial indicator of Dowell’s values and conduct. In fact, the presence of wampum in British culture at this time made it a highly useful item for Ford to associate with Dowell, for wampum provided Ford an ideal vehicle for comparisons he draws between two competing but intertwined epistemological methodologies. Ford links one methodology with Baedekers, basing it on the positivist assumptions underlying the guidebooks’ approach to representing perceptible reality, and the other he associates with wampum, which is endowed with a mysterious interiority and an atavistic connection between psyche and physical place. “A Mass of Talk out of Guidebooks” As we have seen, the Baedeker operates on a supposed one-to-one correspondence between the object under study and the language used to describe it. This relationship features the limited perspective of a single authorial voice, the assumption of complete transparency of descriptive language, and the supposition that the referent is unchanged and equally accessible over time. Baedekers are written in an eternal present, for the benefit of readers whose relationship to the past is thought of as unmediated by any uncertainties or gaps in knowledge. Such a way of thinking about place and events becomes associated with Florence as a result of her study of Baedekers, despite her manipulation of facts. Meanwhile, we find that Dowell’s valorization of wampum accords with his conclusion that a single-perspective point of view, one-to-one correspondences of word and referent, and notions of unchanged and equally accessible objects of study are inadequate for understanding the tangled web of events in his life.

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One can seemingly never get beyond “the shallows” of an English heart (5), Dowell says in a remark that profoundly speaks of the modernist belief in the impenetrability of events. He accepts with resignation the inability ever to get to the heart of places and people, and he makes do with handling the impenetrable fragments of the perceived world. As readers of the novel know, Dowell attempts to deploy a system of multiple perspectives, assumptions of uncertainty, and relational knowledge as he tries to comprehend the story he relates, turning a kaleidoscope of narrative fragments in order to discern meaning through the juxtaposition of events considered in retrospect. Each episode eludes interpretation until a pattern eventually emerges from the entire array. Florence’s death serves as one example, with several months ensuing before Dowell comprehends the reason for her distressed appearance when she saw her husband and Bagshawe together in the hotel lounge at Bad Nauheim. Long afterward, when Leonora Ashburnham casually remarks, “I think it was stupid of Florence to commit suicide,” suddenly the pieces fall into place (117). Dowell realizes that Florence feared he would learn of her affair with Jimmy through Bagshawe—hence her shock and suicide. The introduction of a single new item of information radically alters previously held beliefs, reconfiguring individual impressions into a wholly new understanding of reality. In Dowell’s understanding of place, he likewise grapples with the superficiality of knowledge. He differs fundamentally from Florence in this regard. “I guess Florence got all she wanted out of one look at a place,” Dowell explains. “She had the seeing eye. I haven’t, unfortunately, so that the world is full of places to which I want to return [ . . . ].” However, he cannot remember these places except as fragmented images of locations that could be anywhere: “towns with the blinding white sun upon them; stone pines against the blue of the sky; corners of gables, all carved and painted [ . . . ] gray and pink palazzi and walled towns [ . . . ]” (16). He wonders if the baths at Bad Nauheim were of “reddish stone [ . . . ] or were they white half-timber chalets? Upon my word I have forgotten, I who was there so often. That will give you the measure of how much I was in the landscape,” he exclaims, realizing the limitations of his perceptions of place (24). He does attempt to attach meaning to place names, but the result is a series of summary platitudes: Stamford, Connecticut is “where, as you know, they are more old-fashioned than even the inhabitants of Cranford, England, could have been” (7); Provence is “where even the saddest stories are gay” (15); and initially (enigmatically enough), Brindisi is simply “that fatal Brindisi” (31). “New England no longer idealizes darkies as it did formerly,” Dowell tells us (101). He “just want[s] to marry [Florence] as some people want to go to Carcassonne” (134). Monte Carlo is where one gets “a touch of

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irresponsibility” (173), the code of private silence Leonora and Edward maintain can be found in “the North of England or the State of Maine” (184), Frankfurt is “where they dress as well as in Paris” (206), and the hinted-at extramarital relationships of Mr. Bayham take place in Portsmouth and in a Paris and a “Buda-Pesth” of subtle iconic vice (261). This form of geographical shorthand is the best that one can do in understanding the world, Dowell would have it seem. Florence’s flaw in her understanding, Dowell would say, is that she commits herself to the idea that knowledge of places and events is fully accessible through written artifacts. Her misreading of history and her misplaced faith in Baedeker positivism during her tour of “Luther’s bedroom” (47) also symbolize her superficiality as a human being. Dowell argues this point explicitly when he claims that “Florence was a personality of paper [ . . . ] she represented a real human being with a heart, with feelings, with sympathies, and with emotions only as a bank note represents a certain quantity of gold. [ . . . ] I thought suddenly that she wasn’t real; she was just a mass of talk out of guidebooks” (133–34). For Dowell, the problem with Baedekers lies in their positivist confidence in the ability to describe place combined with the essential superficiality of their descriptions. In this moment, the conflation of Florence as a human with Florence as a place and part of a Baedeker volume is complete. Dowell’s wife is a Baedeker, in a gesture of the narrator that indicts the fallibility of human integrity and pretensions about the accuracy of textual knowledge. In contrast to the Baedeker, which presumes to transmit accurately the essential knowledge about a place through a medium of assumedly transparent language, the wampum is a physical object that conveys something unintelligible about a place. Furthermore, in the world of the novel, its value lies in its unintelligibility. It is through this property that the wampum permits Dowell a fantasy connection to place. When he claims, in his words, that he keeps the wampum “as if it were the only thing that invisibly anchored me to any spot upon the globe” (7), he sustains that connection not in spite of the facts that the wampum is a deed of title with no legible writing on it, and that the farm no longer exists, but precisely because of those facts. If Dowell had some way to read the wampum title deed, the object would underline the farm’s disappearance by detailing the characteristics of the property or the nature of the transaction between the natives and his ancestor. Instead, because the wampum records lost history in a symbolic language, it is endowed with an evocative interiority that allows Dowell to invest a personal meaning in this artifact and thereby satisfy his thwarted desire to get beyond “the shallows” of meaning in other parts of his life (5). (That he carries this

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artifact “as if ” it alone tied him to the world indicates how deeply he regards its significance and how little hold other material objects have in maintaining that tie.24 ) Clearly, the ability to fashion a connection to place as a way to provide meaning in his life holds considerable value for Dowell. How else should one explain his keeping the wampum with him? Furthermore, the manner in which Dowell ends his wanderings around the tourist destinations of Europe can be explained as an indication of real and fantasy connections to place finally coinciding. The paragraph describing the wampum ends by making clear that Dowell is writing from Branshaw Teleragh (which he has purchased). The Ashburnham’s English country house is in the vicinity of Florence’s ancestral home. Dowell has just described how “the first Dowell” left England with William Penn and, like him, purchased land from the Indians (7). The physical existence of the wampum thus telescopes all these historical facts for Dowell, reifying the concept of rootedness and compensating for the epistemological instabilities surrounding his relations with the rest of the characters in the novel. Baedekers at War Before the war, as we have seen from the examples of Beaman’s Travels without Baedeker and Forster’s A Room with a View, the Baedeker stood as the quintessential example of descriptive thoroughness, arbiter of tasteful touristic appreciation, and symbol of proper comportment. Most significantly, its particular epistemology—positivist and confident in the ability to record the details of the perceptible world in a transparent medium—provided a model with which Beaman’s and Lucy Honeychurch’s educative travels, and Dowell’s journey of comprehension, could be compared. It might be argued that characterizing Dowell’s wampum as a truer or more valuable method of topographical representation than that epitomized by Florence’s Baedeker unjustly positions John as more insightful in his approach to acquiring knowledge. After all, while Dowell is seemingly the more sympathetic character of the two, he is also surprisingly dense in his inability (or perhaps unwillingness) to notice the indications of Florence’s adultery. One of complexities of the novel is the possibility that he is not the passive, ill-informed spectator of events, but rather a character who has played a role in bringing about Florence’s death after she receives her inheritance, and has then tried to confuse the evidence.25 Nevertheless, the point to be remembered here is that The Good Soldier calls into question the objectivity of Baedekers in a way that Travels without

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Baedeker and A Room with a View do not. In doing so, furthermore, Ford both demonstrates a typically modernist sensibility (in the interplay between surface and interior and the emphasis on subjectivity and the unreliability of empirical facts) and anticipates a sea change in the understanding of space that took place during the Great War. As the war progressed, it became clear that words could not adequately describe the landscape of the soldierly experience. The conditions of the war forced its literary-minded participants to reassess how writing about place functions. The obliteration of landscape, and the altered association between place names and the geography to which they are attached, led them to call into question the positivist underpinnings of the Baedeker epistemology that until then had served as a key standard of topographical representation through language. One such participant was the journalist-turned-soldier C. E. Montague. Oliver Elton, a Manchester Guardian colleague and Montague’s posthumous biographer, relates a visit that the official war artist Muirhead Bone paid on Montague when the latter was on the staff of the British General Headquarters in late 1916 as an escort officer for visiting dignitaries. Montague “insisted on our doing the sights of [Amiens] most thoroughly,” Elton recalls, “and to my mystification made me stand in the rain while he reeled off at each a careful historical description, which somehow did not sound like C. E. M.’s. Only on the way home to our mess did he explain that it was all got up by heart out of Baedeker, and that he had simply wanted to try if he was word-perfect” (139). It was not until the German offensive of spring 1918 that Amiens was seriously damaged by artillery fire, so perhaps Bone and Montague could still see the Baedeker (in that isolated instance, at least) as a reliable guide, accepting it on its prewar terms as the exemplar of accurate topographical representation. Montague’s explanation that he was seeking to be “word-perfect” indicates just such an understanding. Nevertheless, Montague’s emphasis on reciting the Baedeker descriptions seemingly exclusively for the purpose of testing his memory, not to mention Elton’s “mystification” at the attempt, indicates an awareness of a widening rift between the words on the page and the things they describe (if not just the absurdity of the exercise). By the time Edmund Blunden included a poem entitled “The Prophet” in the supplementary pages of Undertones of War (1928), however, that author’s retrospective consideration of the war’s effect on guidebooks led him to reach a more ironic conclusion. The poem parallels wartime conditions in Flanders with citations from an “old guide-book to the Netherlands” (line 2). For example, Blunden juxtaposes the guidebook’s warning on “ ‘[t]he necessary cautions on the road’ ” with the remark, “Gas helmets at the alert, no daylight

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movement?” (22–23). Similarly, Blunden follows the guidebook’s statement that “ ‘The Flemish farmers are [ . . . ] distinguished/For their attention to manure’ ” with the single word “Perchance” (27–28). The poem’s engagement with history and the ground of experience becomes most pointed when Blunden opens the second of two stanzas with the lines “While in these local hints, I cannot wait/But track the author on familiar ground” (42–43). Blunden goes on to include without comment the guidebook’s description of Ypres (whose famous Cloth Hall, along with everything else, was completely destroyed in the war): a “ ‘pleasant, well-built town’ ” (48). To the guidebook’s “ ‘Poperinghe./Traffic in serge and hops,’ ” Blunden rejoins, “The words might still/Convey sound fact” (51–53). (Poperinghe was a British base camp; serge was used in military uniforms, and beer was served in the town’s canteens.) The poet identifies how past and present might have become connected: [ . . . ] Perhaps some doomster’s envoy Entered your spirit when at Furnes you wrote, “The air is reckoned unhealthy here for strangers.” (53–55)

In these lines, among others, Blunden repeatedly asks if the guidebook’s author did not see into a future that would ironically validate his descriptions. Although at one point in “The Prophet” Blunden addresses himself to “My Belgian Traveller” (49), scholars have apparently not yet identified Blunden’s source, which is, in fact, The Belgian Traveller, or A Complete Guide through the United Netherlands (1816), by Edmund Boyce. The significance of this source lies first in the time of its publication—“Written when Waterloo was hardly over,” Blunden tells us—and in the cultural status of Belgium in the Napoleonic Wars and the First World War (3). Boyce writes in 1816, “When the rest of Europe groaned under an iron despotism, and was involved in comparative ignorance and barbarism, the court of the Counts of Flanders was long the chosen residence of liberty, civilization, and literature” (iii). In 1914, defending the sovereignty and territorial integrity of neutral Belgium was the principal justification for Britain’s declaration of war, and the German Army’s destruction of such places as the cloth hall of Ypres and the medieval library of Louvain fueled British condemnation of the national enemy. By paralleling Boyce’s guidebook with “The Prophet” and Undertones of War through the position of Belgium as a nearly defenseless cultural center subject to the depredations of both Napoleonic and Wilhelmine tyranny, Blunden constructs a comparison that renders poignant the geographical destruction of the Great War through a literary evocation of the continuities of history.

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[A]t the time when I am writing this, (July 29th) no map of the country can be procured, or has been published. The map which enriches this work, gives the boundaries as it was supposed they would be determined a few months ago. The real boundaries were not known till the publication of the act of the Congress of Vienna, on the 18th inst. This map is so very nearly correct, that it was not deemed necessary inconveniently to delay the publication of the work by the preparation of another, which a new treaty of Paris would probably in a few weeks render useless. (3)

To this, Blunden replies in the concluding lines of his poem: I find your pen, as driven by irony’s fingers, Defends the incorrectness of your map With this; it was not fitting to delay, Though “in a few weeks a new treaty of Paris Would render it useless.” Good calm worthy man, I leave you changing horses, and I wish you Good food at Nieuport.—Truth did not disdain This sometime seer, crass but Cassandra-like. (56–63)

While only a small part of the boundary between Germany and Belgium moved as a result of the Treaty of Versailles, the transfer of Alsace-Lorraine to France and the Trentino to Italy, to say nothing of the creation of Poland and the dissolution of the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires, made maps of Europe obsolete overnight. Blunden’s larger point, then, concerns how both the Napoleonic Wars and the Great War—and, by extension, wars in general—call into question the capacity of guidebooks, like the capacity of maps, to render topographical truth in any tones but those of inadequacy and irony. Perhaps the most prominent feature of the Baedeker, as of Boyce’s guidebook, is its catalog of place names, which reified an ostensible equivalency between referent and word. The war unsettled this equivalency by leading witnesses to cast a skeptical eye on connections between place names and experiences. For example, thinking about English place names while at the front gave some pleasure, as Siegfried Sassoon recognizes in Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930). Sassoon calls the mental differentiation between Durham and Devon (the homes of two regiments) as a “pleasant

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Even more importantly, Blunden draws a parallel between the epistemological challenge facing Boyce and that facing the participants of the Great War. Boyce writes:

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associative” task (14). Faced with the realities of the front, however, he finds that pleasant associations turn to cognitive dissonance. Sassoon writes, “Rose Trench, Orchard Alley, Apple Alley, and Willow Avenue, were among the first objectives in our sector, and my mind very properly insisted on their gentler associations. Nevertheless this topographical Arcadia was to be seized, cleared, and occupied” in the upcoming offensive (60). Critics have attended to canonical modernists’ use of place names, such as Proust’s evocative association of the sound of place names with what those places must be like.26 In the world of the Great War, however, place names take on entirely different associations. H. M. Tomlinson’s novel All Our Yesterdays (1930) records several different examples of how place names assumed new valences in the context of the wartime understanding of space. Tomlinson’s novel, based on his own war experiences in the British intelligence service, situates the conflict in a broader historical perspective going back to the Boer War (1899–1902). In the novel, we see various kinds of meanings that place names acquire, depending on who thinks about them. First, the civilians at home: The anxious taxpayers of Ancoats, Dundee, Bruges, Dijon, Penzance, Marseille, and Belfast all became concerned with the fortunes, of supreme moment to them, of other cities which now they heard named for the first time, with varying pronunciation, though usually it was hopeless to search for those strange cities on the map—Przemysl, Jaroslav, Sambor, Rzeszow, and such. These suddenly discovered cities, avowed the public oracles, whose explanatory diagrams were published in the popular newspapers daily, were as important to us as the signs of the zodiac; and they were important to some people, no doubt. (279)

For newspaper-reading noncombatants, then, the war confronted them with alien place names at which they could only wonder, with the assistance of oracular journalist intermediaries. Yet Tomlinson undercuts the entire effort of reading significance into the goings-on in distant places: “they were important to some people, no doubt,” he tells us, ambiguously enough, but the war has made knowledge of foreign lands through encyclopedic geography a questionable enterprise. Later in this novel, Tomlinson uses the alien quality of suddenly famous place names to illustrate the divide between those of the leisured class who escape direct contact with the war and those who participate in it. At one social gathering of aristocrats and ministers of state, foreign place names seem exotic enough, yet not very interesting—as if one had mentioned the name of an unfashionable Central European spa. “The name of Ypres was

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familiar at that table,” Tomlinson writes, “for it had appeared more than once in the official reports from France, but it had no particular significance for the diners. There had been so many strange names. One could not remember all of them. It was good, the news, as far as it went.” One young lady presently remarks, “I have a beautiful etching by Brangwyn [i.e. Sir Frank Brangwyn, Royal Academy, Official War Artist] of that town mentioned in today’s paper—what do you call it?—Ypres?—Is that the way to say it? Beautiful. One of the best things Brangwyn has done, I think. You know, I looked for it on the map. I thought after all this time it must be near Germany. Wasted nearly an hour. And then I got a shock. Really, it is unpleasantly close” (292). For those British soldiers daily getting shelled and sniped and machine-gunned in front of Ypres, of course, the “shock” and unpleasant closeness of enemy troops were of an entirely different order. For those soldiers, place names take on the function of memorializing old battles and comrades, even if the towns that were named had been utterly destroyed. In fact, the names live on as strangely powerful and haunting reminders of the dead, whose bodies were hidden in the ground: The war was ghostly with them, and the land of France was nostalgic with the names of hamlets and odd corners that never had been important, and meant nothing now except to men who once had foregathered there; often the very places had gone. They were now but names and rubble. The names had no meaning, except to survivors, though for them the shades, when evoked by this magic word or that, must arise and move with them through life [ . . . ]. Soissons, Laventie, Festubert, Vermelles, Hulluch, Boesinghe, Kemmel, Notre Dame de Lorette, Souchez, Hébuterne, Beaumont Hamel, Longueval—there was no end to them now—the very map of France was full of stabs. (374–75)

Perhaps the obliteration of the towns made it possible for the names to mark something else: the place of the men who lost their lives there. In a war where so many of the dead did not leave any corpses behind, the haunting name of an otherwise obscure hamlet announces the parallel annihilation of physical objects and human bodies, and the name thus means so much more to those who witnessed both forms of obliteration. Sometimes, on the other hand, place names hold out promises of decisive victory and of an end to the war. When “two new subalterns” arrive at the Somme after the British gain ground against the Germans in 1916, Tomlinson imagines the reaction of the officers to the landscape they see. He writes, “they watched noiseless and unauthentic clouds bulge, black, and sulphur, and sometimes, when a gleam of sun made solid and lustrous the bulk of one of them, vermilion. Up went some house then! That was

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the new battle, the Great Push, with its odd names, added so recently to the names which worked like a spell on those who knew what they stood for—Gommecourt, Thiepval, Fricourt, Mametz, Trones” (320). “Anyhow,” Tomlinson reports soon after, “by the best accounts they ought to be getting into Bapaume soon. Bapaume, that town clean out of the map! Open country then, and no more trenches; nearer home by miles and miles” (322). The subalterns move on from considering Bapaume (an unrealized British objective for the first day of the Battle of the Somme), and look to the northeast, toward the German lines: “to the unknown land, to the woods and villages, not so distant, whose names were new and dreadful—Montauban, Longueval, High Wood, Devil’s Wood, Bernafay Wood, Lousy Wood, Guillemont, Ginchy, Combles. Those names were the gossip of the fair. They were the acute points on the fluctuating line where the earth was blowing up, and the flames consumed more men than could be sent to feed them” (323–24). In this last instance, the names seem like markers of fantastic places, and then seem drawn out of objective reality into existence as points of departure and targets of occupation—abstract points on a plane of pure geometry and purely efficient destruction. During the war, the closest military counterpart to Baedekers (in terms of being a catalog of place names) was perhaps the British Army’s Corps Intelligence Summary—popularly derided by the troops, who called the Intelligence Summary “Comic Cuts” after the name of a contemporary half-penny children’s paper. In No Man’s Land (1917), “Sapper” (Herman C. McNeile) demonstrates how little stock soldiers placed in the accuracy of the Intelligence Summary as a gazetteer of the war’s geographical progress: “On the afternoon of the 21st we gained a small local success. Our line was advanced on a front of six hundred yards, over an average depth of a quarter of a mile. All the ground gained was successfully consolidated. Up to date eightysix unwounded prisoners have passed through the corps cage, of whom three are officers.” Thus ran the brief official notice so tersely given in the “Intelligence Summary,” known to the ribald as “Comic Cuts”; later it will appear even more tersely in the daily communiqué which delights the matutinal kipper and twin eggs of England. It’s all so simple; it all sounds such a ridiculously easy matter to those who read. Map maniacs stab inaccurate maps with pins; a few amateur strategists discourse at length, and with incredible ignorance, on the bearing it—and countless other similar operations—will have on the main issue. (90)

Here, “Comic Cuts” is simply part of a larger apparatus of information gathering and distribution that sanitizes accounts of the war for a gullible public.

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Notably, however, it is the terseness of these descriptions (a manifestation of the encyclopedia entry format) that especially provokes McNeile’s hostility. It would seem the sheer reductiveness of such summarizing attempts as these—and of the Baedekers that they echo—lies at the center of what the war’s witnesses realized is the difficulty of representing the experience of place in words. Other soldiers shared in this critique of “Comic Cuts,” Lieutenant Bernard Adams reporting this snippet of officer mess-room conversation in Nothing of Importance: “ ‘A good entry in Comic Cuts to-night,’ I remarked. “ ‘A dog was heard barking in Fricourt at 11 p.m.’ ” Someone must have been hard up for intelligence to put that in” (252). Sassoon reserves a special ironic antipathy for the efforts of intelligence officers in Memoirs of an Infantry Officer; for him too, the context of a shooting war reveals their products to be gatherings of trivia rather than compendiums of useful fact. In addition to making claims about destroyed enemy observation balloons and silenced enemy batteries, for example, “The anonymous humorist who compiled Comic Cuts was also able to announce that the Russians had captured a redoubt and some heavy guns at Czartovijsk, which, he explained, was forty-four miles north-east of Luck. At Martinpuich [i.e. about a mile behind the German front line at the start of the Battle of the Somme] a large yellowish explosion had been observed” (60). On one level, Adams and Sassoon mock the compilers of the Intelligence Summary for the trifling utility of the information so painstakingly gathered and disseminated through this medium. In this sense, the Intelligence Summary amounts to nothing more than light entertainment, as disposable as the newspaper feature to which the authors liken it. On another level, as even this brief passage makes clear, the war renders the underlying premise of the Intelligence Summary—namely, the Baedeker-like effort to compile topographical knowledge—richly ironic. This irony, incidentally, is what makes the British habit of naming trenches after the cityscapes of home so resonant. A similar sensitivity to irony animates the passage about Comic Cuts in Memoirs of an Infantry Officer. The Russian capture of a minor position hundreds of miles away can surely have no significance for Sassoon and his fellow soldiers on the Western Front. “Czartovijsk” exists here in name only, and the helpful explanation from the “anonymous humorist” that Czartovijsk is “forty-four miles north-east of Luck” adds some seemingly precise navigational detail but still leaves his readers with no earthly idea of what he is talking about. Martinpuich might be much closer, but the “large yellowish explosion” goes completely unexplained. The summary effect of this pseudo-factual account is to ridicule the positivist pretensions simultaneously

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Baedekers as Casualty Perhaps it was inevitable that a British series of guidebooks took the place of Baedekers in that country after the outbreak of the Great War. Maybe the British still resentfully remembered how Baedekers had overwhelmed the guidebooks of John Murray in the British market in the late nineteenth century, in addition to naturally harboring an attitude of hostility toward the initiators of the war. More importantly, confidence in the scientific and positivist underpinnings of the Baedeker epistemology underwent a profound shock as a result of the war experience. First, scientific and technological progress seemed partly to blame for the war. As scholars have pointed out, the telephone and telegraph, for instance, enabled diplomats to coordinate their efforts but also led to messages arriving in crossed sequence and in overwhelming numbers, adding confusion to the crisis of July 1914 while denying time for consultation and reflection. Coupled with the interlocking system of alliances into which international relations had consolidated, these technologies lent a misleading sense of urgency to the summer’s diplomacy and made the outbreak of war appear practically inevitable. Additionally, the complex schedules of troop mobilization and deployment, made possible by railway networks and the exactitude of their management, constituted a vast system of physical movement that seemed to be unstoppable once started.27 Then the battlefield experience revealed the destination of scientific progress: a world of hitherto inconceivable destruction through the use of machine guns, chemical weapons, siege batteries, high-explosive shells, grenades, high-velocity magazine-fed rifles, giant field guns, explosive mining, aerial spotting for artillery, mass-produced barbed wire, illumination flares, aerial strafing and bombardment, submarine warfare, tanks, flamethrowers, torpedoes, anti-personnel mortars, et cetera. Even technologies seemingly innocuous in themselves, such as mobile telephones or aerial photography, permitted massive offensives resulting in staggering casualties. Despite the efforts of journalists and government censors to sanitize news of battlefield conditions, it cannot have escaped the public that scientific developments had opened a terrible new chapter of human history. Consequently, the “exact science” that prewar reviewers had found so appealing in Baedekers became the subject of suspicion.

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underlying both the Intelligence Summary and Baedekers. Sassoon’s implicit point is that under wartime conditions, such narratives about the physical world of the war zone are not only useless, but absurd; the harder such narratives strain for topographical accuracy, the less sense they make.

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One such suspicious commentary appeared in the November 2, 1918, issue of Scientific American, in an article attacking the house of Baedeker as a tool of Prussian militarism and practically a branch of the German Army. Entitled “Baedeker as an Office of Military Intelligence,” this article discerns sinister intent throughout the guidebooks. One would expect that in wartime, such an article would be motivated by a suspicion of all things German and a tendency toward indulging in theories about pan-Teutonic plots. Indeed, the author begins by asserting that whether the members of the Baedeker family “were perfectly well aware that they were part and parcel of the great conspiracy or whether they were merely the innocent tools of their rulers” remained to be seen. Despite the possibility that Baedeker employees were simply gathering information for tourists, “[n]evertheless, they succeeded in collecting between the innocent looking covers of their guide books unrivalled information about every country in the world which must have been of priceless value to the German General Staff in their war of conquest and spoliation.” After disparaging Karl Baedeker for having begun in imitation of John Murray, the author traces the development of the publishing firm and the genealogy of its supervisors until asserting that Fritz Baedeker may well be in the German Army or among the war dead. “But we may fancy that his services were too valuable to permit of his being sent to the trenches,” he writes; “Possibly he is engaged in preparing guide books of the new German territories, which it is fondly hoped the German tourist of the future will be able to gloat over” (354). The books were so costly to research, according to this article’s author, that their sale can scarcely have provided a margin of profit; consequently, the German government must have subsidized the entire effort for military purposes. It may seem illogical that an article in Scientific American should argue against the fruits of science. However, perhaps the human toll levied by technological accomplishments threatened the legitimacy of scientific progress so much that only by singling out specifically German examples of scientific accuracy, such as Baedekers, could the editors of the journal justify their own enthusiasms. In this way the imputed goal of the Baedeker family—“the crowning achievement,” which “was to have been the guide books to the new German empire”—differentiates that particular scientific effort from those of the Entente powers (363). The author draws his animus from stereotypical associations of the German mind with precision and science. What rankles the article’s author most, in fact, is the precise efficiency with which the Baedeker family produced their guidebooks. The piece opens on a derisively ironic note: “In the work of preparation for the war which was to Germanize the world there is at least one German family who can say that they did their job so thoroughly

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and efficiently that nobody could find fault. That family is the Baedeker family.” The writer half-heartedly concedes that the Baedekers are Saxons, and therefore some have said that the Baedeker family members “have none of the unpleasant characteristics of the Prussian”—that is, exactitude and a rigidity of thought informed by an obsession with efficiency and a heartless factualism (354). However, “When the war began, another generation of Baedekers had already been trained with a view to their improving the efficiency of the guide books.” Consequently, he writes, “The book on Belgium and Holland is a wonderful survey of every inch of these countries. The Belgian coast must have been gone over hundreds of times and every creek and gully explored. Not a detail was overlooked that could have been regarded as of military importance” (354). The amazing German successes in the early days of the war would surely have been impossible without Baedekers having provided a wealth of topographical facts about the countries to be invaded. “The maps were marvels of accuracy and detail,” he continues. “Not a railway however small in Europe or Asia but was shown, and any developments were faithfully recorded in the editions that were so kept up to date, that by August, 1914, Baedeker could be implicitly relied upon to show the way to the invading German hosts.” (363). Clearly, the very same precision and detail that had made Baedekers praised before 1914 made them anathema afterward—after war had cast precision and efficiency as the hallmarks of a scientific objectivity whose ultimate product had been a machinery of mass destruction. As we noted at the beginning of this chapter, the Times reference to the death of the head of the Baedeker family in August 1914 was premature. Fritz Baedeker’s actual death, in April 1925, occasioned several retrospective considerations of the Baedeker enterprise, taking into account the wartime epistemological shift as it was recorded in popular and literary characterizations of the Baedeker sensibility. These retrospectives tended to be critical, echoing the denunciation of Baedekers in Scientific American and alluding to the war. For instance, a Times death notice condemns the emphasis on factual accuracy in Baedekers as part of a conceptual, industrial, and economic machinery designed specifically to crush the books’ competition—in other (unspoken) words, factuality was the guidebook equivalent of the Kaiser’s Army and the Schlieffen Plan. Fritz Baedeker “placed great value upon accuracy,” the correspondent explains; in Leipzig, the obituary continues, “were concentrated all the mechanical adjuncts of the complete guide-book, such as foreign printing and map production. Thus Baedeker was able to make his series international, and to drive out—with the assistance of an indiscriminating public—more literary and more original native productions.” Fritz Baedeker appears here as a character in a politico-military drama, a

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general who assembled production materials in order to create an army for international expansion. Baedekers, with their dryly efficient factualism and sterile objectivity, unjustly defeated such “native productions” as those of John Murray, which were “more literary and more original,” but could not stave off the German assault (“Death” 9). The “Entertainments” column of the Times in the following week similarly opposed the literary to the factual and the aesthetically pleasing to the scientifically objective. Entitled “Baedeker: Guide-Books as Books,” the column characterizes Baedekers as “peculiarly works of reference,” suitable to be consulted in the hotel room or “furtively studied in the train,” but if used “on the spot” a hindrance to the proper appreciation of art and architecture. “[T]o carry them with you into the actual presence of the Medici Venus or the St. Ursula of Carpaccio,” the correspondent asserts, “as though to verify the details of these masterpieces from a livret d’identité, is merely barbarous. As well follow an opera with your eyes glued to a ‘book of the words’!” (A. B. W. 12). Personal experience, unmediated by any written account pretending to have a monopoly on knowledge and the proper assimilation of perceptual evidence, offers the best way to apprehend the world. The correspondent particularly criticizes Baedekers as being unsuitable for pleasure reading. He calls them “miniature encyclopædias, biblia a-biblia, rather than books to read for pleasure. Now it was a real literary pleasure to read one of the old Murray handbooks. What a jolly book was [Richard] Ford’s [1844] Handbook of Spain!” he enthuses: [Ford’s] “Gatherings from Spain” [1846] is an even jollier book than the other. It is a vanished Spain, of course; but what does that matter? The past lives again in its racy pages, and you have a picture of human life which is none the less exciting because it has ceased to be true to actual fact. After all, the best guide-books to read are guides to nothing but themselves. And so we may rule out the actual facts as irrelevant to our pleasure. Imaginary journeys are as satisfactory as real ones, without the wear and tear, to say nothing of the expense, of travel. (12)

Pleasure is paramount, even when reading texts about real cities and countryside. As this correspondent puts it, “Old guide-books, out-of-date directories and almanacs, obsolete maps—works of reference to which it is useless to refer—all offer welcome escape from the pressure of fact” (12). Both the authors of these Times articles therefore condemn Baedeker guidebooks for failing to be something that Karl Baedeker had explicitly intended them not to be: literary, digressive, entertaining, and impressionistic—like The Good Soldier, in fact—rather than methodical, catalog-like, factual, and objective.

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While the war spelled the demise of the Baedeker in England, the radically transformed landscape of the Western Front furnished new ground for guidebooks (ironically enough) and a burgeoning battlefield tourism market. For instance, one of Findlay Muirhead’s Baedeker substitutes was his Blue Guide volume entitled North-Eastern France (1922); in this book, Muirhead replaced the lengthy art-history essay typical of Baedekers with a thirty-threepage military history of the British, American, and French campaigns in that area, and he replicated Baedeker’s structure of tourist itineraries while centering them on visits to battlefields, cemeteries, and war monuments. In France, the supersession of the Baedeker took the form of an entire series of battlefield guidebooks, the Illustrated Michelin Guides to the Battle-Fields (1914–1918). Among the advertisements for hotels, “motor agents,” and tires appearing before the title page of Ypres and the Battle of Ypres (1919), a list of “press opinions” includes this note from the Glasgow Herald: “The same excellence of production characterizes the fuller volumes on the towns, which need fear no rivals, not even the once indispensable Baedeker” (n. pag.). With their copious maps, diagrams, and especially with their many photographs (which the Baedekers did not have)—including before-and-after images of towns destroyed by the war—the Michelin guides purportedly showed the truth of the landscape better than Baedekers could. With these volumes in hand, writes the reviewer from the Glasgow Herald, “one can stay at home, and with some complacency gather from them no very inadequate idea of the places around which the world was saved for democracy by the sacrifice of our dead” (n. pag.). While the author of “Baedeker: Guide-Books as Books” might have written with conscious irony about being entranced by guidebooks that “are guides to nothing but themselves,” he might justifiably have been pleased by Michelin’s Ypres and The Battle of Ypres, with its power to transport the reader to the battlefield without incurring the problems of actually going there. The many before-and-after photographic comparisons in the Michelin books underscored the double status of these works as guides both to the front lines and to the story they told in their pages. Ultimately, these were guides perhaps not simply “to nothing but themselves,” but to a history best approached obliquely, from the safe distance of an armchair at home. For the French as well as for the British, the hegemony of Baedeker positivism, like German militarism and the dangers of the battlefield, was finally at an end.

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In Flanders with No Baedeker

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The Persistence of Landscape: Montague and West I think the day by day in the Waste Land, the sudden violences and the long stillnesses, the sharp contours and unformed voids of that mysterious existence, profoundly affected the imaginations of those who suffered it. It was a place of enchantment. —David Jones, Preface to In Parenthesis (1937) (x) Painter fellows doing battlefields never got that intimate effect. —Ford Madox Ford, A Man Could Stand Up—(1926) (Parade’s End 549)

C

. E. Montague asserted several years after the war, “A painter who is worth his salt will flatly refuse to give you just the precise physical facts of a landscape. It is not his business. His business is not to convey topographical information, but to express some emotion or other that he has felt in presence of that scene” (The Right Place 45). Montague exemplifies his prescribed method when relating the front line experience in his polemic memoir Disenchantment (1922). One primary emotion evoked by the war was pathos, which he conveys in this text through gestures to pictorial landscape depictions in which he subordinates topographical factuality to emotional content. For example, he likens disillusioned soldiers to the nineteenth-century French painter Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, for whom (according to Montague) the lifting of an obscuring mist from a landscape paradoxically occasions the end of work and signifies loss and regret. Montague’s fellow British novelist Rebecca West makes similar gestures in what appears to be, at first glance, a very different book: her home front novel The Return of the Soldier (1918). This narrative tells the story of an aristocratic officer who returns to England suffering from shell shock and amnesia; his memory stops fifteen years earlier, in the time of an old, discontinued love

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affair with the daughter of a country innkeeper, who has by now become coarsened by years of domestic toil and middle-class marriage. In West’s description of this woman’s parlor, framed pictures of the ruins of Tintern Abbey serve as shorthand for faded beauty, romantic loss, and the passage of time. Like Montague, West introduces her pictorial references as details in a larger statement about the human consequences of the war—in this case, the consequences for the civilians at home rather than for Montague’s fellow soldiers. Such details might seem like narrative asides of minor importance in the context of larger claims that Montague and West make about British society and culture. A closer look at these two texts, however, reveals how much the articulation of these claims depends on the pictorial, especially the landscape pictorial, as the authors address underlying anxieties about the postwar role of returning soldiers and the need to regenerate a devastated culture. Both authors deploy painters and paintings in systems of referentiality based on pictorial representation’s contested capacity for expression, crafting methods for discerning the meaning and the significance of the war through recourse to a partnership between visual and verbal representation. Furthermore, these authors’ invocations of the painterly landscape tradition take place at the intersection of two pairs of concerns: the contrasting abilities to make a statement in either painting or narrative, and the relationship, which the war called into account, between humans and physical space. At stake in this intersection are the varying reliability of truth claims, the evidentiary capacities of verbal and visual representation, and the resulting efficacy of the cultural diagnoses that Montague and West each undertake. While the texts resemble each other in invoking similar modes of verbal references to visual material, they differ radically in their prescriptions for postwar British society and the role of the returning soldier in cultural regeneration. Taken together, Disenchantment and The Return of the Soldier exemplify two sides of the same coin, depending on complementary uses of the still-valid language of landscape to evaluate the experience of the war, its impact on the families at home, and its effect on national culture. These works constitute significant evidence for reconsidering the literary meeting points between the verbal and the visual, on the ground of landscape and in the context of the troubled search for the war’s meaning. “Topographic Portraiture” In these two texts, the topos occupying the nexus of verbal and visual modes of representation and interpretation of the war is that of landscape. Western landscape paintings typically portrayed rural scenes, and given the scope and

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violence of industrialized mass warfare in 1914–1918, the landscape tradition might easily seem defunct when considered from both vantage points of then and now. Samuel Hynes, in a chapter of his influential analysis A War Imagined (1990) entitled “The Death of Landscape,” details the currently prevailing critical view that the realities of the front lines compromised the traditional techniques and subject matter of pictorial landscape representation. These means are perhaps best typified by the work of the Scottish artist Muirhead Bone, who received a commission as an official war artist in 1916 and went to the front as part of the propaganda work coordinated by C. F. G. Masterman at the War Propaganda Bureau (known as Wellington House). Masterman had apparently selected Bone because of the artist’s predilection for English landscapes in the Romantic style (Hynes, A War Imagined 159). Bone toured the Somme by car, working quickly and publishing two hundred drawings in serial installments starting in December 1916 and culminating in a two-volume collection entitled The Western Front (1917). Bone’s drawings proved popular among the English public, according to Hynes, because they interpreted the war in the reassuring terms of the countryside of home, depicting fields, woods, and distant towns on the skyline in the serene and peaceful atmosphere of idealized England. In Bone’s drawing entitled The Battle of the Somme (1916), for example, a soldier looks out over rolling fields, in which the war is apparent only in distant puffs of smoke and a few inconspicuous airplanes. Not only did the drawings exclude evidence of the war’s destruction, but (as Hynes asserts) they follow the familiar rules of Romantic landscape composition—according to which, for example, views are from high places, human figures are observers rather than agents, and the terrain is the subject of contemplation (A War Imagined 160). Bone’s work drew derision, however, from those who knew that terrain more intimately. Wilfred Owen, in a letter to his mother, called the Somme drawings “the laughing stock of the army—like the trenches on exhibition in Kensington. No Man’s Land under snow is like the face of the moon chaotic, crater-ridden, uninhabitable, awful, the abode of madness” (Owen 429). As Hynes explains further, justifying Owen’s reaction, “the war had annihilated Nature, and with it the whole tradition of Romantic landscape,” which had the English countryside for its usual topic (196). According to Hynes, in order to represent this new physical and moral reality—so unlike that associated with the topography of home—visual artists had to abandon the forms and subject matter of Romantic tradition in favor of radically different representational modes. Specifically, Hynes explains, artists found that an ideal means of portraying the front-line experience lay in the prewar techniques of futurism and vorticism, pursued and extended according to the precepts of avant-garde

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experimentation and modernist discontinuity. Therefore, works such as the futurist paintings of C. R. W. Nevinson and the vorticist products of Paul Nash and Wyndham Lewis came to be seen as epitomizing the truth of the war precisely by employing forms diametrically opposed to those of Muirhead Bone. According to Hynes, such artists found that “a Modernist method that before the war had seemed violent and distorting was seen to be realistic on the Western Front. Modernism had not changed, but reality had.” These artists therefore create an “anti-landscape”—one in which “[s]pace is derationalized and defamiliarized”; habitations are absent; human figures are miniaturized, distorted, or mechanized; and natural shapes of trees, earth, and bodies of water are systematically eradicated (195–96). If the war had killed pictorial landscape, landscape was dead in literature as well. Hynes argues that authors paralleled visual artists in deploying oppositional strategies of contrast, invoking the landscape tradition only in order to discredit it. He shows, for example, how Robert Graves’s poem “A Dead Boche” (1917) enacts “a conventional Romantic scene” for parody. “What Graves did in ‘A Dead Boche,’ ” he explains, “was to take Romantic convention and thrust war into it, turning landscape into landscape-withcorpse.” Similarly, Isaac Rosenberg’s “Returning, We Hear the Larks” (1917) introduces the image of the skylark—“the Romantic image of the creative imagination in Nature”—but as a creature of the night and a disturbing symbol of a “tangled and blurred” dream world, whose existence calls into question the potential of the natural world to inspire creativity (192–93). In emphasizing the role of ironic contrast between landscape tradition and front line reality in visual and literary works, Hynes follows an avenue of thought similar to that pursued by Paul Fussell, in The Great War and Modern Memory (1975), concerning the work of Edmund Blunden. As we have observed previously, Fussell argues that Blunden composes in Undertones of War (1928) an “extended pastoral elegy,” drawing on the conventions of Arcadian landscape description in order to comment ironically on the violence perpetrated on the terrain (254). Blunden thereby eulogizes not only the physical landscape, but also a mode of seeing that the war had rendered archaic. “With language as with landscape,” Fussell writes, “his attention is constantly on pre-industrial England, the only repository of criteria for measuring fully the otherwise unspeakable grossness of the war” (268). Once more, in this particular text and in Fussell’s reading of it, meaning resides in the inadequacy of an obsolete aesthetic in the face of the wartime experience. However, these analyses risk reducing the artistic response to the wartime landscape to a binary of old and new in both literature and the visual arts: discredited romanticism and privileged modernism. I will argue instead that a more complex range of invocations of landscape existed. Montague and

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West, at least, saw the landscape tradition not simply as an archaic inheritance, either to be rejected outright or used for ironic contrast, but as a still valid mode of representation—one that served as an essential recourse, in fact, when attempting to evaluate the significance of something as elusive as the meaning of the war. C. E. Montague was in a favorable position to comment on these matters, having graduated from Oxford and then written about politics and the arts on the staff of the Manchester Guardian since 1890. A talented, scholarly journalist, he also published volumes of his collected theatre criticism and novels about English society as he rose to a prominence at the Guardian. When the war broke out, he lied about his age (forty-seven) to enlist; after a few months at the front at the end of 1915, during which he was hospitalized for trench fever and sent home, he received a commission in the intelligence branch. He returned to the front in the summer of 1917 and carried out new, specifically journalistic duties under the direction of the War Office. In this capacity, he wrote the commentaries on the drawings in Muirhead Bone’s The Western Front, texts on the art reproductions in British Artists at the Front (1918), descriptions of combat experience for Country Life magazine, and various propaganda pieces. After Disenchantment, his war books included two novels and two volumes of short stories, published from 1923 to 1928.1 His staff duties also included giving battlefield tours throughout the war zone, serving as escort officer for a wide range of distinguished visitors. In addition to escorting British and foreign military officers and diplomats, however, he gave tours to numerous authors and artists. His biographer, Oliver Elton, notes, “In Montague’s diary are jotted down the names of Bernard Shaw, J. M. Barrie, H. G. Wells, John Masefield, Spenser Wilkinson, Louis Raemakers, Muirhead Bone, and Francis Dodd” (133–34). Hence, Montague is an especially appropriate and exemplary figure, as his engagement with landscape was informed by (while not necessarily replicating) the artistic currents of his time—placing him both in the middle of the war and in the middle of the arts. An experienced outdoorsman, Montague had long been sensitive to the look of the landscape; in his earlier years, he was a dedicated walker, cyclist, rower, and mountaineer, and descriptions of the Alps and Pennines appear in his fiction and travel pieces.2 Montague transferred that athleticism and topographical interest to his wartime duties. Elton writes, “soon he knew the country from Calais to Albert, and from Étaples to Combles; above all, of course, the Somme and Ancre valleys on our side, with their spines and dips and plateaux that defined the successive tactical positions” (150). Montague met Bone in this capacity; through his relationship with the artist, and through the topographical knowledge he had gained as an escort officer,

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Montague would give rein to his awareness of physical space and his talent for landscape description. Years after the war, in a collection of travel essays entitled The Right Place (1924), Montague contemplates the overlapping operations of touring, map reading, and landscape description. In a chapter entitled “When the Map is In Tune,” he writes of the pleasures to be derived from correlating a map to a physical landscape with which one becomes familiar. He claims, “Much enjoyment of these delights can generate in the mind a new power of topographic portraiture, a knack of forming circumstantially correct visions of large patches of the earth’s surface. You learn, like a portrait painter, to penetrate by the help of intuitive inference; you get at one thing through another” (41). As we shall see, Montague’s earlier commentaries on the drawings in Bone’s Western Front implicitly assert the role of “intuitive inference” in the visualization and representation of the physical landscape, making his commentaries there a prolegomenon not only to the topographical engagements in The Right Place but also to those in Disenchantment. Montague and Bone had become friends before Montague was commissioned to provide the text for the drawings in The Western Front. Elton calls the association “a happy alliance; the places drawn by Bone were already burnt into Montague’s mind: the whole map of the Somme, the shattered towers and churches, the waterlogged shell-holes, the fireworks in the air, the daily round of the trench, in the hospital, or in the quarters, and the wreckage, legitimate or otherwise, done by the enemy in retreat” (198). These topographical facts, I might add, would also color the disillusionment of Disenchantment. Furthermore, the significance of topography in Montague’s literary rendering of the war, and the complementary use of verbal and visual language in meeting the challenge of describing the war experience, lend Montague’s contribution to The Western Front a depth and significance that has been overlooked. The deeper implications of Montague’s commentaries on Bone’s drawings tend to become obscured by the idea expressed in his introduction to the first installment of the collection: namely, “The British line in France and Belgium runs through country of three kinds, and each kind is like a part of England” (“The Western Front” n. pag.). To many critics, Montague here seems to commit the error for which Bone is generally censured. Hynes remarks, for instance, that “Bone’s drawings seem to support [Montague’s] view”—a mistaken one—of a parallelism between the countryside of Flanders and rural England. Hynes goes on to analyze Bone’s results as being therefore too familiar, misinterpreting the landscape of war (that is, its actual appearance) by evaluating it in terms of the English landscape (that is, the painterly convention) (160). In such a way, Bone’s alleged failings reflect back on Montague’s

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commentary, especially if we let our assessment of Montague’s text rest on a brief reading of this early passage. However, the rest of Montague’s commentary belies the critical relegation of his artistic temperament to the sort of anachronism for which Bone’s drawings were considered, in Owen’s words, “the laughing stock of the army.” The full extent of Montague’s topographical engagement in The Western Front is more complex. While he begins by making explicit comparisons between the land north of the Somme and Salisbury Plain, between that north of Arras and Lancashire, and between the ground around Ypres and that around Rye and Winchelsea, he goes on the describe the “ascending scale of desolation” as one approaches the front line. Montague goes beyond these comparisons (at which Hynes’s discussion stops) to conclude with a reference to the “ultimate desert” of the ground at the fighting zone, “where nothing but men and rats can live.” This is not England, obviously, but then “[a]n artist does not merely draw ruined churches and houses, guards and lorries, doctors and wounded men,” Montague explains. “It is for him to make us see something more that we do even when we see all these with our own eyes—to make visible by his art the staunchness and patience, the faithful absorption in the next duty, the humour and human decency and good nature—all the strains of character and emotion that go to make up the temper of Britain at war” (n. pag.). Montague draws a conclusion different from that reached by Owen and other critics of Bone; for Montague, Bone’s drawings serve a purpose higher than either the realistic portrayal of that wasteland or a naïve incorporation of that terrain into the pictorial vocabulary of English landscape painting. In a 1917 letter to his wife, Montague writes that those who criticize Bone’s drawings for the lack of graphic destruction in them miss their point. Understanding the war means going beyond descriptions of death and mutilation, which can safely be assumed to be present at the front even if left unmentioned (Elton 193–94). Or, more precisely, Montague finds certain particularly apt characteristics in Bone’s drawings in spite of the artist’s predilection for anachronistic pictorial techniques and subject matter. Certainly, Montague appears at times to discern qualities in the drawings that are not readily apparent to the casual observer. He emphasizes, most of all, the sheer strangeness of the physical terrain that Bone records—its radical dissimilarity to anything in England, and the difficulty of capturing this strangeness in representation. Words seem inadequate in this regard; Montague claims in his introduction to part II of volume 1, “Many skilled writers have tried to describe the aghast look of these fields where the battle had passed over them. But every new visitor says the same thing—that they have not succeeded; no eloquence has yet conveyed the disquieting strangeness of the portent” (“The Somme Battlefield”

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n. pag.). According to Montague, however, Bone achieves this eloquence: “By some means, which a layman cannot mark down,” he writes, “Mr. Bone has suffused his drawing with his own sense of the tragic queerness of this vacuous and unnerved landscape.”3 Montague typically praises one drawing, Road Liable to be Shelled (showing an empty, tree-lined road extending straight before the observer to a vanishing point on the horizon) for the “artist’s sense of a malign invisible presence”—for Bone’s fidelity to the strangeness of a physical landscape defamiliarized by war and best apprehended in terms of the mysterious, the “uncanny,” and the invisible (n. pag.). Of another scene, entitled In the Regained Territory, Montague writes that Bone captures the “sinister air of a village destroyed, but not quite effaced, by shell-fire” (n. pag.). Of Outside Arras, Near the German Lines, he comments, “This tingle of uncanny dread has been conveyed with remarkable success in this figureless but haunted landscape” (n. pag.). A Square in Arras shows what appears to be a typical Continental urban scene (though without human figures and with weeds growing in the pavement), and Montague calls this place “the most melancholy place in the desolate city.” He writes: several houses were wounded by shells, and nearly all were empty; unheeded grass and weeds grew to extravagant heights among the stones, as in Piranesi’s megalomaniac dreams of the Appian Way; the obelisk in the centre seemed oddly remote from human touch, like a peak in Darien; and some acoustic property of the curved façades gave a peculiar resonance to the crash of occasional shells anywhere in the city or to the footfalls of some wayfarer coasting cautiously along close to the walls, to avoid enemy observation. (N. pag.)

Structures are “wounded,” and the sounds of exploding shells and footsteps undergo similar acoustic distortion, in this anthropomorphic intermingling of the human and inanimate in a dreamlike landscape. Both the ground and the representation of it seem unreal, and in this instance, the fact of Bone’s having chosen this particular square as a subject signals the invocation of the otherworldly qualities that visitors sense there. Montague’s reaction to Bone’s artistry, as we see when we examine it more closely, therefore does not simply celebrate or participate in formal anachronism, as critics tend to conclude. In fact, Montague’s assessments elsewhere of avant-garde artwork preclude any characterization of his taste as limited to the representational or formal. For example, in British Artists at the Front (1918) Montague praises the avant-garde drawings of Paul Nash in the same terms he uses to evaluate Bone’s more traditionalist work. He explains how the distorted perspective and grotesque exaggerations in Nash’s drawings

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are as accurate, in their own way, as the Cartesian regularities of Bone’s landscapes (“Strange, But True” n. pag.). Nor do Montague’s commentaries in The Western Front express a naïve appreciation of landscape, from which he becomes disabused by the experience of the war. As we have seen, he came to Bone’s drawings already with a highly developed interest in topographical description and a thorough familiarity with the infantryman’s trench experience. Montague instead characterizes Bone’s success in terms of the artist’s ability to express, through processes partaking of “intuitive inference” and indirect suggestion, an emotional and psychological reality overlaying the mere data of physical topography. Furthermore, in Montague’s melding of verbal and visual representation, his contribution to The Western Front anticipates his expression of the central themes of Disenchantment. His memoir does not invoke an aesthetic tradition in order to discredit it, or declare it exhausted, or exploit it primarily for ironic contrast (as do Blunden and others, in the standard critical accounts of landscape and its death). Instead, his manifold technique of “topographic portraiture”—aesthetic and documentary, painterly and literary—is the key to Disenchantment, as we shall now see. C. E. Montague’s Pictorial Thematics Disenchantment has secured an important place in Great War literature. Drawn from Montague’s wartime experiences in the British Army, the work is neither strictly a novel nor an autobiography; it is an extended essay chronicling the disillusionment and bitterness felt by those who survived the war only to confront its futility. As a nonfictional polemic attacking the failure to make the Allied victory worth its cost, Disenchantment has come to be seen as a key document in the evolution of literary responses to the war. For Bernard Bergonzi, Montague’s work is “one of the best of [the] earlier books”; it “anticipates the temper of the retrospective studies of the end of the decade,” as well as the sense of futility and waste articulated by so many books that followed (Heroes’ Twilight 146). Andrew Rutherford reads Disenchantment as an antiwar book that nevertheless “pays elegiac tribute to the idealism, decency and courage of the volunteer armies, even as [its author] charts the via dolorosa which they had to tread to death or disillusion” (88). Hynes highlights the text’s theme of betrayal—“how England turned, and betrayed herself, her soldiers, and her values”—and its status as an “[a]nti-monument,” or “the major monument of [the] turn of mind” of veterans who, by 1922, recognized all that they and their country had lost (A War Imagined 307–08). Chris Baldick divides Great War literature into four phases and places Disenchantment in a 1919–1927 phase of prolific commemorative writing, one marked primarily

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by Owen’s poetry of “anti-militarist protest” and Ford’s novelistic treatment (in Parade’s End [1924–1928]) of how the war ravaged English civilization (338–40). In each of these accounts, Disenchantment appears as a literary turning point, a quintessential indictment of the pretensions of prewar British values. Montague’s narrative justifies these conclusions in several ways. He begins Disenchantment by warning his readers from the outset of the work’s place in “a goodly literature of disappointment,” writing of the high spirits, “second boyhood,” and “spring-tide of faith and joyous illusion” with which volunteers like him started their military service in the first year of the war (1, 8, 10). He goes on to reflect on a multitude of aspects of the war experience, focusing on levels of sacrifice, the embattled endurance of values, and the contrasts between expectations and reality. He writes, for example, of the disillusioning effects of the derailments of schedule and discipline inherent to any bureaucracy as large as an army; most soldiers’ unshakeable will to win and the shirkers who avoided the front line; the rare chaplains who ministered under fire and the many who were scarcely seen; the hypocrisy of politicians and the unreliability of newspaper accounts; and the senses of “good sportsmanship” and chivalry that prevailed here and there, but were inexorably ground down by the experience of the conflict (144). Montague devotes considerable attention to the end of the war, asserting that it came too late to be a triumph given that better political leadership could have brought peace sooner. He describes how the spirit of revenge, as demonstrated in popular opinion at home, the British occupation of Germany, and the terms of the Versailles Treaty, ruined the hope for a better tomorrow. “So we had failed—had won the fight and lost the prize[,]” he laments. “[T]he 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” (189). Disenchantment is best known for this twofold theme: the disillusionment of those who had made the sacrifices, and the betrayal of the chivalrous ideals of English culture by the conduct of the nation’s civilian leaders. Montague qualifies his assessment, however, by explaining that while the war did not completely eradicate chivalry, it attenuated and compromised that system of values. Definitely, “something had happened; the chivalrous temper had had a set-back; it was no longer the mode; the latest wear was a fine robust shabbiness,” he writes in a chapter entitled “Autumn Tints in Chivalry” (154). Montague contrasts the two tempers in which war may be conducted—denigrating the enemy or rating him “as high as you can.”

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[T]his temper comes [ . . . ] of decent people. It spoke in Porsen of Clusium’s whimsical prayer that Horatius might swim the Tiber safely; it animates Velasquez’ knightly Surrender of Breda; it prompted Lord Roberts’s first words to Cronje when Paardeberg fell—“Sir, you have made a very gallant defence”; it is avowed in a popular descant of Newbolt’s— To honour, while you strike him down, The foe who comes with eager eyes.4 (142)

Montague tightly weaves references to both verbal and verbal expressions in this passage. Furthermore, among the self-explanatory remarks of Lord Roberts from the Boer War, Newbolt’s popular verse, and a classical allusion perhaps preserved from obscurity by its inclusion in the most popular part of Thomas Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome (1842), Montague cites a painting by Diego Velázquez (1599–1660). Why did he select this particular painting? Artistically informed Britons would likely have been familiar with The Surrender of Breda (1635), not least through their government’s efforts to memorialize the Great War. In March 1918, the British War Memorials Committee was established, with Lord Beaverbrook (Minister of Information) as one of its prominent members. The committee began planning an immense Hall of Remembrance in London: a gallery that would tell the story of the war through a series of large-scale paintings specifically commissioned for the purpose. The committee debated the size the paintings should have; one member—Robert Ross—proposed requiring the paintings follow the dimensions of Velázquez’s Surrender of Breda (which measures 120 by 144 inches). In the words of Richard Cork, Ross “implied that the images in the Hall should aim for the highest standards achieved by the history painters of the past”; not only was The Surrender of Breda of a suitably epic size, but it stood as a model for the painterly treatment of an event in warfare (218). Velázquez’s painting depicts a major Spanish military victory: the surrender in 1624 of the strategic Dutch fortress city of Breda, along with its defenders under Justin of Nassau, to Spanish troops commanded by Ambrosio Spínola—a gifted military engineer and Philip IV’s most talented general. The siege of Breda, which had lasted eleven months and incurred the construction of miles of trenches to flood and isolate the city, attracted interested observers of the spectacle from across Europe. What became even more famous than the military details of the siege, however, was the conduct of the victorious general after the surrender. Rather than dictate harsh terms

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The latter is preferable, Montague explains, and he provides examples of this spirit:

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Figure 3.1 La Rendición de Breda, o Las Lanzas (The Surrender of Breda, or The Lances) (1635), c Museo Nacional del Prado—Madrid – (Spain) by Diego Velázquez. 

to the defeated army, Spínola gave Justin an honor guard, supposedly offered him encouraging words, and allowed the Dutch to leave the city under their own colors and carrying their weapons. In the foreground of The Surrender of Breda, we see the two generals meeting in the center, each with representative soldiers grouped on either side (see figure 3.1). On the left, the Dutch troops carry halberds (a combination of spike and axe on a six-foot handle); on the right, rising above the Spanish soldiers, is the thicket of lances that have given the painting its alternative title of Las Lanzas. Velázquez portrays a moment of Spínola’s magnanimity, with Justin offering Spínola the key to the city and the Spanish general bowing and extending his arm in welcome and compassion.5 Even more than the military significance of the siege and surrender, the behavior of Spínola won lasting fame, and Velázquez’s depiction became well known as an example, not only of a brilliantly executed painting of a military subject, but also of the chivalric ideal in the conduct of warfare. At the time of the First World War, art historians in Britain and elsewhere typically accompanied praise for the painting with admiration for the honorable qualities

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Spínola demonstrated.6 Thus Montague’s reference amounts to a form of shorthand, a pictorial equivalent to the citation of Porsen and Horatius invoking a system of values that Montague finds wanting in the historical aftermath of the war. The utility of this kind of shorthand becomes apparent when, later in the narrative, Montague describes the eve of the August 1918 Allied offensive that inaugurated the end of the war. He writes of the soldiers’ excitement on the night before the attack: Could it be coming at last, I thought as I went to sleep—the battle unlike other battles? How many I had seen outlive their little youth of groundless hope, from the approach along darkened roads through summer nights, the eastern sky pulsating with its crimson flush, the wild glow always leaping up and always drawing in, and the waiting cavalry’s lances upright, black and multitudinous in roadside fields, impaling the blenching sky just above the horizon; and then, in the bald dawn, the backward trickles of wastage swelling into great streams or rather endless friezes seen in silhouette across the fields, the trailing processions of wounded, English and German [ . . . ]; and then the evening’s reports, with their anxious efforts to show that we had gained something worth having. Was it to be only Loos and the Somme and Arras and Flanders and Cambrai, all over again? (170–71)

Lances, anachronistic though they were, still appeared among the weaponry employed by British cavalry regiments, and a September 1916 entry in Montague’s diary records seeing “Lances bristling against dawn—twilight sky in fields beside road” (Elton 143). Thus Montague’s inclusion of them here is not unrealistic. Yet their odd presence in the scene surely reminds the attentive reader of The Surrender of Breda—perhaps under its other familiar title, Las Lanzas. Not only are the lances of Ambrosio Spínola’s troops “upright, black and multitudinous” in Velázquez’s painting, but they are seen “impaling the blenching sky just above the horizon” of Flanders. Montague effectively recreates the scene in Velázquez’s painting by noting such a detail, especially in the pictorializing context of such other features of this passage as “the eastern sky pulsating with its crimson flush” and the returning soldiers viewed as “endless friezes seen in silhouette across the fields.” Through this pictorial allusion, Montague reinforces the idea of the Great War’s futility and the notion that the final battles would not fulfill the hope for an honorable peace of the kind that Velázquez depicts. For some who were familiar with The Surrender of Breda, however, the painting’s portrayal of a historical moment amounts to fantasy. The French author and painter Auguste Bréal, writing in 1905, first praises The Surrender

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In these great decorations, the essential truth, the truth of environment, must always be lacking. It would be as useless to expect it here as in a tapestry, and it would ill become us to criticise Velazquez for submitting to the necessary conditions of this species of painting. But it was not a species of painting which would have allowed of his proving himself the marvellous artist, the incomparable painter whom we know. However agreeable may be the colouring of the light in Las Lanzas, it is a conventional light when we compare it with the light of Baltazar Carlos [Prince Baltazar Carlos on Horseback (1634–35)], for instance. The artist has not felt it on the spot; the landscape does not make one with the picture. If the gesture of the Italian Spinola is a Spanish gesture, is the country where the scene takes place really Holland? It would be absurd to reproach the painter with this; we only wish to say that we are conscious of an effort in the assemblage of elements in this great canvas; Velazquez the realist was not completely at ease in the domain of history, which, in painting at any rate, is a fiction. (157–58)

Arguably, The Surrender of Breda is not a landscape painting per se. Nevertheless, Bréal’s characterization of the painting as one in which human subjects interact within a pictorially significant “vast landscape” indicates the extent to which the fields beyond are more than a mere backdrop. Bréal stresses the role of landscape, or “environment,” as “the essential truth” in historical accuracy. Velázquez, who had not visited Flanders, apparently relied on French and Dutch engravings of the topography, and in this reading, Velázquez’s inability to rely on having personally seen the terrain only highlights the fictional status of his artistic product (Dale Brown 67). Additionally, Bréal’s remarks articulate a conflicted relationship between a painting’s aesthetic value and its faithfulness to history, based on an assumed incompatibility between the realist mode of representation and a historical subject. Because subjects from the distant past cannot be treated with representational accuracy, according to this logic, the necessarily inaccurate attempt to render the historical scene invoked in The Surrender of Breda “constrained” the artist’s abilities. Velázquez’s predicament, Bréal claims, resulted in an “artificiality” of form, the presence of “gaps” and “voids” in the treatment of the subject matter, and the observer’s difficulty in “embrac[ing] the picture as a whole” due to the absence of a necessary “unity of impression”

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of Breda for its background of “a vast landscape with troops filing past, lances and standards, rivers and trenches. The harmony of the pale sky,” he writes, “in which smoke is rising and clouds are passing, is exquisite” (152–53). However, he argues, such historical works inevitably fail to be faithful to history:

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based on “the connecting link of the atmosphere” (154, 157). In Bréal’s formula opposing history and aesthetics, he actually argues that historical painting should not hew too closely to history. “[H]ad the picture been more realistic,” he writes of The Surrender of Breda, “it would have lost its interest, its dignity, its air, the side of heroic chronicle which one requires in a painting of this kind” (158). In a historical painting, then, an artist can portray past episodes of heroism with aesthetic success only by abandoning any pretense to historical accuracy. The difficulty of Bréal’s position lies in the question of history’s uses with regard to artistic truth. According to Bréal, while we can admire Spínola’s chivalry, and we can appreciate the aesthetic qualities of Velázquez’s painting, we must also recognize the inherent irrecoverableness of the past moment that Velázquez depicts. If we stress that the past is inherently irrecoverable, furthermore, then a project such as The Surrender of Breda ultimately becomes a paradoxical act of artistic solipsism. The representation of Spínola is divorced from the context that produced his gesture, and a painting dedicated to portraying historical fact finally advertises history’s indeterminateness; in Bréal’s analysis, such a representation of the past can delight but not instruct. In Disenchantment, Montague reconnects art to context and makes history instructive, implicitly resolving Bréal’s contradictory claim through an entirely different formulation of the relationship between pictorial representation and historical truth. For Montague, The Surrender of Breda is more than a necessarily flawed representation of history; the author transposes Velázquez’s work forward in time and reverses the terms of Bréal’s criticism by valuing this painting as a depiction of the way the Great War should have ended—and what the landscape of the Great War could and should have looked like. Thus, pictorial landscape is not evidence of historical truth, to be evaluated against other kinds of empirical evidence; nor is pictorial landscape a mode of representation rendered a failure by the gulf between the painterly vocabulary of bucolic terrain and the appearance of the front lines, as it is for Blunden and others. Whereas Bréal evaluates such paintings in terms of historical evidence, by pointing out the distance between the representation of the past and unreproducible historical fact, Montague instead applies a prescriptive conception of art and history, transmuting what Bréal sees as the problematic historical rootedness of The Surrender of Breda into the timelessness of an ethical standard with which to engage the problems of the present. He thereby makes pictorial landscape a means toward an end—toward a visualized alternative outcome to the war. Writing in 1922, Montague concluded that the Treaty of Versailles had dashed the hopes for an honorable peace as symbolized by The Surrender of Breda. Chivalry seemed mortally wounded, as was the public confidence

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that the war had been undertaken, on the British side, to defend culture. The troops had once sincerely believed such slogans as “ ‘The freedom of Europe,’ ‘The war to end war,’ ‘The overthrow of militarism,’ [or] ‘The cause of civilization’ ” (187). After the war, however, a “shabby epidemic of spite” came to infect noncombatants, as well as public-school educated officers at the front (who, by Montague’s reckoning, should have known better). “A fine sturdy sneer at the notion of doing anything chivalrous was by this time the mode,” Montague writes as he relates episodes of boorish behavior by British officers and civilians in occupied Germany (185). On the night before the opening of what would be the war’s final offensive, Montague has a premonition of this outcome, shaped by the awareness in the back of his mind of the chivalrous ideal depicted by Velázquez. After asking himself if the impending battle would only repeat the futile losses of Loos and the Somme, et cetera, he answers his own question by realizing that he has been dreaming all along. “Thought must have passed into dream,” he writes of this imagined scene of having “gained something worth having,” which appears so convincingly portrayed in The Surrender of Breda but, in Montague’s time, was not meant to be (171).

The Epistemology of Landscape We have observed how Montague’s incorporation of a Velázquez painting serves as a method of shorthand, in which a particular artwork illustrates a point explored at greater length in the words of the narrative. Elsewhere in Disenchantment, Montague demonstrates a more subtle interaction between the verbal and the visual, according to which “topographic portraiture” functions as a form of epistemological exploration made alongside verbal description. One such use of a pictorial method takes place when Montague describes what the war came to mean to the participants after a few years of fighting had passed: In the autumn of 1917 the war entered into an autumn, or late middle-age, of its own. “Your young men,” we are told, “shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams” [Joel 2:28–31]. The same with whole armies. But middleaged armies or men may not have the mists of either morning or evening to charm them. So they may feel like Corot, when he had painted away, in a trance of delight, till the last vapour of dawn was dried up by the sun; then he said, “You can see everything now. Nothing is left,” and knocked off work for the day. [ . . . ] [For us] that feeling had come. A high time was over, a great light was out; our eyes had lost the use of something, either an odd penetration that they had for a while, or else an odd web that had been woven across them, shutting only ugliness out. (129)

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Montague attempts to relate the paradoxical notion that to become suddenly aware of historical reality involves the loss of another kind of awareness, one of purpose and meaning. The tension of this paradox appears in the final lines of the passage, which waver between the opposing ideas that one’s eyes had lost “either an odd penetration” or “an odd web” of obscurity. The challenge of effectively making this complex point consists of portraying what had been lost as something other than foolish patriotic naïveté or blameless innocence: attitudes all too easily applied to prewar British culture in retrospect, the past being unrecoverable except through the lens of the present. Invoking the painterly sensibility of Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796– 1875) furnishes Montague with a way to explain this paradox. Corot devoted particular attention to the effects of light and shade, working to represent as accurately as possible the appearance of different levels of illumination; he employed finely differentiated gradations of light, which give his landscape paintings a reputation for near-photographic realism.7 As Michael Clarke has pointed out, Corot was especially interested in the influence of mist on luminosity, turning such atmospheric effects on the appearance of the landscape into the subject of his art. One of Corot’s submissions to the Universal Exhibition of 1855, where he won a first-class medal, was entitled Effect of Morning. For Corot and his contemporaries, effet was a term specifically referring to such transitory natural phenomena as twilight mists. “Instead of becoming a means to an end,” in Clarke’s words, “the effet was the end itself ” (78). In Disenchantment, Montague similarly concludes that Corot treats mist not as a hindrance (except perhaps as a hindrance to “ugliness”), but rather as a subject for contemplation and a source of creative inspiration and understanding. Additionally, as Montague will explain later in The Right Place (1924), such a mist that intervenes between subject and object symbolizes the epistemological limitations inherent to any representational efforts: Between our senses and any object that might stir us to some genial or aweful delight there is always interposed a kind of ether distilled from our own personality. All that can ever come to us must come in such vibrations as that intervening medium can suffer to pass. We never really get at the object itself; what we get is always some highly personal sense of the object, a sense strongly coloured and flavoured by ourselves, our temperament’s particular quality of reaction under whatever stimulus the object may exert. To the artist who knows his business this is a commonplace. It is the point that he starts from, to paint a landscape, or even a portrait. He renounces any attempt to represent things as an impersonal science might describe it. (214)

Here, the “ether” correlates to the various “mists” in Disenchantment: not a mediating substance, or strictly a hindrance to observation, but the site of

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meaning. All expression is thus self-expression and qualifies the possibility of scientifically accurate description. On one level, Montague’s analysis of this phenomenon corresponds to the treatment of subjectivity by literary and visual impressionists. In this passage we can hear echoes, for instance, of Ford Madox Ford’s assertion that art provides—can only provide—“the fruits of [the artist’s] own observations,” or “the record of the impression of the moment” (“On Impressionism” 37, 41). According to this aesthetic, the true and sole subject of artistic representation is the mist of perception, or subjectivity itself. For Montague, similarly, losing the intervening mist does not result in clearer understanding. Quite the opposite: losing the mist involves losing part of one’s sense of self and consciousness of meaning. In Disenchantment, the awareness of this loss takes the form of what one can see in the physical terrain of the front lines. Immediately after the passage citing Corot, Montague turns to a specific example of the circumstances under which one feels how one’s eyes had “lost the use of something”: The feeling was apt to come on pretty strong if you lived at the time on the top of the little hill of Cassel, west of Ypres. [ . . . ] You might [ . . . ] be watching at daybreak one of that autumn’s many dour bouts of attrition under the Passchendale Ridge, in the mud, and come back [ . . . ] to sit in an ancient garden hung on the slope of the hill, where a great many pears were yellowing on the wall and sunflowers gazing fixedly into the sun that was now failing them. All the corn of French Flanders lay cut on the brown plain under your eyes, from Dunkirk, with its shimmering dunes and the glare on the sea, to the forested hills north of Arras. Everywhere lustre, reverie, stillness; the sinking hum of old bees, successful in life and now rather tired; the many windmills fallen motionless, the aureate light musing over the aureate harvest; out in the east the broken white stalks of Poperinghe’s towers pensive in haze; and, behind and about you, the tiny hill city, itself in its distant youth the name-giver and prize of three mighty battles that do not matter much now.8 (129–30)

Not only does Montague emphasize the autumnal aspect of this landscape, in a mood appropriate to his theme of the loss of youth and the coming of middle-aged wisdom, but he also constructs the passage in such a way as to render the loss and gain of knowledge as an exercise of pictorialized landscape representation. First, Montague casts this description in terms of what the reader would see: “You might [ . . . ] be watching at daybreak”; “All the corn of French Flanders lay [ . . . ] under your eyes”; “behind and about you, the tiny hill city” (emphasis added). Second, the landscape features a motif of motionlessness,

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which signals that what is being seen is itself a representation and not reality: sunflowers are “gazing fixedly”; the corn “lay cut”; “lustre, reverie, stillness” is “everywhere”; the bees are “old” and “now rather tired”; the windmills have “fallen motionless”; Poperinghe’s towers are “pensive.” Finally, not only does Montague’s reference to “the many windmills” recall Quixote’s futile tiltings, but it also evokes (whether consciously or not) Joseph M. W. Turner’s series of drawings of picturesquely decaying windmills, made even more well known by John Ruskin’s analysis of them in Modern Painters (1856) (17–26). Throughout the description, Montague positions the reader as the passive and stationary observer of a motionless landscape who becomes detached from the events taking place in it. We could therefore even evaluate this passage according to the terms Hynes uses to critique Bone’s Battle of the Somme—namely, that the war is merely another “landscape subject, treated in the most traditional of landscape forms, the hilltop vista.” The seated spectator in Bone’s drawing is a conventional figure of Victorian pictography, someone who also “represents the viewer of the picture, who is simply another spectator, further back. He confirms that the view that they are both observing is worth looking at, and that the right relation to it is a viewing relation (that’s what landscapes are for). It is a drawing that has everything to do with landscape, and nothing really to do with the war being fought there” (160). Montague’s passage places the reader in a position equivalent to that of Bone’s spectator. The presence of each observer, and the observer’s relation to the observed, verifies that the observation is an aesthetic phenomenon of representation, rather than a historical moment of explanation (as in the citation of The Surrender of Breda). Indeed, Hynes’s observation that the drawing has “nothing really to do with the war being fought there” parallels Montague’s assertion that the aesthetic implications of the view of the landscape from Cassel prove more important than the town’s status as the “prize of three mighty battles that do not matter much now.” In both the cases of The Battle of the Somme and Disenchantment, when it comes to landscape, aesthetics trump history. Having set the reader in the position of painterly observer, Montague establishes the conditions for interpreting the final Allied offensive of the war in Corot-like terms of an exchange of knowledge, according to which “mist” signifies much more than obscurity. After the episode in which Montague pictorializes soldiers as “friezes seen in silhouette” and notes the cavalry’s lances in a reminder of The Surrender of Breda, he describes the attack begun on the following day (August 8, 1918) by first revisiting the paradoxical terms of simultaneously losing and gaining sight. The pictorialized vision of soldiers must have been a dream, as Montague claims to have been “awakened by some bird that may have had a dream too and had fallen” noisily from

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its perch. Already the lines separating compartments of objective reality are beginning to blur. “Opening my eyes,” he continues, “I found that a thickish veil was drawn over the stars. When I sat up the veil was gone; my eyes were above it; a quilt of white mist, about a foot thick, had spread itself over the meadow” (171). As he opens his eyes, he finds he has been dreaming; then he discovers that his vision is obscured; then he rises above the obscuring mist—only to see that the mist obscures the ground below him. Unsettlingly, sight here is granted and withheld, and mists and clouds appear, move, and disappear. However, this action will seem less like an episode of disorientation if we consider it the occasion of a perpetually reversing mechanism of antithesis, according to whose terms the loss and gain of different categories of knowledge go hand in hand. At first, Montague praises the mist shrouding the terrain: “Good! Let it thicken away and be shoes of silence and armour of darkness at dawn for our men.” The stars are covered once again, and “[t]he mist was doing its best; it seemed to fill the whole wide vessel of the universe.” Montague then takes us to the top of “a steepsided ridge” overlooking the Ancre and the Somme rivers, the scene of the impending battle. “From the ridge there was, in pre-war days, a beautiful view,” he writes. “Southwards, beyond the river, stretched, as far as eye could see, the expanse of the level Santerre, one of France’s best cornlands. Southeastward you looked up the Somme valley, mile after mile, towards Bray and Péronne—a shining valley of poplars and stream and linked ponds and redroofed villages among the poplars” (171–73). From here, one might have been able to watch the battle unfold. But on this particular morning the view was obstructed: [T]here was no seeing. The mist, in billowy, bolster-like masses, wallowed and rolled about at the touch of light airs [ . . . ]. Of what might go on in that pit of enigma the eye could tell nothing; the mind hung on what news might come through the ear. [ . . . ] The stage was set, the play of plays was about to begin on the broad stage below; only, between our eyes and the boards there was hung a white curtain. (173)

Then, as the battle begins, the mist lifts. “It rolled right up into the sky in one piece, like a theatre curtain,” he explains, “almost suddenly taking its white quilted thickness away from between our eyes and the vision so much longed for during four years. Beyond the river a miracle—the miracle—had begun.” The miracle is the taking of German trenches on the long fought-over Somme Salient. “For a moment,” he writes, “the object of all dream and desire seemed to have come; the flaming sword was gone, and the gate of the garden open” (174–76). The lifting of the mist now signifies, instead of the dangerous loss

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of cover for the advancing troops, the realization that the end of the war was at hand. Yet this knowledge comes with a price: an awareness of loss. The Allied advance came “[t]oo late, as you know. We awoke from delight, and remembered” (176). It had cost too many lives to achieve this success. Furthermore, the failure to defeat the German Army decisively in the field, coupled with the recriminations of the peace treaty, rendered this victory hollow. “What a victory it might have been—the real, the Winged Victory, chivalric, whole and unstained!” he exclaims. “The bride that our feckless wooing had sought and not won in the generous youth of the war had come to us now: an old woman, or dead, she no longer refused us” (178). Montague’s description of the meaning of this final battle and the war as a whole involves a complex interplay of opposites and paradoxes, as we have noted in his accounts of the mist covering the ground where he slept and the site of the battle: awakening from a reality that proves to be a dream; alternating between seeing and not seeing, concealing and not concealing, knowing and learning the illusory nature of knowledge. For Montague, most importantly, understanding the significance of these paradoxes and alternations—and therefore, understanding the war—requires recourse to Corot’s concepts of topographical representation. For Corot, when the mist lifts, the physical terrain can be seen but artistically nothing more can be done—in the sense that the opportunity for creative expression has been lost, for the subject was the mist and not what it had obscured. Similarly, the lifting of the mist from the battlefield in Montague’s description signifies at once the ability to see the military action and to realize the loss of a related opportunity. Because of the failure to live up to chivalric ideals, nothing more can be done to fulfill the dream of an honorable, just, and lasting peace from the sacrifices that had made peace possible. Montague’s sense of futility does not correspond completely to Corot’s sense of closure. However, resorting to visual language and Corot’s painterly sensibility provides Montague a mechanism for explaining the paradoxes of sight and insight inherent in the clearing away of mists both literal and figurative. Montague’s invocation of Corot operates through the mechanism he describes in The Right Place as “intuitive inference”—“get[ting] at one thing through another,” just as painters such as Bone and Corot succeed in their craft at the moment that they record, through “topographic portraiture,” a reality that eludes the language and look of realism (41). The topographical element of Disenchantment therefore makes the work more important than simply as a polemic by an embittered former soldier, in the reading that the text tends to attract. As I have noted, numerous critics taking stock of Great War literature have found it useful to position

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Disenchantment in a trajectory of artistic responses ranging from patriotic abstractions through realistic portrayals of front-line experience to postwar satire and indictment. However, characterizing this book as wholly a narrative of denunciation overlooks the qualification Montague includes in the book’s final pages: a prescription for cultural renewal explicitly bound to the land, and shaped by an artistic appreciation of it. Perhaps, as Montague asserts, “the day of the fighting man, him and his chivalric hobbies, was over” (183). But the spirit in which the fighting man entered into the conflict might be harnessed, recaptured, and transformed through the example and power of the landscape imagination. At the end of Disenchantment, Montague works to recuperate from the war the meaning that the war had denied. He again turns to landscape to attempt this recuperation, deploying landscape as a faculty of the imagination, and an organized method of topographical representation, in its codes, terms, conventions, and traditions: as in a mist not of concealment, but of seeing. As we have observed, Montague treats landscape not as a discredited topic, or an exhausted medium (in the sense of a painterly mode). Instead, for him landscape serves in the mediating role of providing a means to achieve something—a method of seeing that enables him to interpret the war’s meaning and visualize a route to postwar cultural reconstruction. Montague already had a prescriptive turn of mind, as Muirhead Bone recognized when touring the battlefields with him and a Russian colonel in August 1916. The party had just visited an advanced dressing station in the cellars of the ruined Château of Contalmaison, and they proceeded to take lunch while seated on the adjacent slope, with a view of the battle below them. “That it was all the vividest kind of pleasure to Montague to be there was very evident,” Bone explains: History had invited him to witness one of her surgical operations, and he was proud of the privilege, and not the man to lose anything of what was going on. Indeed Montague’s whole attitude to life often reminded one of a kind but consummate surgeon. To us of the weaker knees it seemed to breathe the very words, “Keep calm, and it won’t hurt you.” He had the complete detachment of a man whose courage of mind and heart liberated him from all anxieties. (Elton 138–39)

Many in Britain before the war had seen the coming conflict as a purgative, a clinical cleansing, or an excision of culture’s cancerous decadence: the acerbic and hyperbolic version of what is futurism’s war, “the world’s only hygiene,” in F. T. Marinetti’s well-known formulation (50). Here, Bone chooses a similarly medical metaphor to describe Montague’s sensibility; illness has crept into

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life, and history performs one of her periodic operations. Yet Disenchantment clearly shows that Montague is not bloodthirsty; on the contrary, the attitude expressed in the imagined words “Keep calm, and it won’t hurt you” reflects both an awareness of the inevitability of wars and the confidence that the salutary effects of excising German militarism would somehow justify the loss of human life incurred. Disenchantment also shows, however, that Montague had reason in the end to wonder if he had misplaced his confidence, for the Versailles Treaty seemed to spoil the redeeming promise of the sacrifices Britons had made. Accordingly, in the penultimate chapter of the book (appropriately entitled “Any Cure?”), Montague argues that England, as a structure of values, can and must be built up again. To do so, he writes, one must rely on an explicitly aesthetic and imaginative power. He explains, “Among the mind’s powers is one that comes of itself to many children and artists. [ . . . ] This is the power of taking delight in a thing, or rather in anything, everything, not as a means to some other end, but just because it is what it is, as the lover dotes on whatever may be the traits of the beloved object” (213). He goes on to provide the significant example of a child who “in the full health of his mind will put his hand flat on the summer turf, feel it, and give a little shiver of private glee at the elastic firmness of the globe. He is not thinking how well it will do for some game or to feed sheep upon. [ . . . ] The child’s [mind] is sheer affection, the true ecstatic sense of the thing’s inherent characteristics” (213–14). Montague explicitly orients the child’s appreciation of the land not by the remunerative capacity of the ground, but rather by the appreciation of the thing in itself. “The right education, if we could find it,” Montague claims, “would work up this creative faculty of delight into all its branching possibilities of knowledge, wisdom, and nobility” (215). In and through Disenchantment, Montague has found the right education: it is the ordering of the world through the landscape imagination. First, Montague identifies this imagination in the selected work of Velázquez and Corot; then he employs it himself by the way he sees the war through the pictorial sensibilities of those artists; then he locates that imagination in the child, and by extension recommends it to his readers. Montague’s implicit invocation of the Horatian ideal of art as that which delights and instructs, brought into intersection with an appreciation of the ground through the landscape imagination, is the formula for regenerating a ravaged culture. Sustaining this vision of regeneration though a vision of the land and the artistic representation of it requires vigilance, however, as Montague explains in the concluding paragraphs of the book. There, he pits the war veterans (as the guardians of an antiwar spirit) against a younger generation, who missed

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“Seest thou not, I say, what a deformed thief this fashion is? How giddily a’ turns about all the hot bloods between fourteen and five-and-thirty? Sometimes fashioning them like Pharaoh’s soldiers in the reechy painting, sometimes like god Bel’s priests in the old church window; sometimes like the shaven Hercules in the smirched worm-eaten tapestry?” Anything to be in the fashion. There is only one thing for it. There must still be five or six million exsoldiers. They are the most determined peace party that ever existed in Britain. (228)

Montague fittingly concludes his memoir by invoking these pictorial representations of soldiers, priests, and deities. Works of art, as sources of inspiration and examples of conduct, can also deceive. One must choose carefully. The Beautiful and Picturesque in Rebecca West’s Landscapes While Montague saw the landscape aesthetic as a prescription for cultural regeneration through the faculty of imagination, Rebecca West offers a different view in The Return of the Soldier (composed in 1916 and 1917, and published in 1918). In that novel, the land functions not as a source of inspiration, renewal, and reconstruction for the war participants who return to it and to the nation as a whole, but as something threatened by the presence of soldiers. When West published this novel, which gives an account of a shell-shocked British soldier who returns to England suffering from amnesia, the unprecedented destruction of the First World War must have made traditional artistic notions of sublimity and terror seem positively quaint. Yet West follows Romantic-era codes in establishing telling associations between each character’s persona and different kinds of landscapes. She alters the details of the historical setting to build a fictional world whose formation echoes traditional landscape theories. Her novel also revisits themes in William Wordsworth’s poems “Adventures on Salisbury Plain” (composed 1795) and “The Discharged Soldier” (composed 1798), which associate the sublimity of warfare with the sacrificial subject. West’s novel thus continues an established aesthetic differentiating the beautiful, picturesque, and sublime, while she critiques the status of the sublime as an empowering experience in the context of modern warfare.

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the war but thirst for glory, and the older men whose political intrigues and ambitions and personal immunity engineered the Great War in the first place. Militarism is likely to return, as a recurring “fashion” of youth that Montague attacks through the words of Borachio in Much Ado About Nothing:

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The Return of the Soldier is set primarily in Baldry Court, the country house of the aristocratic soldier Chris Baldry. He returns from the war in Flanders in a state of amnesia brought on by shell shock, and the story relates the effort by his wife, Kitty, and his cousin Jenny, who narrates the tale, to restore his memory. Chris cannot remember anything later than fifteen years previously, the time of his love affair with Margaret—an innkeeper’s daughter whom he had left before meeting Kitty (and of whom Kitty had been unaware). Chris’s memories take him back to an inn on Monkey Island on the Thames, where he had courted Margaret. The two quarreled; Chris left for Mexico to look after family business, Margaret’s father died, she left Monkey Island, and Chris adhered to his social class by marrying the wealthy Kitty upon returning from Mexico. Chris and Kitty had a son, who died as a child. Margaret, now married and no longer beautiful, lives in a middle-class house in Wealdstone, “the red suburban stain which fouls the fields” not far from Baldry Court (9). As Samuel Hynes has already observed, The Return of the Soldier is therefore partly about suburban expansion and about industrialization encroaching on the natural world.9 The novel also holds class relations up to light through the choice Chris must make between Margaret and Kitty: between living in an idyllic past with thoroughly middle-class Margaret, safe from the war, and regaining his memory to return to his aristocratic wife, Kitty, and to his soldier’s duties. He finally does regain his memory, and “the return of the soldier” is therefore a manifold return: of the soldier to Baldry Court, to the present, to himself, and to the battlefield. The setting for Chris’s choice is anything but a mere background, however; West differentiates her characters by associating each of them with varying constructions of the landscape as sites of the beautiful or picturesque. Upon his marriage to Kitty, Chris had Baldry Court rebuilt; “he handed it over to architects,” Jenny explains, “who had not so much the wild eye of the artist as the knowing wink of the manicurist, and between them they massaged the dear old place into matter for innumerable photographs in the illustrated papers.” Baldry Court, with “the suave decorum of [its] lawn,” symbolizes their marriage and their class ties, as a house remade into an idyll according to prescriptions associated with Kitty (and, to a lesser extent, Jenny) (4). Before Chris’s return, while the two women discuss not having heard from Chris in two weeks, Jenny looks out over the grounds and thinks, “My eye followed the mellow brick of the garden wall through the trees, and I reflected that by the contriving of these gardens that lay, well-kept as a woman’s hand, on the south side of the hill, Kitty and I had proved ourselves worthy of the past generation that had set the old house on this sunny ledge, overhanging and overhung by beauty. And we had done much for the new house” (5–6). The characterization of the gardens as “well-kept as a woman’s hand” neatly links

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aristocratic lineage (Kitty) to aristocratic place (Baldry Court) through an aesthetic of “contriving” the landscape of the beautiful. Jenny prides herself on the house’s brightness, its cleanness, its “green pleasantness” (5), filled with “brittle beautiful things” (6), in short, its “beauty”—a word repeated several times—that is the product of the two women’s effort and taste (4–6). That taste is shaped by the aesthetics of “the illustrated papers”; furthermore, there is clearly a gender inflection associating landscape beauty with femininity, as in likening architectural work to that of a “manicurist.” For Chris, however, Baldry Court in its improved state represents a departure from his own preferences. As a boy, he had played with Jenny in the woods surrounding the family manor, and that wild setting was fertile ground for his strong imagination. As Jenny remembers it, “He thought that the birch tree would really stir and shrink and quicken into an enchanted princess, that he really was a Red Indian and that his disguise would suddenly fall from him at the right sundown, that at any moment a tiger might lift red fangs through the bracken [ . . . ]” (7–8). Chris never abandons his attachment to this wild magic landscape, as becomes clear years later when he first leaves for the war. At that moment, Jenny believes that Chris takes pleasure in what the two women have made of the country house. But after he “stared out on the lawn,” Jenny recalls, he “broke off suddenly,” going through the house and out into the grounds. “Then he went to the edge of the wood,” she continues, “and stood staring down into the clumps of dark-leaved rhododendra and the yellow tangle of last year’s bracken and the cold winter black of the trees.” Only after lingering at this rough, dark, and decayed scene did he return “broodingly” to be with Kitty before departing (7). Clearly, Chris has managed to submerge his preference for the wild landscape while having Baldry Court beautified, in a strategy of sublimation akin to his having settled for Kitty as a wife. In arraying Kitty, Jenny, and Baldry Court, on the one hand, and Chris and the woods on the other, West follows specific Romantic-era codes differentiating the beautiful from the picturesque. While Jenny prefers the beautiful, she can at least recognize the picturesque, exercising a power of discernment that facilitates her role as narrator. For it is through her eyes that we see the contrast between the picturesqueness of the natural world surrounding Baldry Court and the fabricated beauty of the country house and its immediate grounds. Later, when Jenny brings Margaret to see Chris, Jenny remarks: [Margaret] looked out at the strip of turf, so bright that one would think it wet, and lit here and there with snowdrops and scillas and crocuses, that runs between the drive and the tangle of silver birch and bramble and fern. There is

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For Jenny, the roughness outside the gates exists in order better to highlight the smooth beauty within. West’s division of the landscape into these two kinds is not new, of course; she relies on a traditional vocabulary of the beautiful and picturesque deployed by critics for over a century. That the immediate surroundings of Baldry Court, with their bright turf and cultivated flowers, display “controlled beauty” that is “made delicate and decorated into felicity” (55) recalls the system of landscape improvement developed by Lancelot “Capability” Brown and Humphry Repton, and analyzed by William Gilpin and Uvedale Price, among others. Gilpin’s Three Essays (1794) emphasize roughness as the most important quality of the picturesque; while he aims primarily to explain painting, his description of the natural picturesque matches what Jenny sees in the land beyond the gates. Gilpin writes: [W]hy does an elegant piece of gardening make no figure on canvas? The shape is pleasing [ . . . ] but the smoothness of the whole [ . . . ] offends in picture. Turn the lawn into a piece of broken ground: plant rugged oaks instead of flowering shrubs; break the edges of the walk; give it the rudeness of a road; mark it with wheel-tracks; and scatter around a few stones, and brushwood; in a word, instead of making the whole smooth, make it rough; and you make it also picturesque. (Essay 1: 7–8)

Price, in An Essay on the Picturesque, as Compared with the Sublime and the Beautiful (1842), distinguishes between beauty as smoothness and delicacy, on one hand, and the picturesque as ruggedness and irregularity on the other (90). He goes on to repeat and extend Gilpin’s formula into a catalogue of roughness, disorder, age, and decay that also characterize the picturesque landscape in West’s account (Price 90, 95). With such prescriptions in mind, we can more fully appreciate the distinction between the roughness of the “dark gorse and rough amber grasses” and “tangle of silver birch and bramble and fern” beyond the gates, and the uniformly bright turf and domesticated flowers adorning the improved grounds (55). Immanuel Kant, whose analytic of the beautiful in Critique of Judgment (1790) is one of the foundational texts in aesthetic philosophy, does not offer a definition of the picturesque, and his analysis of beauty does not therefore

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no aesthetic reason for that border; the common outside looks lovelier where it fringes the road with dark gorse and rough amber grasses. Its use is purely philosophic; it proclaims that here we estimate only controlled beauty, that the wild will not have its way within our gates, that it must be made delicate and decorated into felicity. (55)

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lend itself to direct comparison with those of Gilpin or Price with regard to West’s novel. However, his definition of beauty—“the form of the purposiveness of an object, so far as this is perceived in it without any representation of a purpose”—does describes a state that applies in certain terms to the cultivated landscape at Baldry Court (73). It might seem that when the “architects” of Chris’s home “massaged the dear old place into matter for innumerable photographs in the illustrated papers,” there is an implicit purpose at work, in terms of an attempt to establish a class accomplishment in the public eye (4). However, a description of Kantian beauty occurs when she notes how a border of grass and flowers has “no aesthetic reason” for its existence, and that “[i]ts use is purely philosophic” (55). Furthermore, by couching a description of the landscape in explicitly philosophical terms, Jenny’s narrative sets the stage for an overt association of characters with landscape analysis. This is the physical and psychological environment to which Chris will return from the front, unable to recognize his wife, Kitty, and still in love with Margaret. Margaret, as we soon see, is herself associated with the picturesque. Chris’s choice between two women, which is also a choice between living in the past and returning to the present, manifests itself through what is essentially a choice between two kinds of landscapes. Frank Baldry, Chris’s cousin, visits him in his hospital, writing in a letter to Jenny that Chris is shell-shocked and “in a very strange state indeed.” Frank reports that Chris “wanted to get back to Harrowweald” (the region of Baldry court), inquiring first about the landscape: “He said things about the wood and the upper pond that seemed sentimental but not so much out of the way. He wanted to know if the daffies [significantly, wildflowers] were out yet” (19). When Chris does arrive at Baldry Court, he is disturbed to find it in its improved state. “The house is different,” he declares (25); he misses the old room of his youth and he trips down some new steps. The house is now a “prison” for Chris, Jenny realizes, and he wistfully reminisces to her about the idyllic setting of Monkey Island, where he had courted Margaret (26). Monkey Island is an islet along the south bank of the Thames near Windsor, where Margaret’s father had kept an inn. Through Jenny relating Chris’s account, West describes the approach to the inn, using the familiar picturesque terms of roughness, disharmony, and decay. In Bray-on-Thames, one followed a private road past a cottage and some outbuildings having a dilapidated, “knock-kneed” appearance, then past “a shed that let in the rain through its mossy tiles” and a “rusting aviary” to a white hawthorn (35). Chris describes the hawthorn tree “meticulously as though it were of immense significance” (35), and it reappears later, in Margaret’s account, as a motif of the love between the pair (49). Perhaps the importance of the English hawthorn lies in its botanical characteristics. It is known for its thorns, profusion of tiny

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flowers, and rather gangly branch structure: if not decidedly picturesque, then certainly less regularly beautiful than the Lebanon cedar gracing the lawn at Baldry Court. Beyond the hawthorn were “the dark green glassy waters of an unvisited backwater” separating the riverbank from the island, where more stately walnut and chestnut trees surrounded the Monkey Island Inn (35). But Chris and Margaret preferred to meet “in the fringe of rough grass on the other side of the island” (39). It was in this “wild part of the island” that they walked together, “where poplars and alders and willows grew round a clearing in which white willow herb and purple figwort and here and there a potato flower [ . . . ] fought down to the fringe of iris on the river’s lip. In this gentle jungle was a rustic seat, [ . . . ] and on it they sat until a pale moon appeared above the green cornfield on the other side of the river” (40). Monkey Island, associated as strongly with Margaret as Baldry Court stands for Kitty, is clearly the site of the natural picturesque, “this gentle jungle” where two lovers can meet on “a rustic seat” amidst wildflowers and grasses growing in rough, untamed confusion. After Chris describes Monkey Island to Jenny, he makes it clear that he cannot abandon Margaret for Kitty. The next morning, it falls to Jenny to bring Margaret to Baldry Court for a meeting with Chris. Before Jenny leaves, she finds Chris on the pond: It is a place where autumn lives half the year [ . . . ] here the pond is fringed with yellow bracken and tinged bramble, and the water flows amber over last winter’s leaves. Through this brown gloom, darkened now by a surly sky, Chris was taking the skiff [ . . . ]. He had come down here soon after breakfast, driven from the house by the strangeness of all but the outer walls, and discontented with the ground because everywhere but this wet intractable spot bore the marks of Kitty’s genius. After lunch there had been another attempt to settle down, but, with a grim glare at a knot of late Christmas roses bright in a copse that fifteen years ago had been dark, he went back to the russet-eaved boat-house and this play with the skiff. It was a boy’s sport, and it was dreadful to see him turn a middle-aged face as he brought the boat inshore. (43)

This passage, while lengthy, is worth citing because so much of the novel’s psychological oppositions—between youth and age, the past and the future, middle and upper class—are made visible here through the tension between beautiful and picturesque landscapes. Chris, thinking himself fifteen years younger, haunts a wild spot reminding him of the enchanted woods he played in as a boy. He longs for Margaret, and in his “play with the skiff ” (43) echoes his first trip to Monkey Island, when he, “by the first clean quick movement of tying up his boat[,] made [Margaret] his slave” (50). The rough wilderness by the pond recreates the

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wild part of Monkey Island he and Margaret frequented, and he notes with disapproval the “bright” planted roses he unexpectedly sees (Kitty’s improving touch) in the otherwise “dark” copse of his memories. It might at first seem odd that Chris should choose such a gloomy spot to wait for Margaret, but the classic elements of the natural picturesque here (the autumnal obscurity, darkened water, “surly sky,” and tangled foliage) make it the visible manifestation of his preference for Margaret and Monkey Island over Kitty and Baldry Court. Furthermore, the way that the “water flows [ . . . ] over last winter’s leaves” symbolically underlines the continuity of past and present through the palimpsest of memory and perception (43). Like Chris, Margaret cannot appreciate the country house’s polished beauty. Upon entering “the magnificence of Baldry Court” and laying eyes on the result of “Kitty’s decorative genius,” as Jenny again puts it, Margaret can only say, “ ‘It’s a big place. How poor Chris must have worked to keep it up’ ” (56). Jenny witnesses Chris run across the lawn to see Margaret, her beauty now roughened by time; to Jenny’s surprise, however, he fails to notice Margaret’s altered state: “they looked straight, they looked delightedly [at one another]!” she reports (59). Both are indifferent to time’s ravages, in a move that calls to mind the noble picturesque—the unconscious, unpretending, and indifferent ruin—that John Ruskin celebrates in Modern Painters (16). The two embrace and “[pass] under the tossing branches of the cedar to the wood beyond”—in other words, to the picturesque landscape and aesthetic values that only they share (59). Chris has apparently made his choice between Kitty and Margaret, and he expresses his decision through the preference for one kind of nature over another. The next morning, Jenny and Kitty note despairingly that Chris cannot seem to see the flowers they put out for him in the house, while he “kept till they rotted on the stalk the daffodils which Margaret brought from [her] garden” (61). Dr. Gilbert Anderson, a shell shock specialist, arrives at Baldry Court to cure Chris. Jenny looks for Chris and Margaret when the doctor arrives, and she finds the pair in the wild part of Baldry Court’s grounds, where Margaret is drawing him into a “magic circle” (70). This last formulation is telling, as Margaret had herself described picturesque Monkey Island to Jenny in terms that made Jenny feel “as though it were not a place, but a magic state”—just like the kind of enchanted wild of Chris’s happy boyhood (49). Now reunited with Chris, Margaret draws him toward his youth and his remembered love for her, away from Kitty and artificial beauty and toward the magic, rough, and wild picturesque. Jenny realizes as much, saying Margaret is leading Chris “out of the splendid house which was not so much a house as a vast piece of space partitioned off from the universe and decorated partly for beauty and partly to make our privacy more insolent, out of the garden

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where the flowers took thought as to how they should grow and the wood made formal as a pillared aisle by forestry [ . . . ]” (70). Thus, even Jenny ultimately pits romantic freedom against aesthetic flourishment and wealthy seclusion through the symbolic properties of different landscapes. Jenny and Kitty enlist the aid of Dr. Anderson to keep Chris from physically and metaphorically leaving the beautified grounds of Baldry Court (and to enable his departure for the war). West then uses the character of the doctor to reassert the traditional Romantic valorization of the picturesque over the beautiful, though in the terms of modern Freudian psychoanalysis. Anderson interviews Chris and delivers his assessment to the three women, explaining that Chris’s “deep self ” or “essential self ” has a secret desire that it sends, disguised as an obsession over something else, into “the house of conduct erected by the superficial self ” (79). A man who wants to leave his wife, in his example, might start to harbor a violent hatred for pickled cabbage as a psychological substitute. Anderson seeks to lay bare Chris’s suppressed wish: to dissolve a physically unfulfilling marriage, as it turns out, manifested by a desired forgetfulness so strong that it caused a case of total amnesia extending back to the time before Kitty’s arrival and the country house’s improvement. (We then finally learn that the reason the War Office did not wire Kitty when Chris was wounded was because Chris had “forgotten” to register his home address when joining the service.) Hence, Anderson’s characterization of the conflict between Chris’s “essential self ” and his “superficial self ” ends up aligning the authenticity and primacy of Chris’s deep needs with a prioritization of the Romantic picturesque through Margaret. As happy as Chris is with Margaret now, Jenny asserts that it would be wrong to let him continue to live with amnesia. Significantly, she foresees Chris’s pitiful future in this state through nature imagery. “[I]f we left him in his magic circle there would come a time when his delusion turned to a senile idiocy” she explains, “when one’s eyes no longer followed him caressingly as he went down to look for the first primroses in the wood [ . . . ] He who was as a flag flying from our tower would become a queer-shaped patch of eccentricity on the countryside [ . . . ]. He would not be quite a man” (88). At last, we come to the crux of the issue, as Jenny envisions it: the real danger is that Chris would merge with the picturesque landscape. For Jenny to imagine Chris as “a queer-shaped patch of eccentricity on the countryside” goes beyond the strictly metaphorical terms of likening Chris to a spatial feature. “[T]he doddering old man” wandering the forest would quite literally become another untamed element of the terrain, like the wildflowers he would hunt; “the stately music of his being would become a witless piping in the bushes,” as “senile idiocy” would render his muttering as meaningless as the picturesque song of a wild bird (88). To prevent this outcome, Anderson

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and the women agree to have Margaret see Chris alone, taking him some clothing and a ball that had belonged to Chris and Kitty’s dead son, in order to jar Chris back into the present. This Margaret does, meeting Chris out beyond the garden. Jenny watches the pair return and pause beneath the large cedar tree on the lawn just outside the house. In the gathering gloom, Chris turns his back on Margaret and happiness and walks back to the house across the lawn. He has been cured but he still hates what he sees, “stepp[ing] aside to avoid a patch of brightness cast by a lighted window on the grass; lights in [the] house were worse than darkness [ . . . ]” (90). Light and darkness, just like the smooth and the rough, the ordered house and the wild woods, Baldry Court and the “magic state” of Monkey Island: to the very end (and with this scene the novel closes), West relies on the contrast between the beautiful and the picturesque to portray the moral dilemma confronting the characters in the novel (49). War, Sublimity, and Sacrifice While West establishes the differences between Kitty and Margaret in terms of the beautiful and the picturesque, she also relies on the qualities of the third major type of Romantic landscape in order to engage the war that is seemingly outside the novel. The war supplies a violent energy, an ominous immanence, that threatens to burst out of the landscape at any moment— like the “tiger [lifting] red fangs through the bracken” in the woods of Chris’s boyhood play (8). The looming, unspoken presence of the war gives the landscape its hard edges and darker tinges. For example, when Jenny looks for Chris and Margaret to take them to see Dr. Anderson, her recognition that success means Chris’s return to war occurs at the same time that, in her words, “a hardening of the light during the afternoon [ . . . ] made the dear familiar woods rich and sinister [ . . . ].” Jenny feels a “sense of danger [ . . . ] as though a snake coiled under every leaf,” as she sets in motion the events that will lead to Chris’s cure and likely death in battle (68). Behind the conscious contrast between the picturesque and the beautiful, then, lies the uneasy sense that all is not right in the topography of the novel. Our attention to the contest between Margaret and Kitty neglects the unnamed, but ever-present danger hidden in the landscape: the violent sublime. This treatment of landscape blends well-known associations of violence with the sublime as articulated by Longinus, in his treatise On the Sublime (third century a.d.), and by Edmund Burke, in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). Longinus offers as one key example of sublime writing, an ode by Sappho in which the “the frenzy of love” (in Longinus’s words) threatens dismemberment. The sight

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Yea, my tongue is broken, and through and through me ‘Neath the flesh, impalpable fire runs tingling; Nothing see mine eyes, and a noise of roaring Waves in my ears sounds; Sweat runs down in rivers, a tremor seizes All my limbs and paler than grass in autumn, Caught by pains of menacing death, I falter, Lost in the love trance. (Qtd. in Longinus 17)

Yet Sappho’s speaker overcomes the violence done to her body, Longinus explains, and the fragmentation that Sappho figuratively undergoes allows her to draw strength from her experience. Edmund Burke similarly cites the threat of impending violence as a key constituent of the experience of sublimity. Violence induces terror, and “Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling” (39). The strongest emotion is the fear of pain, or “an emotion of distress” (86). “[T]he most genuine effect, and truest test of the sublime,” he also writes, is the “delightful horror” we feel when confronted with such phenomena as vastness, infinity, or powerful effects of nature (73). Elsewhere he describes this “delightful horror” as “a sort of tranquillity tinged with terror” (136). However, Burke further characterizes the sublime in relation to violence as whatever excites that delight we feel when “we have an idea of pain and danger, without being actually in such circumstances” (51). “Whenever danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible[,]” he concedes, “but at certain distances, and with certain modifications, they may be, and they are delightful, as we every day experience” (40). Thus, the experience of sublimity requires not only a sense of danger, but also a feeling of distance or safety that enables the satisfied recognition of successful self-preservation. In this respect, Burke’s analysis is paralleled by Kant. For the latter philosopher, who was familiar with the theories of his English predecessors, the sublime inheres in the observer’s inability to apprehend the limitless in nature—as in contemplating the power of volcanoes, storms, or the ocean. Nevertheless, he explains, “the sight of them is the more attractive,

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of her lover causes Sappho’s speaker to undergo sensory fragmentation and bodily paralysis:

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the more fearful it is, provided only that we are in security.” “Satisfaction” depends on a feeling of safety, and observing these natural phenomena “gives us courage to measure ourselves against the apparent almightiness of nature,” insofar as we discover within ourselves “a faculty of resistance” composed of our powers of reason.10 For Kant, as well as for Longinus and Burke, then, the sublime—even (or especially) where it intersects with violence—provides an occasion for emotional or rational integration or delight. War, as the epitome of organized violence, would seem to provide many opportunities for encounters with the sublime (although only Longinus draws examples from war). West goes beyond the examples of violence offered by these previous authors, though, to demonstrate how the catastrophic scale and consequences of modern warfare’s destruction empty sublimity of any positive value. For instance, whereas Longinus highlights Sappho’s evocation of figurative fragmentation as that which “produce[s] the outstanding quality of the poem” and makes possible the speaker’s subsequent reintegration (18), in The Return of the Soldier a motif of dismemberment appears repeatedly as a horrific, ironic joke. Two soldiers are “talking in a void: ‘Help me, old man, I’ve got no legs . . . .’ ” one says. The other replies, “I can’t, old man, I’ve got no hands . . . .” (71). Unlike in the fictive world of Sappho, in the real world of amputee veterans there is no remedy for this fragmentation, and no power can be drawn from it. Chris’s choice between two women—two landscapes—does not exist, really; the fact of war has altered the formula, and he cannot return to a life of repressed cohabitation with the beautiful at Baldry Court. Instead, as Jenny reminds us at the very end of the novel, Chris now “would go back to that flooded trench in Flanders under that sky more full of flying death than clouds, to that No Man’s Land where bullets fall like rain on the rotting faces of the dead”: in other words, to the horror of a sublime landscape that has no redeeming aesthetic or metaphysical dimensions (90). Some ambiguity does enter into West’s topographical scheme in the episode of the Greek temple on Monkey Island, for when Chris lifts Margaret up among the temple columns he seems to place her into a context of the beautiful instead of the picturesque. However, that the architectural refinement surrounding Margaret dissolves into an image of the front is apposite to the novel’s plot. Furthermore, as much we might read West’s descriptions of England and the front as distinct and separate regions, between which she moves back and forth, we might also consider these regions as altered images of each other. Specifically, the artificial qualities of the “circle of smooth turf ” (41) and the temple standing on it—which serves no religious purpose— share the purposelessness of the “strip of turf ” between the Baldry Court drive and the surrounding vegetation. We have observed that, as West describes it,

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“There is no aesthetic reason for that border [ . . . ]. Its use is purely philosophic [ . . . ]” (55). The arbitrariness in the layout of both locations reflects the geometry of the front, with its variant and arbitrary divisions and borders, its line of trenches that runs through fields, woods, and mine pits, capriciously dividing rivers, roads, and towns. By 1916–1917, when West was writing her novel, the scope of the war’s destruction became fully evident, starting with the length of the casualty lists from the Somme, which could not be concealed. Perhaps such a toll in human lives rendered Romantic conceptions of sublimity untenable, as the experience of terror acquired a wholly new meaning. But if the Burkean and Longinian models of the sublime cannot fully account for its appearance in The Return of the Soldier (after all, Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry appeared decades before the French Revolution and the original Reign of Terror), we might profitably turn to the different formulation of sublimity expressed in the poetry of William Wordsworth. As we have noted, war could be characterized as the ultimate encounter with the sublime, especially in relation to the Napoleonic and the World Wars, which were continental in scope and incurred unprecedented loss of life. Such events as the complete destruction of Napoleon’s 500,000-man army in Russia, French atrocities in occupied Spain, and the hecatombs of two decades of international conflict made the Napoleonic Wars the unmistakable precursor of the First World War. Therefore, West’s engagement with the Great War in The Return of the Soldier already shares an important contextual similarity with certain of Wordsworth’s poems. West explicitly links her novel to Wordsworth on one obvious level: references to Tintern Abbey. Framed views of the abbey are one of a few things Margaret still has in her Wealdstone house that had been in her home at the Monkey Island Inn fifteen years earlier (the others being a photograph of her mother, her mother’s sewing machine, and carpet slippers—first her father’s, then her husband’s) (41, 45). These mass-produced views of Tintern Abbey thereby help invoke Margaret’s past and present middle-class existence while simultaneously reinforcing her association with the picturesque landscape. Furthermore, the inclusion of this detail sounds a note of pathos: we can read the abbey’s physical ruination as the topographical equivalent of the coarsening of Margaret’s former good looks and the loss of the romance between Margaret and Chris. This detail also recalls two Wordsworth poems written during wartime and situating the returning serviceman in his landscape: “Adventures on Salisbury Plain” (1795) and “The Discharged Soldier” (1798). (“Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey” [1798] appeared in the same period.) Significantly, in both the case of the first poem’s sailor and that of the second

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For years the work of carnage did not cease, And Death’s worst aspect daily he survey’d Death’s minister [ . . . ] (lines 82–84)

The sailor robs and murders another traveler within sight of his own home, the senseless destruction of war having seemed to infect his spirit. Henceforth, he is doomed to wander a blasted landscape prefiguring Chris’s Flanders trenches, one of “clouds and stormy fire” and “thirst and hunger” (46, 51). The poem ends with the sailor in a gibbet, “hung on high in [an] iron case” (820), while Jenny foresees Chris’s “rotting” body merging “into union with that brown texture of corruption which is No Man’s Land” (71). In both instances, bodies join the terrain—either physically, in Chris’s case, or metaphorically, as the sailor’s corpse becomes a fixture of the bleak landscape. The sailor returns to his home country only to find that he can never truly return home, and the same holds true for the character in “The Discharged Soldier.” In this second poem, Wordsworth presents the returning soldier as a “ghostly figure,” more dead than alive, in what can also be read as a cautionary tale about what happens to humans who experience war (125). The discharged soldier, like the sailor of “Salisbury Plain,” cannot reintegrate himself into society. He claims to be “travelling to regain his native home,” but his initial immobility (he is propped up by a milestone) and his repeatedly described “weakness and indifference” lead us to believe that he will never arrive at his destination.11 He seems to sense that he can never be welcome home or anywhere else, for it is with what the narrator calls a “ghastly mildness” that the soldier says he puts his trust in God to help him home (163). The poem ends with the soldier on the threshold of the inn, and the tone of the ending leaves it far from certain that the soldier will enter. Instead, we can only envision him as a perpetual wanderer. The experience of war exerts a powerful transformative effect on the discharged soldier as on the sailor and Chris: having been exposed to violence, they are all marked for death, unable to rejoin humanity and destined instead to become part of the physical landscape. (We should recall that Chris’s apparent choice between women is really a choice between two processes of physical incorporation: either becoming “a queer-shaped patch of eccentricity on the [picturesque] countryside” [88], or “rotting into union with [ . . . ] No Man’s

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poem’s eponymous character, having experienced the violence of war makes a return to home impossible. In “Adventures on Salisbury Plain” (written at the start of the wars of the French Revolution and Empire), the sailor has partaken of war’s violence:

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Land” [71].) But to what end do Chris, the discharged soldier, and the sailor meet their similar fates? In The Return of the Soldier, Chris’s recovery of his memory effectively restores Kitty to her position as mistress of Baldry Court, reinscribing the social order seemingly threatened by the massive casualties among the British upper classes in the First World War. In “The Discharged Soldier,” as Beth Darlington for one argues, the ghostly soldier serves as a restorative for the narrator’s spirits through the power of “archetypal images [ . . . ] to act as agents of healing” (54). In “Adventures on Salisbury Plain,” the sailor’s corpse on display at the ending serves as an object lesson on society’s plans to deal with those who have internalized and exert the violence they witness in wartime. These three characters have in common the status of sacrificial figure; having partaken of violence, they must themselves then die, literally or figuratively, for the benefit of the living. Perhaps both Wordsworth and West are tapping into archetypal concepts of sacrifice elaborated elsewhere by René Girard in Violence and the Sacred (1972) and Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss in Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function (1898). According to Girard, contact with violence (as a form of the sacred) causes “ritual impurity” that threatens to infect the diseased person’s society (28). During the First World War, interestingly enough, shell shock was regarded in some aspects as though it were a kind of contagion: the cure often consisted of a quarantine-like seclusion at remote hospitals or houses in the country, and the variety of treatments (for officers, at least) included psychoanalysis and such solitary activities as photography and model-boat building.12 Patients who left the grounds of their hospitals were even required to wear special distinguishing badges on their clothing.13 West’s depiction of Chris’s treatment—a therapeutic interview at an isolated country house—therefore replicates some of the features of actual shell shock treatments. Furthermore, West implicitly defines the nature of his contagion as nothing less than a symbolic assault on the class system. We should not forget that Chris’s preference for Margaret also reflects an indifference to class distinction. As West would surely have been aware, the dramatic expansion of the British Army led to the introduction of officers who had not come from the prewar mold of public-school education and aristocratic privilege. As Ferguson points out, “There was [ . . . ] an immense change in the social composition of the officer corps during the war: 43 per cent of permanent commissions were granted to NCOs compared with just 2 per cent before the war, and around 40 per cent of temporary officers were from workingclass or lower-middle-class backgrounds.”14 Having been exposed to this class amalgamation, Chris (like real officers) represented a threat to class distinctions on his return to civilian society; his refusal to rejoin his aristocratic

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milieu through recognizing his wife therefore symbolizes a much larger cultural anxiety about maintaining the status quo ante with regard to social structures. To prevent the class contamination that Chris’s preference for Margaret implies, Chris is committed to a cure that amounts to a ritual sacrifice according to the archetypal formula uncovered by Hubert and Mauss. Chris is the sacrificial victim, as becomes clear when we realize that his cure necessitates his return to near-certain death at the front. According to the formula, there must be a “sacrifier” who carries out the sacrifice; Margaret and Kitty fulfill this role collectively (Hubert and Mauss 10). The cure consists of jolting Chris back into present time, which Margaret accomplishes by presenting to Chris tokens of his dead son. (Appropriately, Margaret and her husband lost a son, who died at about the same age as Chris’s and Kitty’s boy.) The necessary preliminary purification of the sacrificial victim, in this case, is the recovery of Chris’s memory; thereby restored to the present, he is now able to fulfill his responsibilities as a soldier. The ball and jersey that had belonged to his son also double as the instruments of sacrifice, in that they are the physical objects through which Margaret and Kitty engineer Chris’s return to the front lines. Finally, in keeping with the archetypal procedures, the sacrifice takes place out of sight: under the Lebanon cedar and away from the house. Even though Chris’s physical death may take place much later at the front, then, his death is ritually invoked precisely according to the terms outlined by Hubert and Mauss (25, 29). While Chris’s sacrifice reinscribes the social order, it also marks a literary solution to the societal problem of dealing with the violence that soldiers symbolically bring home after participating in the war. Contact with the sacred requires a sacrificial victim who accomplishes a union of the sacred and the profane while (paradoxically, but crucially) keeping them separate, as Hubert and Mauss envision. In this respect, Chris’s sacrifice serves the same function as the death of Wordsworth’s sailor and the internal exile of his discharged soldier. Any approach to that kind of terrifying power, that kind of sublimity, can only be made through such an intermediary: a soldier or sailor who, having been contaminated by battle and having tried to return home, must then be sacrificed for the health of the social order. Each of these three characters merges with the landscape, in one way or another, making permanent their status as sacrificial subject. For West, then, codes of the beautiful, picturesque, and sublime still serve to illuminate the path of the soldier’s return—to transcendental violence, however, for he is barred from home forever. As we have seen, both Montague and West draw on specific characteristics of painterly topographical description in their literary works, qualifying

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commonly accepted critical conclusions about the war having rendered the idea of landscape irrelevant to the modern condition. To be sure, the inherited painterly techniques of landscape representation must have seemed decidedly obsolete when married to the subject matter of the front lines. Yet Montague foregoes an outright rejection of Muirhead Bone’s realism, to which so many of Bone’s contemporaries and present-day critics resort, preferring instead to characterize Bone’s work as expressing meaning through indirect suggestion and the relation between psychological reality and topographical information. Montague finds in Bone’s drawings the successful portrayal of “the tragic queerness of [the war’s] vacuous and unnerved landscape,” achieving painterly depictions of a subject that has eluded attempts by “[m]any skilled writers” (“The Somme Battlefield” n. pag). Accordingly, in Disenchantment Montague finds in the vocabulary of visual representation the expressions that are absent from the lexicon of spoken or written descriptions of the war. Like Montague, West implicitly foregoes the idea of “the death of landscape” when she relies on the landscape categories of the beautiful, the picturesque, and the sublime in order to portray the psychological and emotional circumstances impinging on Chris. Rather than participating in a binary of opposing old and new methods of painterly or literary representation, then, both these authors transcend such reductive oppositions by refashioning aesthetic tradition to the wartime condition. They locate meaning in the relation between physical and psychological landscapes at the same time that they assert the continuing, if altered, validity of inherited representational forms. In Disenchantment and The Return of the Soldier, Montague and West also share an attention to the impact of the war on society, and to their personally desired (or feared) cultural outcomes of the conflict. West composed her novel during the dark days of the Somme and its aftermath, when victory was still in doubt and the end of the war could not be easily foreseen. While Disenchantment appeared four years after the Armistice, the fundamental meaning the war had yet to be fully elucidated. Both authors were therefore writing from standpoints of uncertainty and concern about how the war’s meaning would change the lives of Britons. Both Montague and West consider the question of proper conduct in the face of an overwhelming, and overwhelmingly tragic, event. Montague wanted to keep alive the flame of chivalry that the war had nearly snuffed out. His engagement with Velázquez—transposing him forward in time, in my formulation—therefore accords with the proposal debated in the War Memorials Committee to size memorial paintings to the dimensions of The Surrender of Breda as the epitome of painterly treatments of chivalry. That the War Memorials Committee debated this topic in March 1918 (that is, before

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the war was over), and Montague invoked the same painting in 1922, testifies to the continuing concern with chivalrous values and their position in British culture during and after the war. West, for her part, reinvigorates the chivalrous ideal when she has Chris walk back to Baldry Court after his cure, and hence to the war, looking “[e]very inch a soldier” and ready to endure the sacrifice his recovery has entailed (90). Finally, when the household of Baldry Court is restored to the order symbolized by its traditionally English manicured lawns and neat flowerbeds, West reasserts national values at the same time that she has Chris return to his national duty as a member of the chivalrous aristocracy. Despite the optimism implied by West’s ultimate restoration of topographical and class order, both works provide narratives of disenchantment and disillusionment as referred to most explicitly in the title of Montague’s work. Furthermore, both authors portray these sentiments in the pictorial terms appropriate to the visual metaphor of a mental process. As we have observed, Montague imagines Corot as having “painted away, in a trance of delight”; once the sun clears away the morning mist, he would say, “You can see everything now. Nothing is left.” The departure of the mist removes the source of artistic inspiration and knowledge about the world’s truths. For this reason, Montague explains, at that moment “A high time was over, a great light was out,” and the “charm” of enchantment was gone (129). The corresponding moment in West occurs in the climactic concluding paragraphs, when Chris returns to the house having been cured of amnesia, Margaret has “almost [ . . . ] dissolved into the shadows; in another moment the night would have her”—and Chris scrupulously “step[s] aside to avoid a patch of brightness cast by a lighted window on the grass” (90). Chris has lost the charm of his illusions of life and family with Margaret, and for him, as for Montague, “a great light was out.” West thus tempers the return to stability at the end of the novel with the knowledge that the restoration of order and sanity requires the returning awareness of the present and the war. The nature of awareness is one of the key concerns of both works. We have already seen how important the idea of the mist is as the locus of meaning in Disenchantment; in The Return of the Soldier, the character of Jenny fulfills that function. We can read her as the mediator of the account, in the sense that she is a central figure who aligns herself with Kitty but is still able to recognize the alternate aesthetic shared by Chris and Margaret. In another sense, however, she is the device through which West presents the story. While what she knows is all that we, as readers, can know of the tangled web that brings the other characters together, in West’s aesthetic what Jenny knows is all that anyone can know—as signaled by the abrupt beginning and ending of the novel, which consist of Kitty’s quoted words to Jenny, without authorial

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interpretation. (In this respect, Jenny is to The Return of the Soldier what John Dowell is to The Good Soldier: a curiously rather static character around whom the action takes place, someone who almost only listens and observes but whose observations make up the substance of the story.) Significantly, not only do Chris’s stories of the past appear to us through the workings of Jenny’s imagination, but also Chris’s future at the front exists as an image in Jenny’s mind’s eye. Thus, even those events that take place out of the time of the novel’s telling are creations within Jenny’s mediating consciousness, which contains the limits of knowledge in the world of the novel. Furthermore, when West places topographical awareness in the mind of a fictional character—someone whom a reader would uncritically accept as susceptible to an artistic tradition that might otherwise be seen as antiquated—she makes the differentiation of Kitty and Margaret according to landscape types a credible narrative strategy. When both authors resort to the pictorial language of landscape, here and throughout their texts, they implicitly demonstrate the usefulness of complementing the verbal language of description with conventions of pictorial representation in the face of the overwhelming, epistemologically ambiguous event that was the war.

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Fluid Front Lines: Conrad and Woolf

The land had turned to a shadow. Of all scourges and visitations against which mankind prays to Heaven, it was not pestilence that had smitten that shore dark; it was war; with sudden death, another of that dreaded company, full of purpose, in the air, on the water, and under the water. —Joseph Conrad, observing the wartime blackout of England from the North Sea in 1916, in “The Unlighted Coast” (1925) (48)

I

f there was any part of the world that might have seemed by its nature immune from the topographical depredations of industrialized warfare, it was the sea. A vast expanse whose featureless surface bore no trace of the epic battles fought upon it, the sea could easily have represented to the artistic imagination of 1914–1918 a space outside war. Rosalind E. Krauss, in her account of painterly modernism in The Optical Unconscious (1993), reaches such a conclusion when describing the abstract seascapes of Piet Mondrian’s “Plus and Minus” paintings (1914–1917): “It’s sea and sky, or dunes, sea, and sky, that have been segmented off from the rest of the world, from everything political, or economic, or historic, and themselves made into an abstraction of that world. In 1916, after all, the Great War was being fought not too far away from that very sea and sky” (12). The sea was “a special kind of medium for [painterly] modernism,” she argues, “because of its perfect isolation, its detachment from the social, its sense of self-enclosure, and, above all, its opening into a visual plenitude that is somehow heightened and pure, both a limitless expanse and a sameness, flattening it into nothing, into the no-space of sensory deprivation” (2). This is the sea as void: a Cartesian res extensa pushed to its asymptotic maximums, at which even objects and events, sensations and awareness—to say nothing of such grim material actualities as those that accompany life in the trenches—approach the vanishing point.

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Yet the work of two particular modernist authors, Joseph Conrad and Virginia Woolf, would seem to contradict the assessment that Krauss offers with regard to visual art. In The Shadow-Line (1916), a partly autobiographical narrative of a harrowing Gulf of Siam passage, which scholars typically read as only tangentially related to the war, Conrad manipulates the properties of a tropical sea voyage in what amounts to a restaging of the topography of Flanders fields. In Jacob’s Room (1922), in which Woolf tells a story that only hints at the coming of the Great War and then surprises the reader at the end with the eponymous character’s unwitnessed death at the front, the sea proves to be a mechanism of global connectedness and a constitutive space of warfare through a dynamic of absence and presence. In these two fictional works, the sea is anything but a void; on its fluid surface, if we look carefully enough, we can see how both Conrad and Woolf write topographies of the Great War as legible as any trench map. “My Changed Mental Attitude” Relatively little has been written about Conrad and the Great War. To begin with, out of all of Conrad’s novels only The Shadow-Line seems identifiable as a war book, given that it was composed entirely during the conflict and bears a dedication to his son Borys (1898–1978), who joined the British Army in 1915. Yet critics have not so far given sustained attention to this work as an artifact of wartime history. Cedric Watts, surveying the relationship between Conrad and the war, mentions The Shadow-Line’s dedication and instead focuses on Conrad’s essay “Autocracy and War” (1905); three essays on Poland published between 1915 and 1918; and “The Tale” (1917), a short story about a naval officer who causes the sinking of a neutral ship. Other scholars interested in the wartime genesis of The Shadow-Line offer readings that ultimately transform the historical context of the novel into a generalized, abstract background of generic danger. However, recontextualizing The Shadow-Line to popular knowledge of the Western Front reveals how this story fictionally restages the spaces of the war and enacts a fantasy about overcoming the conflict’s chief spatial characteristic: namely, the geographical stasis that has made “the Great War” a virtual shorthand for deathly immobility. In order to draw this connection, and to situate it properly with relation to the war service of Conrad’s son Borys, we must first consider the origin of the tale and the timeline of its composition. The germ of the story had evidently been in Conrad’s thoughts since 1888, when his own voyage from Bangkok to Singapore as captain of the Otago furnished him with the historical and biographical material from which he would later fashion his fictional

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tale. Like the narrator of The Shadow-Line, Conrad accepted an offer to take command of a sailing merchantman lying at Bangkok; he was to take the place of the ship’s previous master, who had recently died at sea. Conrad traveled to the Siamese capital as a passenger in a steamship and took charge of a crew laid low by fever. After fighting a series of delays in Bangkok, he eventually descended the Chao Phraya River (called the Meinam in Conrad’s day) to the Gulf of Siam. Over the next three weeks, baffling calms slowed the ship to a torturous crawl and further sickness incapacitated the crew. He finally managed to bring the Otago into Singapore as one of the few physically able men left aboard (Allen 245–53). Not much is known, on the other hand, about the timeline according to which Conrad turned the memory of this experience into its fictional form, beyond what can be gleaned from Conrad’s letters and a note that survives in Richard Curle’s copy of the novel. “This story had been in my mind for some years,” Conrad states there; “Originally I used to think of it under the name of First Command. When I managed in the second year of the war to concentrate my mind sufficiently to begin working I turned to this subject as the easiest. But in consequence of my changed mental attitude to it, it became The Shadow-Line” (Karl 770). Conrad had first mentioned the idea for this story in an 1899 letter to William Blackwood (editor of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine) (Collected Letters [hereafter CL] 2: 167). In a February 3, 1915 letter to J. B. Pinker, his agent, he writes “I propose to write a story for the Met [that is, the New York Metropolitan Magazine]: It’s an old subject in [the] style of Youth. I’ve carried it in my head for years under the name of First Command” (CL 5: 441). In another letter to Pinker, written in late March 1915, Conrad promises to send him the first half of the story. He adds, “I am particularly anxious to finish the writing by the end of this month. By the way the title will be: The Shadow-line it having a sort of spiritual meaning.”1 In May he writes to Pinker, “The Shadow-line is nearly finished.” Apparently, however—and as was usual for Conrad—the story grew and took more time to complete than he had anticipated. He was sending “another batch” of manuscript pages to Pinker with a letter of August 3, 1915, promising that the following batch would be the last. He writes to Pinker around December 15, 1915, “I have finished the Shadow-line,” and the manuscript is dated the 15th of that month (CL 5: 474, 496, 536). It was first published serially in the New York Metropolitan Magazine (in September and October 1916) and in the English Review (September 1916–March 1917), and in book form in 1917.2 Because Borys Conrad joined the army and left for France during this period, and especially because the novel is dedicated to him, readers and critics see the book as a conflation of Joseph Conrad’s own crisis of maturation

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To BORYS AND ALL OTHERS WHO, LIKE HIMSELF, HAVE CROSSED IN EARLY YOUTH THE SHADOW LINE OF THEIR GENERATION WITH LOVE4 Biographers and critics interpreting the dedication and the work as a whole take their cue from the opening lines of the text, where Conrad explains that the shadow-line is that demarcating “the region of early youth,” which “must be left behind” (3). They construe the title as plainly denoting the boundary between youth and experience, reading the text as an interpolation between Conrad’s reinterpreted memories and his concern for his son’s safety. However, the association implied by the dedication is not so clear-cut. First, the dedication does not appear in the story as first published serially in the English Review and the Metropolitan Magazine. Furthermore, Conrad later seemed uneasy about it, writing to Pinker before the novel’s independent publication, “I think I’ll cancel the dedication as I don’t want the boy’s name to be connected with a work” that some “imbecile” readers might deem inferior (CL 6: 25). Given the coincidence between the novel’s genesis and Borys’s enlistment, Conrad’s expressed desire might represent overcompensation; or, if we take Conrad at his word, a reader would be mistaken in attempting an allegorical reading that casts his son in the role of the novel’s unnamed narrator. How else might The Shadow-Line be situated with regard to the war? Perhaps the most extended evaluations of the novel in this context have been undertaken by Edward W. Said and Jacques Berthoud. For Said, The Shadow-Line stands for something other than Conrad’s response either to the historical moment or a simple reminiscence. “Any attempt to locate his fiction within the matrix of Conrad’s inner life,” Said writes, “must see The Shadow Line as the final, searching re-examination in a long series of self-dramatizations” (167–68). Said proposes, “One might make an analogy between [the narrator’s] sentiments and certain of Conrad’s own during the war” (185). He frames the analogy by citing Conrad’s mistaken reference in his author’s note to having written The Shadow-Line in “the last three months of the year 1916” (Conrad 111). The significance of this error, according

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with Borys’s coming of age and military service. The danger Borys was about to undergo at the age of seventeen lay heavily on Conrad’s mind, as is clear from numerous letters and from the reminiscences of his wife, Jessie.3 Hence the language of the dedication:

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to Said, lies in what he terms “[t]he single most notable event in Conrad’s life during the last few months of 1916,” which was a reconnaissance voyage in the sailing ship HMS Ready as a guest of the Royal Navy (165). Said argues that Conrad conflated these events because the primary theme of his novel (“the way in which resolute strength faces threatened destruction”) is based on the “very similar theme” of a book that fascinated Conrad during his leisure time on this voyage: War and Lombard Street (1915), Hartley Withers’s study of the British Treasury’s imposition of a moratorium on credit on the eve of the war (166). Withers draws a parallel between the bravery and independence of British fighting forces and the fiscal courage of the government on the credit issue. Hence, Said claims, the wartime significance of The ShadowLine is personal only insofar as it expresses an abstract ideal of individual professionalism through an implicit analogy to the credit moratorium (165– 66, 192). Borys does not enter into Said’s argument at all, despite the novel’s dedication. Berthoud evaluates three possible senses in which the book can be regarded as a war novel. First, there is “allegory (political or historical),” an “inviting interpretive [road]” that Berthoud declares is “blocked” (9) by Conrad having seemingly “registered the impact of the catastrophe, at least initially, through its effect on his son [ . . . ]” (8). Second, there is the “parallelism (between the two ordeals)” (that is, his and his son’s) (9). Berthoud declares this route likewise closed by Conrad’s disclaimer, in his author’s note to the novel, that “[t]here could be no question here of any parallelism” because of the “enormous difference of scale” between the war and his “obscure” experience in the Otago. Lastly, there is what Conrad describes in the author’s note as a “feeling of identity” with “a whole generation” undergoing its “supreme trial,” and it is upon this sense that Berthoud bases his reading of The Shadow-Line. Ultimately, Berthoud writes, “It seems clear that [Conrad] regarded the writing of The Shadow-Line as an act of solidarity with the youthful combatants with whom he could no longer serve.”5 Nevertheless, The Shadow-Line is no more than “an oblique meditation on the significance of war,” according to Berthoud’s interpretation. “What connection can there be between a purely natural ordeal, like that of disease or dead winds,” Berthoud asks, “and the political affliction of military combat?” (18). He comes closest to an answer when concluding, “The pressure of war under which the novel was written makes itself felt in the discovery that what men are up against is not only ahead of them, but also inside their ranks” (22). Thus, the war is generalized as a “pressure” provoking introspective awareness. Other critics similarly read the context of the war as an abstraction, as in Daniel R. Schwarz’s assessment that “the World War was a factor in making [ . . . ] Conrad aware that the subjective epistemological journey and the

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discovery of one’s own truth are not enough in a world where each man’s fate is tied to that of his fellows’ by political circumstances” (94). If the war occasions a rite of passage equivalent to that involved in undertaking a dangerous voyage, then the equivalence invoked tends to level differences between the experience of a war and the experience (and specificity) of sailing a ship— thereby diluting the power and significance of the war experience. Hence, while Jeremy Hawthorn notes that Conrad “had certainly been very conscious of the war,” Hawthorn locates the connection to the war in a “consciousness of evil and of death” common to the Western Front and the fictionalized Gulf of Siam (Introduction xiii–xiv). As in Berthoud’s evaluation, Hawthorn’s argument characterizes the significance of the war exclusively as provoking Conrad’s subjective response to an atmospheric effect. I would suggest that The Shadow-Line’ s connection to the war is considerably more specific than scholars have allowed—and that the route to a new understanding of this connection begins with the novel’s title. Conrad inadvertently alerts us to the significance of the title through his typically Conradian disclaimer that this aspect of the story does not bear close inspection. He rather evasively states in his author’s note, “I will not consider here the origins of the feeling in which its actual title, The Shadow-Line, occurred to my mind” (111). However, Conrad’s similarly off-putting claim in terms of the setting that “[t]he locality doesn’t matter; and if it is the Gulf of Siam it’s simply because the whole thing is exact autobiography” does not stand up (CL 6: 37). In fact Conrad clearly manipulates historical details about the setting for specific thematic effects.6 His comparable refusal to explain the title and its origins surely invites further consideration of it. In the story, as we have noted, Conrad calls the shadow-line that line dividing “the region of early youth” from maturity (3). Critics offer further interpretations that similarly render the line as purely metaphorical, a figure indicative of a mental or emotional demarcation. Hawthorn remarks, “Given Conrad’s comment in his ‘Author’s Note’ that ‘no suggestion of the Supernatural’ would have been found in the tale had it been published under the title of First Command, the comment [in his letter to Pinker about the title ‘having a sort of spiritual meaning’] is interesting” (Note on the Text xxxiv). For Said, “The ‘line’ to be confronted” is, in the narrator’s mind, “that solid boundary between his wholly discrete self and the outer world, between inner and outer reality” (169). Elsewhere, he writes that the line separates “shadowy, unrealized ambitions” from “a sort of restricted, terrible reality [ . . . ] that always falls short of those ambitions” (186); alternatively, “The shadow line is the edge of darkness that one crosses over to create character” (195). Schwarz writes that “the shadow-line was created by the European war,” and was constituted from those combat “challenges,” like the narrator’s, “for which one

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can be professionally and technically prepared, but for which ethical preparation is impossible”—joining those who generalize the war as a backdrop of moral abstraction (93–94). An alternative reading reaches the conclusion that crossing the shadowline of the book’s title alludes to death in combat, a fate that so many of the “others” of Borys’s “generation” had already met. (After all, the most notable ◦ line in the novel is the latitude line of 8 20 North, marking the burial site of the ship’s previous captain at the mouth of the Gulf of Siam.) As we have seen, though, Conrad hesitated adding the dedication; he then resisted a reading of the shadow-line as an allusion to the line between life and death. Jessie Conrad writes, “[The] dedication used to trouble me all the time my boy was at the front. There seemed something ominous in it, though of course the line alluded to has no relation to the passage from life to death, but symbolises the passage from the irresponsible early youth to the wider selfrealisation and the responsibilities of manhood.” While Jessie is not entirely reliable in matters relating to her husband’s works, elsewhere she reports, “Very many friends and acquaintances misread those words and forebore to write fearing the shadow-line must mean the shadow of death. I pointed out the possibility of such a misunderstanding to Joseph Conrad, but he was set on just that phrase and would not alter a word. He agreed afterwards that I had been right”7 Again, if we are to believe Joseph and Jessie Conrad, an aspect of interpretation that the dedication invites—this time, an obvious symbolic inference to life and death contained in the title—is not to be accepted. The novel as first published bore the dedication after all; nevertheless, critical attempts to interpret the meaning of the title by linking the story’s creation to Borys’s enlistment neglect a crucial divergence in the timelines of the two events. The date of the title change from “First Command” to The Shadow-Line—in mid-March 1915—is critical. It is likely that Conrad started writing the story at the end of 1914, and he definitely finished the manuscript at the end of 1915. In a letter to his friend Sir Sidney Colvin, dated February 27, 1917, Conrad interestingly claims, “I was writing that thing in Dec 1914 and Jan to March 1915” (CL 6: 37). Conrad is himself not entirely reliable in his recollections (indeed, in this same letter he erroneously dates his Otago voyage to 1887 instead of 1888). Yet his memory of having worked on The Shadow-Line principally from December 1914 to March 1915 seems especially apt, given that his first mention of a new title of the tale dates from his letter to Pinker written sometime around March 18, 1915 (CL 5: 458). The timing of the title change therefore bears closer scrutiny, as it does not correspond to the dates of any of the significant events with which it

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is customarily associated. Borys wanted to enlist as early as November 1914 (CL 5: 427). He attempted for several months to join the army and eventually enlisted by the end of August 1915; he then received a commission as a transport officer in the Army Service Corps in mid-September. By October he had been appointed second in command of an artillery transport unit and expected to leave for France within a month (although he did not finally depart for the port of embarkation until February 1916).8 Borys himself mistakenly believed (before the March 1915 letter was published) that his father did not change the title until November 1915, when Borys’s departure for the Western Front was imminent. Frederick R. Karl has claimed (again, in advance of the March letter’s publication) that Conrad changed the title because of Borys’s enlistment and commissioning.9 However, the actual date of the title change does not coincide with the periods of Borys’s initial interest in enlisting, his commissioning, his appointment to a leadership position, his departure for France, or his arrival at the front. Conrad may well have renamed the tale in anticipation of Borys’s enlistment, based on knowledge of his son’s wishes. As we shall see, though, a dramatic event in the course of the war—in the way the space of the war was understood—took place in early March 1915, providing Conrad ample opportunity to reconsider the setting of the tale and the significance of topographical geometry. There is one explanation that, while perhaps might at first seem more prosaic, yields a rich harvest through an association of the novel with the war through the medium of topographical representation. Our first indication that there is more to the wartime significance of the title than meets the eye appears in Conrad’s remark that “the second year of the war,” while degrading his ability to write, occasioned a “changed mental attitude” toward the work that had been germinating for two decades, inspiring the title change in March 1915 (CL 5: 427). As we have seen, the date of this change does not correspond to events in Borys’s military service. In the wider history of the war, what specifically happened in early March 1915 that might have brought about these changes? The answers have to do with a fundamental shift in the spatial dynamics of the British campaign on the Continent. As we shall see, the choice of title and the novel’s key dynamic of boundary crossing amount to nothing less than the wholesale transposition of the changed spatial conditions of Flanders onto the map of the Gulf of Siam. Stalemate and Breakthrough The Great War was unlike any other European war for a multitude of reasons. Chief among them was the virtual immobility of the front lines in the West after the opening engagements in August 1914. First, the German Army

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advanced swiftly through Belgium and as far as the Marne while executing the vast counter-clockwise wheeling movement of the Schlieffen Plan, some units averaging more than thirteen miles each day for 260 miles (Keegan, The First World War 36). When this movement petered out in early September, due to the absence of motorized transport and the ever-lengthening supply lines back to Germany, the opposing sides attempted to outflank each other to the north, in what became known as the “race to the sea.” By the middle of September, advancing French troops found to their consternation that the Germans before them had taken shelter in a set of an expanding network of entrenchments. The enormous size of the armies and the tactical advantage of the defensive (enabled principally by the technology of the machine gun and barbed wire, and the inability of advancing infantry to move faster on foot than the enemy’s rail-supplied reinforcements) then combined to create conditions under which attackers could neither outflank enemy positions nor carry them easily by frontal assault. Over the next four years, consequently, the front lines would scarcely move at all. The principal tactic employed by the Allies consisted of massive artillery barrages, intended to cut the enemy’s barbed wire and destroy or depopulate the opposing trenches, followed by infantry walking forward to take possession of a battlefield that was by then supposed to have been abandoned. However, the projectiles available at the time proved ineffective at cutting wire and reaching deep dugouts, and shell craters proved just as handy for shelter as were man-made entrenchments, which were hardly damaged anyway. Allied generals never completely solved the baffling problem of tactical stalemate, only attempting ever-larger artillery barrages, which forfeited surprise, and poison gas, which turned out to be often as hazardous to the attackers as it was to the defenders. (The tank represented stalemate-breaking technology, but these were slow and unreliable, and rarely employed in adequate numbers; moreover, effective tactics for the joint employment of infantry and tanks lay in the future.) Consequently, gains were measured in hundreds of yards, and losses in hundreds of thousands of men, giving the Great War its unique and well-deserved reputation for futility and stasis. The new conditions of warfare were striking for two reasons, then: first, there was an operational shift from constant movement to static engagement. As Modris Eksteins observes, “For military establishments that had been convinced that the outcome of a future war would hinge on one major battle, the stalemate in the west was impossible to accept”—or, I might add, to understand. “The previous century had been one of extraordinary technological change and movement,” Eksteins writes; “War, it was assumed, would reflect that movement.” Therefore, British and French military planners constantly sought the “one decisive thrust” that “would move the stalled war machine”

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and return the combatants to the battles of mobility that had marked the first month of the war (101). Second, the vastly increased size of armies in the field meant that combat was no longer conducted at diverse geographic points, but along a line hundreds of miles long. This circumstance must have seemed strange to Britons remembering the recent Boer War (1899–1902), which was largely an affair not only of cavalry movement, but also of isolated engagements scattered in the vast South African plains. In contrast, in the Great War the opposing sides occupied lines of connected, increasingly strengthened and layered entrenchments and fortifications. Eventually, in theory—and in the popular imagination as well—one could walk from the Channel to Switzerland without ever leaving a trench. In fact, the statesman and author John Buchan, in one of his propaganda pieces for the Times, begins his “special account” of the battle of Loos (in September 1915) by declaring, “It is possible to-day to walk in a trench from the North Sea to the Alps.” If someone were to do so on the previous Saturday, the day of the assault, “the odds were that he would have been entangled in an attack. For on that morning began what may well prove to be the battle on the longest continuous line in the world’s history” (“The Allies’ Advance” 9). The very continuousness of this line was a new and remarkable development of warfare. The space of the battlefield thus came to be dominated, in the words of Allyson Booth, by “the geometry of the line” (Postcards 88). As she has noted, “[b]oth systems of defense and conceptions of offense adhered unwaveringly to an ideal of the line,” whose attractions lay in its “inevitable simplicity” (89). Not only did defenders take shelter in continuous lines of trenches, but attackers advanced in orderly linear waves—especially British attacking soldiers, whose generals believed that more sophisticated methods of advancing across no-man’s-land were beyond the capabilities of nonprofessional troops. Additionally, the “linear logic” that Booth discerns in the way generals saw the war on their maps and carried out their assaults extends to other aspects of the war as well. For instance, artillery fire was devised to fall in linear zones that moved forward according to a prearranged timetable, and a common objective of an advance consisted of attempting to cut the transverse lines of communication running behind the enemy front line and parallel to it.10 While Booth’s analysis emphasizes in part the characteristic straightness of ideal lines, generals did not always organize their strategy around straightening crooked lines. Booth discusses Blunden’s remark in Undertones of War that “[t]he German line ran out in a small sharp cape here, called The Boar’s Head. This was to be ‘bitten off,’ no doubt to render the maps in the châteaux of the mighty more symmetrical.”11 However, the British held the Ypres salient principally for the symbolic value of keeping that famous and ancient

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town in Allied hands, even though British troops consequently occupied a bulging salient vulnerable to German fire from three sides. The front line in the French sector contained the even more radical kink that was the salient around the fortress of Verdun. The Germans, pursuing a strategy of attrition, selected this area for assault in 1916 knowing the French would defend it, at enormous cost in lives, for a value that was at that point exclusively symbolic: Verdun was not even a fortress anymore, having been stripped of its artillery (Taylor 91). Rather than elaborate on the straightness of the line, then, I would attend to its sheer linearity: primarily, its virtual endlessness. I say “virtual” because while the German line had geographic termination points, it could not be got around. Neutral Switzerland hemmed in one end, and at the other, a landing on the North Sea coast (though perennially advocated in some British quarters) was deemed too risky. Tunneling was too slow and impractical on a large scale, and aerial assault not yet conceivable, so the “one decisive thrust” British strategists sought could only take place by piercing a line that could not be outflanked. Eksteins records that: The illusion of the knockout blow continued to dominate strategic thinking throughout 1915, particularly in Britain and France, despite shortages of munitions and of adequately trained troops. British and French attacks in Artois, Picardy, and Champagne, German attacks in Flanders, and even the British vision of a breakthrough against the Turks in the Dardanelles, were all based on the dream of the “gap,” the sudden parting of the enemy front, as if it were the Red Sea confronted by the faith of Moses, and the subsequent charge to victory. (142–43)

Making “the dream of the ‘gap’ ” come true thus began to represent (until 1916, at least, when both sides consciously resorted to war of attrition) the only adequate response to this unprecedented military situation. While British general officers attempted to grapple with a war of stasis instead of movement, and replaced the logic of points with the logic of the line, what of the general public, who did not have access to military intelligence and who received information about battle conditions through the filter of a heavily censored mass media? It turns out that such media outlets as newspapers helped create in the public imagination a conception of strategic space that mirrored high-echelon military thinking on these topics, even if much of the specifics (and practically all the bad news) from the front was suppressed. For instance, an article in the London Times on November 24, 1914, explained, “The constant extensions of the line of battle [ . . . ] have at

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last led to the building up on each side of a wall of men which reaches in the West from the North Sea to Switzerland [ . . . ]. No one anticipated such an aspect of modern war.” Consequently, “At the cost of thousands of lives a few hundred yards may be gained, but rarely indeed does the most brilliant attack produce anything more that some slight indentation of the opposing line.” The correspondent asks, “Is there no means for curing this tactical catalepsy which has seized upon the combatants?” bringing to the forefront of public discourse the terms of linearity and paralysis, and the necessary exchange of massive casualties for the smallest alteration of front-line geometry (“The War Day by Day” 5). On December 5, 1914, the Times published an article on the contents of a French military bulletin summarizing the conduct of the war over the first four months and the consequences of these conditions. The article begins by describing the first battles of the war: the mobile engagements in August and September as the Germans swept through Belgium, the British retreated from Mons, and the British and French counterattacked on the Marne. “From September 13 onwards,” the article continues, “a new battle began.” The article describes the attempts by each side to outflank the other as “a contest in speed, a real race to the sea.” By the middle of November, the article points out, the mobile battles were over; “the fighting continued along the whole front, assuming the character of siege warfare”—revisiting the earlier correspondent’s remark at the end of November that “we have to ask ourselves whether this war of uninterrupted field-sieges is not the particular form of campaigning inexorably involved in the principle of nations in arms.”12 The bulletin and the article clearly explained that a fundamental transformation in the nature of the war had taken place as the initial advances solidified along the lines of entrenchments. In January 1915, the Times offered further explanations of the stalemate, continuing the theme of siege warfare in the article “Siege Tactics: The New Phase of the War.” The article describes the operations of the first few months having followed “three distinct phases” of movement: “the great outflanking advance of the Germans and the retirement of the Allies,” “our advance to the Aisne,” and “the gradual extension northwards on both sides to the North Sea.” The fourth phase is described in a section of the article subtitled “Gigantic Siege Operations.” The anonymous author writes, “It has frequently been pointed out that the present form of warfare is neither more nor less than siege operations on a gigantic scale [ . . . ].” The extent and nature of these operations challenge understanding, the author claims; “In order to find any parallel to the general features of such warfare as is now being waged it is necessary to go back to the days when nations sought to defend their territories by continuous lines of entrenchments or fortifications” (“Siege Tactics” 7).

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Attempting to familiarize readers with the alien nature of these proceedings, the author first cites the Great Wall of China and the Roman Wall in Britain, but then turns, for a more suitable precedent, to the fortifications designed and built by Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban (1633–1707), a Marshal of France under Louis XIV and a brilliant military engineer. It seems especially appropriate to the author that the British Army’s area of operations in Flanders and Northern France covers the same region fortified by Vauban. Only by conceiving of the new phase of the war in such historical terms as siege warfare on a grand scale, this article argues, can one grasp the challenge facing the British Army and the patience needed for success. “[P]rogress in such operations cannot be measured by the standard of field operations,” the author argues, justifying the immobility of the army through recourse to the idea of the war as one enormous battle line: [I]t is necessary to bear in mind that the operations in the Western theatre must be viewed as a whole, and that progress must be judged by the sum total of results along the whole line and not on any section of it where, owing to the local conditions, the state of the country, or some other consideration, a forward movement may have been temporarily suspended.

The operations required to overcome the enemy’s line of continuous fortifications seem, to this author, no different “in principle from that employed in those [earlier] days”: preparatory bombardment, “the advance by sap and parallel [ . . . ] and the minute preparations made for establishing a foothold in each successive outwork as a point d’appui for a further advance on the main line of works.” By casting the situation in the terms previously outlined, the article simply observes what “has frequently been pointed out” in public discourse: that stasis would necessarily henceforth characterize the war, which had turned into a prolonged and immobile siege engagement (“Siege Tactics” 7). In March 1915, however, a remarkable development in the spatial situation on the Western Front occurred. December 1914 and January 1915, when the articles previously discussed appeared, had marked a comparatively quiet time on the Western Front. The initial battles and the “race to the sea” had wound down, the German Army had retreated to their more easily defensible positions on the heights above the Somme, and both sides paused to consider how best to renew the struggle under the strange conditions prevailing. In February 1915 the Dardanelles campaign began, in an attempt to circumvent the German line on a grand scale by going through Constantinople, and General Joseph Joffre (commanding French armies in France) became impatient with the continuing inactivity on the Western Front. Accordingly, Sir

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John French (then commanding the British Expeditionary Force, or BEF) organized the first major British assault of the year: a three-day attack at Neuve Chapelle starting March 10. Because the British Army was short of artillery shells, there was no preliminary bombardment; consequently, the Germans were taken by surprise (Taylor 62). The effect was dramatic. “The British infantry broke the German line— for the only time in the war,” as A. J. P. Taylor observes (62). This success in breaking the line (even if it was short lived, as the Germans reinforced their side before the British could exploit the break) provoked a flurry of reassessments of the military situation, as explained in celebratory press accounts of the battle. In a communiqué published in the Times on March 13, Sir John French reported that the front had been “materially altered,” as his troops “had captured the whole of the village of Neuve Chapelle” and taken control of “the whole labyrinth of trenches” (“Another Village Captured” 8.) Subsequent reports and commentary sought to emphasize the significance of this event, “the first serious offensive movement undertaken by the British” since the start of the phase of siege warfare (“The British Advance” 8). A number of subsequent newspaper articles consider the point that the word “siege” did not adequately label the sort of warfare exemplified by the battle of Neuve Chapelle. The logic of the fortified point, characterized by patient sapping and protracted reduction of an isolated position, seemed less applicable than the logic of the penetrable line. Accordingly, the strategic situation started to be explained in these new, more explicitly geometrical terms. An article in the Manchester Guardian on March 17 reassures its readers that: it is an unsound way of looking at the military problem in Belgium to imagine the Germans falling back inch by inch from one end to the other of the country. The problem is not quite so desperate as that. We should rather imagine the defences of Belgium and Northern France as consisting of three or four concentric sets of lines, each some distance behind the other, and each perhaps from ten to fifteen miles across. The problem is to pierce each belt in succession [ . . . ].13 (“The Progress of the War” 6)

In a commentary in the Times of March 18, the editors select the same logic and terminology, concluding that “[t]he chief lesson of Neuve Chapelle seems [ . . . ] to be that the enemy’s line can be broken if the price is paid” (“Neuve Chapelle and After” 11). Henceforth, in such public formulations of the war’s conduct, at least, the struggle would typically be defined not as a siege, but as the attempt to penetrate a line at a corresponding price of human lives.14

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These events and the discourse surrounding them loomed large in British public awareness in early to mid-March 1915—marking a critical turning point in the conception of the war, and forming a crucial part of the context for Conrad’s alteration of the title of his work. It is clear that as far back as 1899, Conrad had intended his story to carry the title “First Command” (CL 2: 167). In every reference to the story in his letters up until the time of the battle of Neuve Chapelle, Conrad consistently refers to the tale under that title. Despite critics’ association of the tale’s germination with Borys’s enlistment, then, surely the public characterizations of the war’s changing spatial imperatives might have inspired Conrad’s arrangement of space in his novel even more profoundly than any general sense of concern (however genuine) for the well being of his son—who during the battle of Neuve Chapelle had already announced his intention to enlist, but was still studying with a coach at Oxford in preparation for the Sheffield University matriculation exam (CL 5: 459). Consequently, the evidence suggests that the abrupt alteration of the title in March 1915—just as spatial metaphors describing the war were changing from those of a static siege to a penetration or crossing of lines—was due primarily to the influence of the war’s topographical description in public discourse. More than simply a conflation of a tale of personal transformation inspired by a son’s coming of military age and memories about a voyage of initiation almost thirty years in the past, The Shadow-Line is also a meditation on the spatial phenomena of the war. As we will now see, Conrad structures the entire novel—in its motifs, its narrative progress, and in its characterization of success and sacrifice—around the peculiarities of its physical and psychological landscapes, which in turn reflect those of Flanders. Conrad’s Topographical Strategy As I have discussed elsewhere, “The Secret Sharer” (1910), Conrad’s other Gulf of Siam tale, opens with a spatialization of experience that exemplifies the importance of topographical description in Conrad’s nautical fiction, especially in the opening lines of his works (“Teaching ‘The Secret Sharer’ ” 127). A topographical description similarly occupies the beginning of The Shadow-Line. Conrad likens his narrator’s position to being in “an enchanted garden,” a space of “early youth” that one enters through “the little gate of mere boyishness”: Its very shades glow with promise. Every turn of the path has its seduction. And it isn’t because it is an undiscovered country. One knows well enough that all

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It would seem, then, that the shadow-line is metaphorical. Human experience is like walking through a garden, Conrad explains; one can visualize the boundaries of the imaginary garden, and the transformations one undergoes in life are like crossing those boundaries. Such boundaries exist in the imagination and not in the experience of life—except that key moments in The Shadow-Line involve physically crossing real boundaries, reversing the terms of the invocation of metaphorical liminality in the work’s first paragraphs (Larabee, “ ‘Funny Piece of Water’ ” 40–42). The first moment occurs in an unnamed port (which we gather to be Singapore) when the narrator, waiting for passage home after having resigned his position in a merchant ship, learns that he is to be offered his first command. He hastens to the Harbor Office for his appointment and finds himself standing “before a portal of dressed white stone” (23). He must pass through this “archway,” then under a “curtain [ . . . ] raised for [him],” before seeing Captain Ellis, the Harbor-Master (24). After his interview, the narrator is aware of a “new dignity.” “It seemed as if all of a sudden a pair of wings had grown on my shoulders,” he claims, and he “float[s] out of the official and imposing portal” (28–29). The narrator has changed as a result of undertaking physical action to cross a boundary line: in this instance, taking the fateful step of entering the Harbor Office. The next key moment involving physical boundary crossing takes place when the narrator says goodbye to Captain Giles (who had informed him that an offer of a command was forthcoming). The narrator is to meet his ship in Bangkok. “But I won’t feel really at peace,” he tells Giles, “till I have that ship of mine out in the Indian Ocean” (36). In reply, Giles remarked casually that from Bangkok to the Indian Ocean was a pretty long step. And this murmur, like a dim flash from a dark lantern, showed me for a moment the broad belt of islands and reefs between that unknown ship, which was mine, and the freedom of the great waters of the globe. But I felt no apprehension. I was familiar enough with the [Malay] Archipelago by that time. Extreme patience and extreme care would see me through the region of broken land, of faint airs and of dead water to where I would feel at last my command swing on the great swell and list over to the great breath of regular winds, that would give her the feeling of a large, more intense life. (36–37)

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mankind had streamed that way. It is the charm of universal experience from which one expects an uncommon or personal sensation—a bit of one’s own. One goes on recognising the landmarks of the predecessors, [ . . . ] One goes on. And the time, too, goes on—till one perceives ahead a shadow-line warning one that the region of early youth, too, must be left behind. (3)

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Again, it is the crossing of a physical boundary (here, the island chain of the Dutch East Indies) that leads to a mental and emotional transformation: to the “freedom” one feels in the open ocean, and the “feeling of a large, more intense life” he attributes to the ship but really means for himself. Before the narrator can reach the boundary of the Archipelago, however, he must first cross yet another physical boundary: the Gulf of Siam, where he and his ship will undergo the trials of sickness and persistent calms. The narrator confesses to Giles that he is unfamiliar with the Gulf: “The gulf . . . Ay! A funny piece of water—that,” said Captain Giles. Funny, in this connection, was a vague word. The whole thing sounded like an opinion uttered by a cautious person mindful of actions for slander. I didn’t inquire as to the nature of that funniness. There was really no time. But at the very last he volunteered a warning. “Whatever you do keep to the east side of it. The west side is dangerous at this time of the year. Don’t let anything tempt you over. You’ll find nothing but trouble there.” Though I could hardly imagine what could tempt me to involve my ship amongst the currents and reefs of the Malay shore, I thanked him for the advice. (37)

Elsewhere, I have discussed at length the extent to which Conrad alters the topography of the Gulf of Siam in The Shadow-Line. Briefly, in the case of the Gulf passage, portraying this body of water as generally more mysterious and dangerous than it actually was accomplishes several effects; in part, this alteration makes the Gulf of Siam the ideal arena for the depiction of moral trials and the themes of transformation and responsibility (“A Mysterious System” 357–61). The most dramatic boundary line in the novel, however, and the one whose crossing brings about the climactic transformation of the narrator, is ◦ the latitude line of 8 20 North, which marks the previous captain’s burial site at the mouth of the Gulf (see figure 4.1). This line is at the focus of the fever-stricken ravings of Mr. Burns, the chief mate, who obsesses over the need to cross the barrier. Not long after entering the Gulf, when the narrator notifies the sick Burns about a lack of wind, the chief mate commences “a rambling speech. Its tone was very strange,” the narrator continues, “not as if affected by his illness, but as if of a different nature. It sounded unearthly. As to the matter, I seemed to make out that it was the fault of the ‘old man’—the late captain—ambushed down there under the sea with some evil intention. It was a weird story” (61). After the ship crawls past Cape Liant, the narrator again speaks to Burns but “it was not comforting in the least to hear him begin to mutter crazily

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Figure 4.1 The Gulf of Siam in 1889. Reproduced and adapted from Alexander George Findlay, A Directory for the Navigation of the Indian Archipelago and the Coast of China [ . . . ], facing title page.

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about the late captain, that old man buried in latitude 8 20 , right in our way—ambushed at the entrance of the Gulf ” (67). Ransome, a sailor whose heart condition relegates him to the light physical duties of ship’s cook (and later, captain’s steward), tells the narrator that Burns had remarked to him that “ ‘he was sorry he had to bury our late Captain right in the ship’s way, as one may say, out of the Gulf ’ ” (68). Burns eventually starts to recover, the narrator reports: “ ‘The great thing to do, sir,’ he would tell me on every occasion, when I gave him the chance, ‘the great thing is to get the ship ◦ past 8 20 of latitude. Once she’s past that we’re all right’ ” (71). When the ship finally approaches the line, Burns bursts out on deck in the middle of the

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night to warn the narrator about the danger that the captain’s spirit poses. “He was just downright wicked,” Burns claims; “He was nothing less than a thief and a murderer at heart. And do you think he’s any different now because he’s dead? Not he! His carcass lies a hundred fathom under, but he’s just the ◦ same . . . in latitude 8 20 North” (97). Upon managing to cross the line, the narrator reports, “The barrier of awful stillness which had encompassed us for so many days as though we had been accursed was broken” (99). In sum, Conrad makes this intangible line of latitude bear the narrative burden of symbolizing supernatural agency, the danger of death, and a potentially impassable geographical barrier whose penetration represents a victory over impending doom. Given what was happening in the war at the time of The Shadow-Line’s composition, the source of Conrad’s topographical strategy is now clear. He began writing the story in February 1915, and by the end of March he had written enough to call it the first half of the story and had decided to change the title. The shape of the work and the choice of title had thus become set at the same time that the battle of Neuve Chapelle caused observers to characterize the British strategic aim as one of piercing a line at mortal cost. The pattern of boundary crossing in the novel, culminating in the dramatic penetration of the latitude line marking the captain’s burial site, replicates the desire of army strategists to break through the German line. The shadow of the shadow-line signifies death—not in the abstract, as many critics have argued, but in the physically present mortal danger posed by the enemy’s front line trenches. In conclusion, the line in the novel functions as a simulacrum of the front line in the war. In light of this explanation, we can now understand why Conrad selected a line rather than a point as the geographical marker of the dead captain’s burial site. It would certainly have been easier, from the standpoint of narrative verisimilitude, for the captain’s body to have been buried at sea off an island or promontory. In fact, this was the fate of Conrad’s predecessor in the Otago; Captain John Snadden had indeed died at sea (although, as scholars have pointed out, he was in no way like the malevolent, irresponsible character of the fictional ship’s previous captain).15 Norman Sherry observes that the precise spot of Snadden’s burial location has not been preserved in any surviving documents. Nevertheless, Sherry deduces from the dates of Snadden’s death and the Otago’s arrival in Bangkok, as well as from the manuscript of Conrad’s short story “Falk” (1903; also set in this area and drawn from Conrad’s experiences), that Snadden may well have been buried off Cap St. Jacques (see figure 4.1) (N. Sherry 223). However, Conrad moves the fictional captain’s burial site to the mouth of the Gulf of Siam, which he marks in the novel by a latitude line.

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Furthermore, Conrad goes to considerable lengths—in fact, rather straining credulity—in order to make the determination and expression of this line possible. Burns and the previous captain had endured an antagonistic relationship, due to such factors as the captain’s habit of disturbing the crew’s sleep by playing the violin in his cabin all night, his “keep[ing] the ship loafing at sea for inscrutable reasons” (47), leaving the unloaded vessel at anchor in the sweltering heat of Haiphong for three weeks while he visited a woman ashore, and insisting on sailing to Hong Kong directly against fierce monsoon winds—“an insane project” (49). When the captain falls ill and his death is clearly imminent, Burns gathers the crew to pay their last respects. Yet at the crucial moment of the captain’s death, oddly enough, Burns is not even in the cabin. Conrad has the captain die near noon, just when Burns is up on deck observing the sun with a sextant (47). Conrad’s orchestration of the captain’s death at this particular moment, while it precludes the drama of a scene in which Burns watches his nemesis die, suits the geometrical economy of the novel in that it permits the creation of a line, rather than a point, to mark the burial site. Had the captain died near land, as did Conrad’s predecessor, his burial spot would logically have been described as “off Cap St. Jacques,” for example. If the fictional captain had died in open waters, the ship’s location would generally have been recorded as a point of latitude and longitude determined through “dead reckoning” (which produces an approximate position based on an earlier “known position” and estimates of speed, course, wind, and current). Alternatively, the captain might have died at the usual time for performing celestial navigation, at morning or evening twilight; in one of these periods, observing a number of celestial bodies yields an intersection of several lines on the chart at various angles to the equator. In each of these cases, the ship’s position would be expressed by a point (see figure 4.2, left). When the sun has reached its zenith in the sky (at what is termed “local apparent noon”), however, its observation yields a line parallel to the equator, that is, a latitude line (figure 4.2, right). Latitude lines are especially useful in charting a voyage, as one might imagine, in that they can be recorded numerically in such convenient shorthand ◦ as “8 20 N,” easily spoken, written, and remembered. Indeed, Conrad signals the importance of the latitude line by citing its numerical designation no fewer than four times over the course of the novel (67, 71, 97). Perhaps Conrad was thinking about the equator, that zero latitude line whose crossing was traditionally the occasion of elaborate ceremonies. In writing a book about the transforming power of crossing a line, the significance of the ceremonies as rituals of rebirth must have occurred to him, and such a connection thus accords squarely with the reading of the novel as a chronicle of initiation and passage from “early youth” to maturity. However, this

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Figure 4.2 Lines of position. Left: a celestial fix for 6:08 a.m., derived from three lines of position. Right: a single line of position—a latitude line—calculated from observing the sun at local apparent noon.

explanation does not account for the presence of supernatural powers and death in the novel—aspects missing from typical traditions of the crossing the line ceremony (Durey 209–10). The improbable timing of the captain’s death principally enables the creation of a geographical marker unique and notable in its sheer linearity, combining the fixed precision of one dimension (angular distance to the equator) with the ambiguities of endlessness (a line circling the globe) and the uncertainty of knowing one’s position along that line. Unlike taking a celestial fix, a running fix, or a fix based on observing positions on land, observing the sun at noon produces a line of infinite length, upon which the observer could theoretically be anywhere. The navigational calculation Burns undertakes thus produces a line precisely marking the dead captain’s linear ubiquity. This is a line that is as readily described and remembered through its notational system—and whose piercing is such a compelling need—as the fixed and seemingly endless front lines in France and Flanders. Once we recognize how certain aspects of the linearity of the Western Front—its seemingly infinite length, the inability to get around it, and the necessity of piercing it—appear in Conrad’s selection of a latitude line to mark a point, then we can see a number of other ways in which the topography of this novel reflects the logic of the front line. First, Conrad consistently associates immobility with death. When the narrator first discusses his prospective journey with Captain Giles, as we have seen, he sees in his mind’s eye the barrier of the “broad belt of islands and reefs” that stands between his ship “and the freedom of the great waters of the globe” (36); to reach that freedom, however, he must contend with “the region of broken land, of faint airs and of dead water” (37). While traversing the Gulf, the

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winds are not simply calm, but “[d]ead calm” (61); the ship’s stillness is a “deadly stillness” (78). This ship is held “motionless” in “[a] great over-heated stillness,” and the sick Burns risks “being smothered by this stagnant heat” (67). After a brief and fickle wind, the narrator remarks, “The spell of deadly stillness had caught us up again. There seemed to be no escape” (98). As long as the ship remains imprisoned by the light and random breezes, furthermore, the crew is in danger of dying from the unspecified but apparently malarial sickness that spreads among them after the narrator discovers that his predecessor secretly sold the ship’s quinine stock. While the curse of impending death lies over the ship as long as it is motionless, the vessel’s slow and haphazard movement brings it inexorably closer to its rendezvous with death as personified by the dead captain. In this respect, the ship’s advance—by fits and starts, drawing closer to danger while risking death through the slowness of its progress—replicates the course of the war. The great “pushes” claimed tens of thousands of lives and resulted in gains measured by the yard. Yet remaining in place resulted in human wastage as well; not only did the constant artillery barrages incur casualties, but the British Army’s policy of periodic trench raids to maintain combat efficiency produced one thousand deaths a month in the “minor trench operations” of periods of relative quiet (Denis Winter 92). Burns’s obsessive idea that the captain’s “carcass lies a hundred fathom ◦ under, but he’s just the same . . . in latitude 8 20 North,” defies logic; a body buried at sea would either drift with the currents, or if weighted, be anchored to a point (97).16 However, Burns oddly makes the captain’s corpse ubiquitous along the length of a line. Yet this remark echoes one of the facts of trench warfare: because corpses were not sent home for interment as in past wars, the front line and no-man’s-land (all along their lengths) became repositories of corpses and body parts that, even if buried, soon became disinterred by shellfire, flooding, and trench excavations. The quantity and nature of the unburied and unburiable dead made the Great War trench experience unique in the annals of warfare, and countless memoirs attest to the ever-present human remains and their gruesome tendency to resurface.17 At the front, bodies encroached upon the living in the trench line, just as the dead captain, whose “carcass” is a permanent fixture of a line that cuts across the Gulf, seems in Burns’s fevered imagination as though ready to reappear upon the ship’s approach. While British generals dreamed of piercing the German front line, line crossing in Conrad’s novel takes place in a similar state of fantasy. When the narrator learns that a command is in the offing, he finds himself “suddenly on the quay [of the Harbor Office] as if transported there in the twinkling of an eye, before a portal of dressed white stone above a flight of shallow white

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steps” (23). At the Harbor Office, he passes through the physical boundaries there (this portal and the archway beyond) as if through the action of the “strong magic” of command (24). After accepting Captain Ellis’s offer of a ship, the narrator approaches the door to exit Ellis’s inner office and “move[s] like a man in bonds.” Once he passes through, however, he moves as if in a dream. Seemingly having grown wings, he explains, he “merely skimmed along the polished floor” (28). When he takes leave of the Shipping-Master on the way out of the Harbor Office, he says, “I floated out of the official and imposing portal. I went on floating along” (29). In this sequence, movement across the physical boundaries of the Harbor Office architecture takes place under dream-like or fantastic conditions, where the deathly danger of stasis is acknowledged and then miraculously dispelled through sudden movement. Such a fanciful resolution of hazardous immobility, breaking the deadlock and restoring a war of movement, was the chimera after which British war planners chased in each of their offensives. As at the front, it seems that only a frontal assault can end the stalemate posed by the baleful and ubiquitous presence of the captain along the length of his latitude line. The British remained wedded to frontal assaults throughout the war, and the Allies in general never gave up the idea that an enthusiastic attack at the strongest point was the path to victory (Taylor 14, 49). Significantly, Conrad gives Burns the same terminology circulating in army communiqués and newspaper editorials about boldness, the offensive spirit, and the need to strike at the enemy’s strength. Burns declares, “ ‘You can’t slink past the old murderous ruffian. It isn’t the way. You must go for him boldly—as I did. Boldness is what you want. Show him that you don’t care for any of his damned tricks’ ” (95–96). The dead captain and German soldiers are alike in their deadliness and omnipresence along their lines, and the apparent enmity with which they block the path to peace or safety. Because the topography of the war underpins the topography of The Shadow-Line, as we have seen, the book’s status as a war novel is considerably less oblique than critics have generally allowed; consequently, other aspects of this text open themselves to fertile reinterpretation as markers of the war. For example, Burns’s condemnation of the dead captain additionally echoes sportsmanlike British opposition to perceived German conduct, such as the “damned tricks” (in Burns’s words) of the widely reported (if exaggerated) atrocities in Belgium and the unchivalrous use of poison gas. The German Army first employed gas on a large scale on the Western Front at Ypres in April 1915, causing agonizing deaths and resulting in swift denunciations in the pages of the Times as “a very barbarous form of attack,” an “atrocious method of warfare,” and evidence of “new German ‘frightfulness.’ ”18 The official report of the War Office on the German introduction of poison gas,

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published in the London Times within a week of the Ypres attack, reminded that paper’s readers that Germany had signed the 1899 Hague Conference declaration outlawing the use of such weapons (“Lethal Gases in War” 9–10). Or had Conrad possibly read in the Times of “German smuggling tricks,” or the “tricks of the Germans” concerning press disinformation and explained in detail by the Lord Chancellor in Parliament?19 A large advertisement in the Times, taken out by the founder of the Anti–German League, calls the Germans “savages” who deploy “knavish tricks and subtle devices” (“An Appeal to the Nation” 10). Perhaps Conrad noticed an explanation elsewhere in the Times of one complex species of “German cunning”: fooling British observers into firing on their own aircraft. “The cunning [ . . . ] of the Germans is by now fully realized,” this article explains; “That it is only too often mixed with treachery is equally well established; but cases have recently occurred of the performance of a clever trick which is unmarred by any suspicion of foul play, and is worthy of admiration on account of its ingenuity.” After detailing the method of arranging for the British to target their own planes, the article concludes with a note about yet another “trick of the Germans”: booby traps left in their trenches (“Sharp Fighting” 5). Not only would Conrad have witnessed the popular British revulsion to German “Kultur” and military barbarity, but also he would doubtless have shared the distaste that members of a Victorian and Edwardian culture of fair play and decency felt about such “tricks.” In yet another case among the several parallels between The Shadow-Line and the front-line experience signaled by the existence of coterminous physical and fictional topographies, the bestowal of responsibility in both the novel and the war seems improbable, even magical. When the narrator marvels at being “invested with a command in the twinkling of an eye, not in the common course of human affairs, but more as if by enchantment” (33), he is repeating what many Britons must have felt when they suddenly found themselves in command. During the massive expansion of the British Army in the wake of Kitchener’s call on August 7, 1914, for a hundred thousand male volunteers, a call enthusiastically answered by hundreds of thousands, the usual requirement for prospective officers was possession of a Certificate A or B from a university Officers Training Corps (Keegan, The Face of Battle 220). These certificates equated to examinations for army promotion, and the Officers Training Corps experience would have included training in map reading, drill, and tactics (Clayton 260–61). However, the amount of that training for any individual may have varied, for as Keegan explains, simply having had an “education at one of the public or better grammar schools which ran an O.T.C. was in practice often found sufficient” for a commission. Meanwhile, “Some ‘battalions’ entered into military existence when a train load

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of a thousand volunteers was tipped out on to a rural railway platform in front of a single officer who had been designated to command it” (The Face of Battle 219–20). Such a new officer must have been amazed at his own transformation, and Borys underwent a similarly rapid elevation to a leadership position. Soon after his commissioning—at “17y. 8m. 4d old,” Conrad ◦ scrupulously notes in a formulation reminiscent of “8 20 North”—he found himself second in command of an artillery transport section consisting of over 120 soldiers and officers and twenty-five trucks. “He hasn’t been yet 30 days in the Army,” writes Conrad in a letter to Ford on October 19. Conrad reports to André Gide on November 18 that Borys had already been acting commander of his unit for a month, even though “not yet 18”—and no doubt Conrad was conscious of how both he and fictional his narrator had similarly been “invested with a command” at an early age and seemingly “by enchantment” (CL 5: 516, 519, 531). Then there is the matter of Captain Ellis’s complaint that European captains shy away from sailing ships. “Too much trouble. Too much work, [ . . . ]” he explains; “Easy life and deck-chairs more their mark” (26). Ellis’s criticism, while it echoes comments in Lord Jim (1900) and “The End of the Tether” (1902), sounds quite like the sentiment behind the widespread complaint in 1914 that easy life had led to cultural decay, and that war would awaken society and have a cleansing effect.20 These complaints took a number of nowfamiliar forms, from F. T. Marinetti’s infamous glorification of war in 1909 as “the world’s only hygiene,” to Rupert Brooke’s more palatable expression in his poem “Peace” (first published December 1914): Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour, And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping, With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power, To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping[.]

Such ideas as Marinetti’s and Brooke’s circulated widely through British culture, and Brooke’s poem has come to define the spirit of Britain’s entry into the war.21 Another description of war as a cleansing agent appears in the essay “War and Literature” published by the influential British author Edmund Gosse in the Edinburgh Review in October 1914. He begins with the well-known lines, “War is the great scavenger of thought. It is the sovereign disinfectant, and its red stream of blood is the Condy’s Fluid that cleans out the stagnant pools and clotted channels of the intellect.” Gosse goes on to offer an observation that parallels Brooke’s thanks for God’s reveille: “We have awakened from an opium-dream of comfort, of ease, of that miserable poltroonery of ‘the sheltered life’ ” (313). Gosse’s statement—if “we” were changed to

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“I”—could easily have been made by the narrator of The Shadow-Line to Captain Ellis at the end of his voyage. In part, his transformation includes replacing his dream-like states in Singapore with decisive movement. Furthermore, the eagerness of Conrad’s narrator, who volunteers for the responsibility of command and then endures a harrowing voyage of self-discovery and transformation, mirrors the pluck and sense of duty with which a disproportionate number of middle-class and white-collar Britons voluntarily gave up the “easy life” of careers in finance, commerce, or other professional fields to enlist in what they thought was an opportunity for cultural regeneration. Admittedly, such a claim projects a potentially reductive explanation of the war enthusiasm in Britain. Such reasons for joining as the ones foregrounded here should rightly be balanced with other factors highlighted by Niall Ferguson (such as recruitment techniques, peer pressure, impulse, and financial motives). However, middle-class and white-collar employees did enlist out of proportion to their demographic representation, and by February 1916 men in professional sectors such as finance and commerce had joined at a rate nearly twice as high as those in industrial occupations (Ferguson 199–207). Volunteerism in war also inevitably meant sacrifice, which may explain the prominence in The Shadow-Line of the character of Ransome. In both the war and in the novel, sacrifice—specifically of lives—appears necessary for movement. Ransome, whose very name signifies sacrifice under compromised or deceitful conditions, has a bad heart (like Maisie Maidan, who plays a sacrificial role in The Good Soldier). “It was as though he had something very fragile or very explosive to carry about his person and was all the time aware of it,” the narrator tells us, as though describing a soldier laden with grenades or trench mortar shells (60). When Ransome becomes the only other physically fit man on the ship, the implication of his fragility is that he will have to die of a heart attack trying to help save the ship by getting it moving. This is the same sentiment the editors of the Times express when they write on March 18, 1915, at the very time that Conrad announced the change to the novel’s title, that “[t]he chief lesson of Neuve Chapelle seems to us to be that the enemy’s line can be broken if the price is paid” (“Neuve Chapelle and After” 11). The payment of the death ransom on the Western Front and the death of Ransome on the ship seem to be the prerequisites to breaking the respective lines and the deadly stasis they represent (and echo the sacrifice of Chris Baldry in The Return of the Soldier). Hawthorn sees Ransome as Christ-like (Introduction xxiii); in the context of the war, he resembles the ideal soldier who lays down his life for others, as depicted in so many Great War poems (Fussell, Great War 119). By the end of the war, one of the ubiquitous phrases appearing on war memorials and in other remembrances of the dead was the phrase “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13). The

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first half of these lines appear most famously, perhaps, on the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior at Westminster Abbey, which was dedicated on November 11, 1920. Conrad, however, would not have had to wait until then to tap into this archetype, even if subconsciously, for the idea of the soldier as Christ became popularized much earlier—as in such representations as James Clark’s painting The Great Sacrifice, which shows a dead soldier lying, as if sleeping, below a crucified Christ, with one of the soldier’s hands touching Christ’s feet. Clark’s painting first appeared in the Graphic in 1914 at Christmas, significantly enough, just when Conrad (according to his letter to Sidney Colvin) had begun writing his novel.22 At this point in the war, the British Army had already suffered its heaviest monthly casualty rate of the entire war: 45,000 killed by the end of August 1914 (Ferguson 340). The battles of Mons and Le Cateau in August, and Ypres in October, practically annihilated the British Expeditionary Force; out of the original 160,000 Regular Army troops that had begun the war in Belgium, 54,000 were killed or wounded at Ypres alone. By December 20, one typical brigade was left with only 18 percent of its original officers and 28 percent of “other ranks” (Eksteins 100). Casualty lists started appearing in newspapers in May 1915, as Conrad was writing to Pinker that The Shadow-Line was nearly complete.23 As the years wore on and the casualty lists grew, drawing the parallel between Christ and fallen soldiers allowed civilians and survivors to make sense of a war whose catastrophic cost would otherwise have seemed unjustifiable. In The Shadow-Line, Ransome may not ultimately have to pay the sacrificial ransom we expect; despite his weak heart, he survives the effort of helping the captain bring the ship into Singapore. Nevertheless, in the conclusion of the novel, which was published when the outcome of the war was very much in doubt, Conrad makes it clear that Ransome can go to sea again only at the risk of getting himself killed. The narrator has given him a letter of recommendation for another position: “How are you feeling now?” I asked. “I don’t feel bad now, sir,” he answered stiffly. “But I am afraid of its coming on . . . .” The wistful smile came back on his lips for a moment. “I—I am in a blue funk about my heart, sir.” I approached him with extended hand. His eyes, not looking at me, had a strained expression. He was like a man listening for a warning call. “Won’t you shake hands, Ransome?” I said gently. He exclaimed, flushed up dusky red, gave my hand a hard wrench—and next moment, left alone in the cabin, I listened to him going up the companion stairs cautiously, step by step, in mortal fear of starting into sudden anger our common enemy it was his hard fate to carry consciously within his faithful breast. (109)

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It may very well be more than coincidental, therefore, that Conrad’s pronouncement at the war’s end quotes the title of Clark’s painting while it implicitly gives closure to the spirit of Ransome’s predicament. Conrad wrote in a letter to Colvin on November 11, 1918—the day the armistice was signed—“The great sacrifice is accomplished” (CL 6: 301). Read in the context of the war, the novel describes an analogue of the hoped-for voyage of Borys “and all others” of his “generation” (in the words of the dedication): travel to France, maturation in combat, and triumphant return home. All the sentimental implications of the word “home” lie in the title of the Officers’ Sailors’ Home, where the narrator and the novel begin. Ultimately, the narrator returns to this Home, and to Captain Giles’s fatherly figure (or perhaps his avuncular figure; he has a “ ‘kind uncle’ smile,” the narrator says) (107). Giles tells him “a man should stand up to his bad luck, to his mistakes, to his conscience, and all that sort of thing,” in the same tones that a generation of Britons would tell themselves they should stand up to the challenge of the war, despite its bad luck, dangers, and mistakes (108). The Shadow-Line depicts the pluck in the face of danger that Conrad surely hoped his son would exhibit. Yet this may also be why Conrad and his family preferred not to see The Shadow-Line too clearly as a war novel: casting the war as a test of maturity, through which one can leave “early youth” behind, would trivialize a worldwide conflict that had already claimed on the Western Front well over two million men killed or wounded by December 1914 (Eksteins 100). Conrad explicitly attempts to deflect just such a reading through his assertion, “There could be no question here of any parallelism. That notion never entered my head. But there was a feeling of identity, though with an enormous difference of scale—as of one single drop measured against the bitter and stormy immensity of an ocean” (Author’s Note 111). Conrad’s choice of the word “parallelism” is interesting, given the preoccupation with lines in the novel. Through the mechanism of the topographical parallels between the Gulf of Siam and the Western Front, furthermore, Conrad can implicitly comment on the war without trivializing it. Reverberations of War in Virginia Woolf’s Geography While early readers of The Shadow-Line promptly drew a connection between the novel’s dedication and the Great War, it was rather belatedly—not until the 1930s—that Jacob’s Room was recognized as a war novel (Levenback 44–45). After all, practically the entirety of the novel’s action takes place before the war begins. Furthermore, while Jacob dies as a soldier he is commonly thought to be modeled after Woolf ’s brother Thoby Stephen. “Like Thoby,” Nancy Topping Bazin and Jane Hamovit Lauter explain, “Jacob

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spent part of his childhood at the seashore, went to Cambridge University, lived in Bloomsbury, traveled to Greece, and died an early death” (15). The war seems decidedly peripheral to the narrative. Rather than an overwhelming and transformative occasion, it is simply the mechanism by which Jacob’s life comes to a close. Consequently, many critics tend to see Jacob’s Room as addressing the war only indirectly. Karen L. Levenback, for example, argues that the book “refers to war and war death only in undertones, that is, in allusions, metonyms, and interrupted syntax.” Jacob’s Room incorporates only “the coming of the war,” and “actual experiences of the war are not at issue” (41, 46–47). Sue Roe remarks that “the immanence of the First World War” makes itself felt through a number of clues: passing references that take on a different valence with the knowledge of future events. Among these clues are Jacob Flanders’s family name, of course; the clock stroke in Cambridge, which sounds (in Woolf ’s text) “as if generations of learned men heard the last hour go rolling through their ranks”; and the chimney smoke that Jacob and Timmy see, having “the look of a mourning emblem, a flag floating its caress over a grave” (36, 39). There is also the aside regarding Jimmy, who now “feeds crows in Flanders,” and Helen, who “visits hospitals” (83). By the end of the novel, Roe concludes, even if Jacob’s death is on some level a surprise, we have in fact been prepared for it (xxxv). In these interpretations, however, while the novel may periodically hint at the Jacob’s fate, the war still serves as a plot device—a way of having Jacob die before his life can be fully realized, in a novel whose modernist significance lies in how it presents our fragmented and incomplete attempts to understand another person. Other scholars have investigated Jacob’s Room as a more direct response to the effects of the war, especially as a response to bereavement or the militarization of society. For instance, Josephine O’Brien Schaefer reads the novel as “an indictment of [ . . . ] patriarchal history” and “the senseless waste of war” (135, 139). “Woolf illustrates the cause and effect cycle of the war and the psycho-social views which perpetuate it,” claims Stephanie Zappa; “She probes on a deep psychological level, exposing what I call a war-thinking culture” (275). For Christine Froula, Jacob’s Room is “an epic canvas on which its Outsider-narrator paints ‘the problems of civilization’ and barbarism in modernity’s dis-illusioning yet revelatory light” (291). With regard to bereavement, William R. Handley argues that while “[a] conventional psychological reading of the novel emphasizes the inscrutability of human beings and marginalizes the war’s significance,” Woolf ’s aesthetic strategies constitute “a fighting response to the war” through the politicization of sorrow and “the ideology of form” (110–11). Allyson Booth writes that “Jacob’s room operates imagistically as an empty coffin,” reflecting the British government’s policy of

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not returning deceased soldiers’ remains and the consequent reformulation of attitudes toward memorialization (Postcards 46). Similarly, Tammy Clewell has recently written that while Woolf ’s novel “has frequently been read as a modernist critique of wartime idealism,” it also “denounce[s] traditional forms of consolation for loss,” encoding “the creation of an anticonsolatory practice of mourning” (199). In these analyses, the relationship between Jacob’s Room and the war operates primarily on the level of psychology: as an engagement with the war as a set of powerful ideas. As useful as these readings are, I would advance a further reading of Jacob’s Room as an engagement with the war as a set of historical events—of particular spaces of the war and what happens in them. Among recent critics, Booth perhaps has done the most in this regard, observing “the persistence with which the landscape of the trenches gets superimposed onto the landscape of England” in this novel. She points out a number of mechanisms through which Woolf accomplishes this effect, such as the narrator’s use of a ground-level point of view as a soldier or corpse might have (“The Architecture of Loss” 68). Booth also explains how Jacob’s Room, like the war zone, “is loaded with graves, tombstones, bones, and skulls” (69). I would add that at Mr. Plumer’s luncheon, there is “talk of names upon gates,” perhaps reflecting the discussions surrounding postwar memorials (26); the most famous of such projected name-bearing gates became Edwin Lutyens’s Monument to the Missing of the Battle of the Somme at Thiepval (1932), on which are inscribed the names of 73,367 British dead (Ferguson 437). Additionally, the most direct and obvious spatial reference to the war occurs at the end of the penultimate chapter, where Woolf juxtaposes the sound of “ships in the Piraeus fir[ing] their guns” at nightfall with a sound that Betty Flanders hears in Scarborough—a “dull sound” in the dark, like “women [ . . . ] beating great carpets,” that at first she thinks might be the noise of gunfire on the continent (154). Betty Flanders might indeed have been able to hear the guns if Scarborough were on the southeast coast of England instead of in North Yorkshire. Woolf was aware of this phenomenon, which she describes in “Heard on the Downs” (1916) as sounding “like the beating of gigantic carpets by gigantic women” (40). As Masami Usui has pointed out, however, Betty Flanders is more likely hearing the sound of the attack by German warships, on December 16, 1914, on Scarborough, Whitby, and Hartlepool. At Scarborough alone, the shelling killed 124 people and injured over 500. Usui explains that the bombardment of resort towns was an “unexpected and horrible attack” that “shocked the people seriously. It became also an unforgettable experience for the British people because England had never been attacked since Paul Jones’ Raid on Whitehaven on St. George’s Day, 1778” (7). The

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war intruded on British space (and place), shattering any complacencies about civilian safety. As for the gunfire in the Piraeus, scholars regularly refer to Woolf ’s journal entry from her 1906 trip to Greece, where she records that boats fire their guns at sunset in Piraeus (the port of Athens) in a harmless quotidian signal (A Passionate Apprentice 325). Indeed, Woolf explicitly invites this association earlier in her novel, when Jacob is in Athens and the narrator describes the scene “at sunset, when the ships in the Piraeus fire their guns” (129–30). If, as Usui argues, the German attack on Scarborough was sufficiently outrageous and “unforgettable” as to have firmly lodged in Woolf ’s memory, however, it is worth considering what wartime events in Greece—a nation whose history and culture both Woolf and Jacob particularly admire—might have inspired Woolf ’s repeated citation of guns firing in Greece. I suggest that the symbolic juxtaposition of belligerent gunfire at such geographically distant points as the Piraeus and Scarborough signals a much larger strategy of topographical representation, one partaking of a fundamentally altered sense of global maritime space inaugurated by the American navalist Rear Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan, author of the widely influential best seller The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783 (1890). At stake in the reconsideration of global space in the two decades between the publication of The Influence of Sea Power upon History and the start of the Great War were issues of global connectedness and a newfound artistic aesthetic endowing backgrounds, voids, and empty spaces—such as the sea— with their own constituency and agency. As we shall see, military events in the Piraeus and at Scarborough resulted from the application of Mahan’s theories and were interpreted in public discourse by using The Influence of Sea Power upon History as a guide. Jacob’s Room thus encodes, however unintentionally, a new way of thinking about sea space. Britain’s strategists, seeking to capitalize on her dominance of the sea, considered the strategic possibilities of intervening in the Balkan Peninsula. Greece was officially neutral through 1915, although Franco-British policy was to encourage it to join the Allies while at the same time attempting to ensure the neutrality of Bulgaria, one of Greece’s traditional Balkan antagonists. However, the Turkish containment of the Gallipoli landing by the summer of 1915 encouraged the King of Bulgaria to side with the Central Powers, joining a renewed Austrian-German attack on Serbia. The Serbian leadership urged the Allies to land troops at Salonika, in Greece; the Greek Prime Minister, Eleutherios Venizelos, told the British and French governments that if they would land 150,000 troops there, he could induce his government (despite the vacillation of King Constantine) to join the Allies under the terms of a preexisting treaty between Serbia and Greece. In October

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1915, consequently, a joint French and British force landed at Salonika. On the day of the Allied landing, Constantine, who was determined to preserve his country’s neutrality, dismissed Venizelos. After an initial advance into Serbia, the Allied forces retreated to their debarkation point, where they would remain virtual prisoners of the Bulgarian Army: bottled up at the foot of a valley surrounded by steep mountains until 1918 (Keegan, The First World War 250–56). Romania entered the war in August 1916, further complicating the political and strategic situation in the Balkans. The French government was convinced that the Greeks were passing information on French military movements to the Bulgarians; a French fleet (to which British ships were attached) was therefore ordered to seize control of Greek harbors, railways, telegraphs, and posts. The British government agreed to participate in the operation, but only reluctantly as it became clear that the French were pursuing strategic aims different from their own and were in danger of destabilizing the situation. On September 1, 1916, the Anglo-French fleet seized Greek ships off the Piraeus and bottled the rest up at Salamis (Newbolt 139–43). The following month, Venizelos formed a provisional government at Crete, one moved later to Salonika and recognized by the British. The Greek political situation thereafter became even more confused, as Venizelos sought to bring his country into the war and Constantine continued to try to stay out of it. The situation deteriorated amid factional strife and royalist demonstrations against the Allies; meanwhile, German and Austrian forces were overrunning Romania. In mid-November the French commanding admiral demanded that Constantine’s government surrender artillery and ammunition as proof of their “benevolent neutrality” toward the Allies (Newbolt 160). The Greek government refused, and on the night of November 30 a force of French and British troops and marines landed at Piraeus and began to march on Athens (about five miles away). The Greek Army resisted the Allied advance, firing on the landing parties from the Acropolis and the Stadium on December 1. French ships off the Piraeus shelled the Stadium, the first shells falling nearby in the palace where the King was installed. The naval bombardment induced the Greeks to cease fire; the Allies reached an agreement with the Greeks, according to which some Greek artillery would be surrendered in exchange for the withdrawal of the landing parties. By the end of the operation, the casualties included 191 French and twenty-one British soldiers (Newbolt 160–70). Although little known today, the action in Greece assumed a high profile at the time in England. First, extraneous events lent urgency to the situation: the Greek crisis came to a head at the same time that Bucharest fell to the Central Powers (December 5) and the British government underwent

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its own political crisis (Prime Minister Asquith resigned on December 5). Additionally, even though the Allied forces ultimately withdrew, British newspapers breathlessly reported the situation as it continued to simmer. An initial headline in the Times on December 6 reads, “Reign of Terror at Athens: Red Cross Nurses Assaulted; Torture and Murder of Venizelists.” Reports of further “atrocities” appeared the following day.24 Woolf had little direct information about the war, lacking access to soldiers returning from the front. What she did know, however, she derived from the newspapers—which we know she read extensively (Levenback 20, 32). The Times reported on December 4, “Many of the Allies were killed or wounded, and in consequence at least some of the guns of the Fleet were brought into action” (“Grave Events in Athens” 8). Thus, Woolf ’s thorough reading of the newspapers would doubtless have brought to her attention that the harmless firing of boats’ guns in the Piraeus at sunset, as she remembered it from her 1906 trip, was being reenacted in a bloody battle. The events in the Piraeus cannot have failed to move Woolf. For both the author and her creation of Jacob (and her brother Thoby, who introduced her to Greek classics), Greece represented the cradle of civilization and a place of almost mystical importance. Roe notes that “Jacob’s passion for the Greeks is a strong theme running through the novel,” and “Woolf ’s views here coincide with Jacob’s: ‘it is to the Greeks that we turn,’ she wrote [elsewhere], ‘when we are sick of the vagueness, of the confusion [ . . . ] of our own age.’ ”25 References to Greek statues and literature, “the flavour of Greek,” “the love of Greek,” “the Greek myth,” “the Greek spirit,” and “[t]he tragedy of Greece” occur throughout the novel (63, 64, 120, 124). “I intend to come to Greece every year so long as I live” (128), Jacob writes in a letter to Bonamy, and he began pondering how “the problems of civilization” [ . . . ] “were solved [ . . . ] so very remarkably by the ancient Greeks” (131). Greece held a preeminent place in Woolf ’s conception of art, history, and culture, and this preeminence was reflected in Jacob’s attitudes.26 It is likely that for Woolf the sound of guns in the Piraeus in 1906 and in 1916 constituted a remarkable historical coincidence. If this passage in the novel indeed refers to both events, it deepens the foreshadowing that surrounds Jacob as he moves in time toward his own death. Additionally, the other details of this passage assume an entirely different valence. The “red light [ . . . ] on the columns of the Parthenon,” referring to the setting sun’s rays, could just as easily refer to the blood of warfare and the Greek troops’ use of the Acropolis to fire on the Allied soldiers (154). Thus, in Jacob’s Room Greece occupies a double space in history: as a space of cultural achievement, and as a war zone where memories of the Trojan War, and of Salamis and Marathon (battle sites Jacob sees during his tour) form the substrata of the

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Allied landings at Gallipoli, Salonika, and Athens (129). When Woolf writes, “Darkness drops like a knife over Greece,” furthermore, she could also be characterizing the darkness of the spreading global conflict as the Great War fell on that country, which had hitherto been out of harm’s way (154). For Woolf, the Great War had burst upon the Greece of ancient civilization with as loud and as incongruous an explosion as what must have surprised the guests of the seaside hotels of Scarborough. The Influence of Sea Power upon Modernism If the German raid on English coastal towns was one of the two most prominent naval events in December 1914, the other was Alfred Thayer Mahan’s death on December 1. Mahan had served in the American Civil War, commanded several ships, and lectured on naval history and tactics at the Naval War College before achieving international prominence in 1890 with The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783. Analyzing the significance of naval campaigns in conflicts dating back to the Punic Wars (third and second centuries b.c.), Mahan advanced the novel view that sea power was not merely the adjunct of land power, but instead exerted the determining factor in international conflicts. He advocated the construction of a large battle fleet according to a national policy of naval superiority. Prime strategic aims, he argued, should be the concentration of force and the control of sea space through a decisive fleet battle—thereby “break[ing] up the enemy’s power on the sea, cutting off his communications with the rest of his possessions, drying up the sources of his wealth in his commerce, and making possible a closure of his ports” (254). Mahan’s subsequent volumes, The Influence of Sea Power upon the French Revolution and Empire, 1793–1812 (1892) and The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future (1897), furthered the scope and influence of his ideas. Mahan’s work appeared at a key time in international imperialist competition and the development of naval technology. The “scramble for Africa” was well underway, as European powers quarreled over the last remaining pieces of unclaimed colonial territory, and Mahan’s pioneering philosophy of international relations proved irresistible to governments obsessed with the application of sea power for their imperialist projects. America was starting a shipbuilding program that would give it stature as a world power. Germany began a buildup of its High Seas Fleet in 1897 with the intention of rivaling the Royal Navy and enabling the acquisition and protection of its own overseas empire. The events of the Spanish-American War (1898) and the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905), dominated by engagements between capital ships, appeared to validate Mahan’s views about the control of sea

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space as critical to the projection of power ashore. In 1906, the heyday of the Dreadnought battleship began when the British launched a warship of that name: a vessel of unprecedented size, heavily armored, and equipped principally with guns of a single large caliber. This ship rendered all of the existing battleships of the world’s navies obsolete overnight and led to renewed international anxiety about the relative strength of navies. Soon Germany and Britain would embark explicitly on the “battleship race”: a shipbuilding competition that has been identified as one of the causes of the First World War. Indeed, we might even trace the Anglo-German naval armament race to an enthusiastic reading of Mahan. A review of The Influence of Sea Power upon the French Revolution and Empire in the Times casts the Royal Navy as a bulwark of national sovereignty in distinctly apocalyptic language: “What the historian, naval and general, has for the most part failed to perceive,” writes the reviewer, “is that from 1793 to 1815 the sea power of England was the one solid barrier which the Revolutionary and Napoleonic deluge failed to submerge, as it spread in a devastating flood over the whole of Western Europe, and at one time threatened to assume the proportions of a universal cataclysm.” The review asserts, “What we learn from Captain Mahan’s pages is that, to a country like England, commercial, expansive, and maritime, sea power is not merely an incidental element of national strength, but the very foundation of its being; [ . . . ] it is as impossible for England not to be the dominant naval Power of the world, as it is for Germany not to rely on the armed manhood of the nation organized for territorial defence” (“Captain Mahan’s New Work” 11). Given Mahan’s analysis, according to this review a future conflict with Germany assumes the outlines of a historic inevitability. The appearance of Mahan’s work also coincided with the transformation of geography into geopolitics, or the systematic study of the relationship between topography and human history. In Germany, Friedrich Ratzel, a professor of geography at Leipzig, published several texts in the 1890s linking national destiny to spatial circumstances. In Das Meer als Quelle der Völkergrösse (The Sea as a Source of the Greatness of a People) (1900), Ratzel explicitly draws on Mahan to argue for expansionist and navalist German national policies. The American historian Frederick Jackson Turner gave his highly influential address, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893; Halford Mackinder, Director of the London School of Economics and Reader in Geography at Oxford, read his paper entitled “The Geographical Pivot of History” to the Royal Geographical Society in 1904. Mahan’s ideas flourished amid this intellectual environment of intense European interest in international relations and imperial expansion, susceptible to a rationalist analysis of

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the relationship between military strategy, geographical circumstances, and national destiny. While Mahan wrote primarily for an American audience and in the service of the American expansionism during decades that for the first time saw the addition of an overseas empire to a nation hitherto largely occupied by its own continental affairs, political leaders and military strategists elsewhere were quick to take notice. Kaiser Wilhelm is said to have “devoured” The Influence of Sea Power upon History (Hacker v). Mahan’s views were especially popular in England. The Times review of The Influence of Sea Power upon the French Revolution and Empire credits Mahan as “not merely [ . . . ] the most distinguished living writer on naval strategy, but [ . . . ] the originator and first exponent of what may be called the philosophy of naval history.” The review continues: Many historians have told us the splendid tale of England’s naval exploits and illustrated the superb steadfastness of her immortal heroes of the sea. [ . . . ] But Captain Mahan is more historical than the strategists, more strategical than the historians, and more philosophical than either. At best the historians, where they have not misconceived the conditions of naval warfare altogether, have regarded it rather as an auxiliary and subordinate element of military strategy than as an independent and co-ordinate, if not supreme, factor in determining the course of history and the fate of nations. (“Captain Mahan’s New Work” 11)

Mahan applied “profoundly scientific” principles of historical analysis to geopolitical problems. Consequently, his first book “was at once recognized as a new departure in naval history,” and according to this review, his work ranked with Adam Smith’s 1776 Wealth of Nations in its literary merit and general import (11). Mahan’s books had an impact felt throughout British culture. In the words of Margaret Tuttle Sprout, The Influence of Sea Power upon History “appeared in England at the precise psychological moment to win the greatest attention and approval.” The government had just introduced in Parliament a plan to enlarge the Royal Navy to make it the equal of the next two largest European powers (the “two power standard” of 1889). Sprout explains, “Mahan’s book appeared at the right moment to provide clear and irrefutable arguments to justify this program”; furthermore, given this felicitous timing, this book and The Influence of Sea Power upon the French Revolution and Empire “were the most important single factor in making the whole nation navyminded” (440). During several visits Mahan made to England in 1893–95, he dined with the queen and the prime minister, received honorary degrees at Cambridge and Oxford, and became the first foreigner to be the guest of

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honor at the Royal Navy Club. “His views were widely disseminated in the press, in the quarterlies, through the professional journals, and by such influential societies as the Royal United Service Institution,” Sprout writes. Even Prime Minister William Gladstone, who was opposed to armaments, called The Influence of Sea Power upon the French Revolution and Empire the “book of the age” (Sprout 441). Mahan’s popularity in Britain was further enhanced by his biography of Horatio Nelson, The Life of Nelson: The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain (1897). A glowing Times review of this book not only characterized it as “one of the greatest naval classics,” but also noted that Mahan’s earlier works were “synchronized with the awakening of the long dormant naval instincts of this country,” as books that “revealed to Englishmen the forgotten secret of their own Imperial history” (“Captain Mahan’s Life of Nelson” 12). Given the status of Mahan’s opinions, when the Great War started, Britons evaluated the naval dimension of the conflict through a Mahanian lens. The day after Britain declared war against Germany, Mahan granted an interview to a Times correspondent in which he predicted, “We may expect any minute [ . . . ] to get word of a great engagement” between the British and German fleets in the North Sea, according to the principles of sea control that he had explained in his work (“Admiral Mahan on the War” 5). When this expected battle, in the classic style of Trafalgar or Tsu-Shima, failed to materialize by September 14, another Times article reassessed the naval situation by turning again to The Influence of Sea Power upon History. This time, however, the correspondent points to Mahan’s reference elsewhere to “the unremitting daily silent pressure of naval force, when it has attained control of the sea against an opponent,” by which (in the correspondent’s words) Britain’s naval superiority can “profoundly affect the issues of the war—without a big sea battle taking place.” In fact, the correspondent relates, “Admiral Mahan does not anticipate an immediate collision between the two fleets” (“The Fleets at Sea” 5). Mahan’s death on December 1 occasioned encomiastic obituaries such as that in the Times, which refers to his “brilliant” work in The Influence of Sea Power upon History. “The effect of [the text’s] publication,” the obituary declares, “was in the end profound and quite unparalleled,” further reminding the British public of Mahan’s prescience and, in so doing, keeping his theories in circulation (“Admiral Mahan” 7). The shocking and “unforgettable” German bombardment of English coastal towns two weeks after Mahan’s death, taking place in spite of the blockade and in the absence of the expected, decisive fleet engagement, once more sent Britons to Mahan for interpretation. Three days after the raid, a letter-writer to the Times sought to console those “who continually ask what our Navy is doing and how such things can be” by quoting these lines from

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The Influence of Sea Power upon History (and helpfully providing a page number): “The control of the sea, however real, does not imply that an enemy’s single ships or small squadrons cannot steal out of port, cannot cross more or less frequented tracts of ocean, make harassing descents upon unprotected points of a long coastline [ . . . ]. On the contrary, history has shown that such evasions are always possible” despite the disparity in the strength of the rival fleets.27 Thus the British public could still continue to see the maritime war as unfolding according to Mahan’s predictions. As an artifact of the British wartime imagination, Jacob’s Room incorporates the impact of Mahan’s theories as well. First, Woolf records the nature of actual naval engagements carried out in accordance with the Mahanian doctrine of sea control decided by the outcome of large battles between entire fleets. Thus we read this description during a discussion in the Durrants’ drawing room: The battleships ray out over the North Sea, keeping their stations accurately apart. At a given signal all the guns are trained on a target which (the master gunner counts the seconds, watch in hand—at the sixth he looks up) flames into splinters. With equal nonchalance a dozen young men in the prime of life descend with composed faces into the depths of the sea; and there impassively (though with perfect mastery of machinery) suffocate uncomplainingly together. (136)

According to Sue Roe, this passage “may be flash-forward, or perhaps even a mock-up battle, staged by the military as part of their preparations” (183n24). Bazin and Lauter alternatively write that here, “Woolf parodies the kind of dehumanized point of view that makes war possible.” Their conclusion is bolstered by the lines immediately following those cited previously, in which an army, “[l]ike blocks of tin soldiers,” moves over a cornfield “and falls flat,” with the exception of “one or two pieces,” which, seen through binoculars, “still agitate up and down like fragments of broken match-stick.”28 The descriptions of battleship gunnery and the sinking submarine sound more like exercises than a battle.29 However, through the conspicuous references to accurate station keeping and precision gunnery, this passage could also allude to the classically Mahanian Battle of Jutland (1916), in which two large fleets of Dreadnought battleships, arrayed in lines, executed complicated maneuvers in what was expected to be an epic and decisive battle to control sea space. If, in this example, Jacob’s Room records the overt impact of Mahan’s doctrines on the conduct of the war, the novel also testifies to the more subtle application of such Mahanian concepts as global connectedness. Here is

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Five strokes Big Ben intoned; Nelson received the salute. The wires of the Admiralty shivered with some far-away communication. A voice kept remarking that Prime Ministers and Viceroys spoke in the Reichstag; entered Lahore; said that the Emperor travelled; in Milan they rioted; said there were rumours in Vienna; said that the Ambassador at Constantinople had audience with the Sultan; the fleet was at Gibraltar. (151)

The modern world was a connected world, and Britain’s role in the drama of the war’s eruption hinged on her status as a maritime—and hence worldwide—power. Consequently, it is entirely fitting that Woolf concludes this sequence by locating the fleet. “They say the sky is the same everywhere,” Woolf ’s narrator remarks elsewhere, and the image of the globe as a symbol of worldwide connection appears repeatedly throughout the novel (24).30 Letters, writes Woolf, “lace our days together and make of life a perfect globe” (79). Even “each insect carries a globe of the world in his head” (143). As if reinforcing Woolf ’s notion, Jacob reads the Globe newspaper (84) and “the Globe Trotter, an international magazine” (121). In a novel whose implicit project consists of asking what life is, the closest Woolf comes to an answer takes place at a moment of geographical and cartographical contemplation, focused on a globe: “One’s godmothers ought to have told one,” said Fanny, looking in at the window of Bacon, the mapseller, in the Strand—told one that it is no use making a fuss; this is life, they should have said, as Fanny said it now, looking at the large yellow globe marked with steamship lines. “This is life. This is life,” said Fanny. “A very hard face,” thought Miss Barrett, on the other side of the glass, buying maps of the Syrian desert and waiting impatiently to be served. “Girls look old so soon nowadays.” The equator swam behind tears. (150)

When Fanny says, “This is life,” while happening to be looking at a globe, she doubtless does not mean literally that cartographic products hold the secret to life. Yet Woolf ’s juxtaposition of Fanny’s contemplation of the meaning of life with the image of the globe and its depiction of steamship routes is telling. At this moment, which takes place during the diplomatic maneuvering in the summer of 1914, knowledge of worldwide connectedness and the worldwide consequences of the looming conflict inform the awareness of what the consciousness of life signifies.

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how Woolf describes the events of August 4, 1914, the day of the British declaration of war:

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Woolf ’s assertions of global connectedness were not unique. We may judge that she repeats a common cultural awareness also observed by H. M. Tomlinson in All Our Yesterdays (1930). He writes of the run-up to the war, “It was already becoming clear for the first time to many onlookers that the earth is not two hemispheres, as we had thought, but one simple and responsive ball, and that happenings on the shores of the Yellow Sea and elsewhere may cause disturbing noises even in Washington” (281). First, as Stephen Kern has noted, such technological developments as the telephone, railroad, automobile, bicycle, airplane, and cinema collapsed distances for travel and communications, helping create the belief that the world was dramatically shrinking and becoming increasingly interconnected (213). Also, a public sense that the nations of the world were inextricably linked in a network of shared cartographical, geographical, and spatial knowledge was enhanced by the laying of a telegraph cable across the Atlantic Ocean in 1866 and one across the Pacific in 1902. From such evidence, then, one would conclude that global connectedness resulted principally from technological advances. In Mahan’s analysis, however, the idea that power shifts can be felt across the globe antedates the technology Kern identifies. For instance, in The Influence of Sea Power upon History he highlights Napoleon’s claim “that he would reconquer Pondicherry on the banks of the Vistula. Could he have controlled the English Channel,” Mahan supposes, “can it be doubted that he would have conquered Gibraltar on the shores of England?” (11). Mahan’s assertion that the application of sea power can make results at one side of the globe dependent on events on the other side accurately predicted the results of world war, as Woolf and Tomlinson describe them. Today, scholarly interest in the concept of global connectedness in the early twentieth century is shaped especially by “The Geographical Pivot of History,” in which Mackinder proposed that whatever nation managed to control the “pivot area” of Eurasia was destined to dominate the world (43). However, while “The Geographical Pivot of History” appeared in Geographical Journal in 1904, the essay did not see book form until 1919; even then, this book attracted little notice in Britain until the time of the Second World War (Gilbert 10). As well known as Mackinder’s theories are today, then, it is important to remember that at the time Mahan’s work was much better known. Mahan’s theories actually tend to undermine Mackinder’s “heartland” argument, as Mackinder concedes when explaining how sea communications historically served “in some measure to neutralize the strategical advantage of the central position of the steppe-nomads” during the age of Columbian exploration. On the topic of global connectedness, furthermore, Mackinder explicitly credits the technological advancement of steam propulsion, which

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revolutionized navigation, commerce, and naval strategy by making them independent of the elements. Even without steam, however, “The one and continuous ocean enveloping the divided and insular lands is, of course, the geographical condition of ultimate unity in the command of the sea, and of the whole theory of modern naval strategy and policy as expounded by such writers as Captain Mahan [ . . . ]” (40). Thus Mackinder acknowledges the preeminent position of both Mahan and his theories in the argument for a connected world. While Mahan gave Britons a historical-analytic framework for comprehending Allied and Central Powers strategy according to rationalist geographic and technical principles, he did not merely analyze the strategic impact of fleet movements. He inaugurated a new way of thinking about ocean space that, in its parallel to contemporary artistic theories, gave geostrategic thought a profoundly evocative aesthetic force. Mahan joined artists in reconfiguring the terms of absence and presence, discerning in the apparent empty space of the sea a constituency and agency that, up until then, had not been systematically analyzed. The constitutive quality of space was one of the significant artistic and scientific issues of this period, as Stephen Kern explains while formulating the expression “positive negative space” to describe what was new. Art critics, he reminds us, refer to a painting’s subject as “positive space” and the background as “negative space.” Under the prevailing historical and technological developments of the early twentieth century, however, “what was formerly regarded as negative now [had] a positive, constitutive function,” leading to nothing less than “a transformation of the metaphysical foundations of life and thought” (152). Thus, in Cubist paintings, such sculpture as that by Umberto Boccioni and Alexander Archipenko, or architecture designed with an eye to the volumes enclosed by structures—just as in Einstein’s model of a dynamic space-time continuum replacing the Newtonian spatial void—what had previously been considered empty space now had a constituent presence of its own (159–62). If the transformation of geography into geopolitics provided the scientific context for Mahan’s work, the emergence of this “positive negative space” formed the aesthetic context. According to the Mahanian view of historical geography, the sea was not a void to be crossed by fleets on their way to points on coastlines (with incidental clashes with the enemy along the way) but a space whose domination by a battle fleet enabled supremacy over neighboring landmasses. To exert naval power, according to Mahan, means controlling a sea space through the presence of the fleet (actual, recent, or potential), thereby turning that space into a contiguous section of national territory strategically indistinguishable from that on dry land. Therefore, when Mahan

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argues in The Influence of Sea Power upon History that Roman control of the central Mediterranean basin in the Second Punic War decided the conflict against Carthage by interdicting potential sea lines of communication and so dooming Hannibal’s invasion of Italy via the Alps, he implicitly concludes that the effect was in large part psychological. The Roman galley fleets could not remain at sea indefinitely, but the threat of their superior presence led the Carthaginians to avoid battles and so concede control to the Romans (14). The central Mediterranean therefore became one such “positive negative space,” a space of Roman presence even when the Roman fleet was not in it. In Jacob’s Room, Woolf confronts the consequences of such new conceptions of space in decidedly personal, human terms. Mahan’s neat battle-maps mean something else when one realizes that the icon for a ship’s physical location also symbolizes the hundreds of lives carried within it. The ability to transmit information across the globe at the speed of light takes on a different valence when a telegram is a message of condolence—such as the telegram in Woolf ’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) that Lady Bexborough stoically holds in her hand while opening a bazaar, having just read of her favorite son’s death at the front (5). The war gave these spatial theories a mordant reality; furthermore, it brought out an essential conflict between the two principal ideas of space, indigenous to modernity, that I have been discussing: the shrinking globe and Mahanian constitutive space. Jacob’s Room explores the contradictions between these ideas on the level of personal consequences, bearing witness to the fraught transformation of space enabled by technology and theorized by Mahan. In Jacob’s Room, the version of global connectedness analyzed and propounded by Mahan makes itself felt in the key moment at the end of the penultimate chapter, worth returning to in full: But the red light was on the columns of the Parthenon, and the Greek women who were knitting their stockings and sometimes crying to a child to come and have the insects picked from its head were as jolly as sand-martins in the heat, quarrelling, scolding, suckling their babies, until the ships in the Piraeus fired their guns. The sound spread itself flat, and then went tunnelling its way with fitful explosions among the channels of the islands. Darkness drops like a knife over Greece. “The guns?” said Betty Flanders, half asleep, getting out of bed and going to the window, which was decorated with a fringe of dark leaves. “Not at this distance,” she thought, “It is the sea.” Again, far away, she heard the dull sound, as if nocturnal women were beating great carpets. There was Morty lost, and Seabrook dead; her sons

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Between “Darkness drops like a knife over Greece” and “ ‘The guns?’ ” we see a blank of several lines, and this typographical void neatly symbolizes—one might say, directly represents—the aesthetic dimension of Mahan’s thinking about global space. This blank typographical space connects the physical spaces of wartime Greece and England just as surely as the seemingly blank space of oceanic distance geographically links the two regions. I say “seemingly” because that blank is nevertheless, paradoxically enough, constitutive of presence: the presence of the war. The war is inescapable for the women ostensibly safe on the home front of England, just as it is inescapable for the women of Piraeus as Woolf had seen them in the days of peace. In this extraordinarily complex and subtle passage, Woolf reminds us of the fact made clear to the dead civilians at Scarborough and the dead soldiers at Athens: that just as Mahan had warned, a country’s frontiers include its seacoasts (Mahan 30). Woolf ’s episode in turn sets the stage for the appearance of the consummate empty space of the novel: the room empty of Jacob, and in particular the emotional plenitude of his empty shoes. The brief final chapter draws an even more personal conclusion about global connectedness and the dynamic of absence and presence explored on a geostrategic level in the preceding passage. In this last chapter, Woolf reminds us in several ways of the curious properties of empty space. First, in Bonamy’s words Jacob has “ ‘left everything just as it was,’ ” in an apparent expectation of return that makes his absence more palpable. In the physical center of this page-long chapter, we read, “Listless is the air in an empty room, just swelling the curtain; the flowers in the jar shift. One fibre in the wicker arm-chair creaks, though no one sits there” (155). The air is invisible, yet it moves the curtain; the chair is unoccupied, though a fiber of it creaks: Woolf plays on the expectations established by the end of the previous chapter, pointing out the presence paradoxically sensed in the face of absence. And, of course, at the very end of the last chapter we read the lines toward which the entire novel has been building. “ ‘What am I to do with these, Mr. Bonamy?’ ” asks Betty Flanders; “She held out a pair of Jacob’s old shoes” (155). Jacob’s shoes are the ultimate positive negative space in the novel, simultaneously constitutive of life and death, movement stilled, and grief and remembrance. The shoes mark the absence of Jacob’s body from his home and his family, yet his mother seems unable to bring herself to discard them. The emptiness within the shoes has become Jacob, in the absence of a corpse that can be brought home from across the water. Ultimately, this is the supremely

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fighting for their country. But were the chickens safe? Was that some one moving downstairs? Rebecca with the toothache? No. The nocturnal women were beating great carpets. Her hens shifted slightly on their perches. (154)

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interpersonal consequence of a theory of space contemplated by thinkers as diverse as Mahan and Picasso, and brought to reality through the agency of the war: sea power has made oceans constitutive and shrunk the globe, making Scarborough as vulnerable as Athens. The similarly constituent spaces of Jacob’s room and Jacob’s shoes are finally, and paradoxically enough, all we have of him. I do not base this analysis on the suggestion that Woolf read Mahan, any more than I would suggest that Conrad made the topography of the Gulf of Siam resemble the fields of Flanders through a deliberate effort intended to be obvious to the reader. Yet I would suggest, however, that such demonstrations of spatial awareness as were enforced by the geometries of siege warfare or unveiled by Mahan created certain cultural imperatives that were then subsumed into works of fiction and articulated through them. Thus, when Mahan writes, “The seaboard of a country is one of its frontiers,” he is helping initiate a rethinking of space that occurs synchronically across culture and according to shared or overlapping principles (30). For the navalist, the boundaries between land and sea space dissolve— as boundaries dissolve in such paintings as Georges Braque’s Still Life with Violin and Pitcher (1910) and Edward Wadsworth’s depiction of camouflaged vessels, Dazzle-Ships in Drydock at Liverpool (1919), for example. While dazzle camouflage was designed to disturb the aim of submarine attackers by making it difficult to determine the target vessel’s course, rather than by blending the ship in with its surroundings, such depictions as this by Wadsworth (who supervised the application of the camouflage scheme on thousands of vessels during the war) testify to the artistic power of the idea of interpenetrating spaces (Cork 232). In the case of both paintings, the observer cannot easily distinguish the outlines of material objects among the geometric shapes similarly marking the spaces inside and outside them. Such a coincidence of boundary dissolutions exemplifies the transmission and reverberation of spatial attitudes toward which this discussion has pointed. In these readings, The Shadow-Line and Jacob’s Room become war novels to the extent that they engage the experience of the war as topographical expressions. Furthermore, the status of these texts as war literature is related to the issue of connectedness on the broader cultural level. Specifically, the manner in which the war finds its way into these novels serves as an analogue for how disparate parts of the world came to be regarded as newly connected in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Conrad and Woolf do not consciously assert the penetration of the topography of the war into the topographies of their imagination—such a declaration would seem both superfluous and misattributed to their own agency. Instead, the

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connectedness of spaces in wartime is an inexorable part of modern progress, which these authors are led to acknowledge. Spatial connectedness and the peculiar topographical circumstances of the war together informed these authors’ literary responses to the conditions of their lives. First, both books feature internal instances of connectedness. As we have noted, The Shadow-Line ends in Singapore where it had begun. In the final chapter of Jacob’s Room, the reappearance of words, phrases, and images used earlier in the novel similarly knits up the parts of the narrative into a connected whole. For example, a “ram’s skull” (6) carved into the wood over a doorway repeats the “sheep’s skull” (155) that Jacob found on the beach as a boy. The passage “Listless is the air in an empty room, just swelling the curtain; the flowers in the jar shift. One fibre in the wicker arm-chair creaks, though no one sits there” is a word-for-word repetition of the scene in Jacob’s rooms at Cambridge University (31, 155). Within the confines of these novels, such repetitions and circularities help the narratives to cohere while also establishing the epistemological stakes of connectedness. Beyond the confines of these texts’ internal workings, Conrad and Woolf also draw connections between the parts of the world that their novels describe both explicitly and implicitly. In this larger sense, The Shadow-Line and Jacob’s Room address the personal dimension of the war through recourse to mechanisms of topographical parallels—connections between physical and psychological landscapes, and between topographies at home and abroad, in France, in Flanders, and in more distant regions of the globe. Accordingly, Conrad and Woolf stage in these narratives imaginative enactments, or reenactments, of the emotional consequences occasioned by such historical events as Borys Conrad’s departure for the front and Rupert Brooke’s death in the Aegean, which affected Woolf profoundly (Levenback 13–16). We might even, therefore, view the two novels as a form of fantasy, recapitulating the war on its topographical terms. Hence, Conrad imagines a shadow-line that can be crossed without dying after all, while Woolf imagines a method of dealing with death that turns a physical void into a compensation for absence through the mechanism of positive negative space. Yet if these novels encode spatial fantasies, we should by no means reduce them to expressions of authorial auto-therapy. No doubt the similarities between a latitude line and a trench line, and between the Mahanian exercise of naval spatial dominance and the embodiment of a dead soldier in the void of his empty shoes, operate on a level removed from the conscious application of theories about space as mediated by newspaper articles. Perhaps it would be more fitting to describe these two works as eloquently articulating the wartime consequences of an interconnected world, consequences that

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make possible the reconstruction (even if unintended) of Flanders fields in the Gulf of Siam and in the space between Greece and Scarborough. The possibility of writing such works as Jacob’s Room and The Shadow-Line is the direct consequence of what was initially known simply as the War or the European War, and later as the Great War or the World War. As Woolf and Conrad testify, the all-encompassing sweep implied by the last titles reaches far beyond the physical topography of the globe and into the imaginative topography of the fiction that bears it witness.

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n the introduction to this book, I noted that when Bernard Adams’s friend asks what the war was like, Adams falls silent, unable to find the words to describe his experience. As Fussell points out, “Whatever the cause, the presumed inadequacy of language itself to convey the facts about trench warfare is one of the motifs of all who wrote about the war” (Great War 170). Why do words seem to fail their speakers in these extreme circumstances—a condition that applies not only to Adams, but also to the sufferers of shell shock induced aphasia or to the countless war veterans moved to keep their war stories untold? (Harry Patch, the veteran who died in 2009 as the last British survivor of the trenches, was one who never spoke to his wife or children about what he had witnessed [“Death of Last Tommy”].) One answer may simply be that trauma, both physical and psychological, interferes with the capacity of the human intellect to comprehend or articulate the traumatic event. As this book does not focus primarily on the mental effects of trauma with regard to modern literature, however, I would have to leave that topic in the hands of the many scholars whose wide-ranging discussions resist easy summary here.1 Another answer has to do with the status of words as the currency of meaning. One way to account for the wordlessness permeating such stories as those by Adams and so many others would be to point to the meaninglessness of the described events. According to this reasoning, words necessarily fail in the face of trench warfare, whose participants wait for random death by shellfire in between the senseless repetition of “over the top” offensives. The texts studied in this book, read according to this attitude, exemplify the limits of literary meaning-making as authors struggle to fit the realist mode of description to the evasive qualities of the war experience. Such an argument demands qualification in turn, however. As Niall Ferguson’s The

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Pity of War and Dan Todman’s The Great War: Myth and Memory point out, the currently widespread notion of the futility of the Great War is largely a postwar phenomenon. The belief that the Great War had no meaning at all certainly became a firmly established part of common wisdom after Wilfred Owen’s poetry took center stage in the canon of Great War literature in the 1960s. The idea of the war’s futility had been gaining international traction ever since the publication of Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front in 1929, though, and it was Montague’s position in Disenchantment as early as 1922, as we have seen. Yet at the time of the conflict, there was a strong sense among its participants that they were indeed fighting for a worthy cause and to good effect. Perhaps we can reframe the problems of wordlessness and meaningmaking by addressing why, in literary criticism, we would want to connect the two in terms of interpretation. Our age of criticism is one detrimentally dominated by interpretation, according to Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht in Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (2004). Gumbrecht argues that while interpretation is “an elementary and probably inevitable intellectual practice,” the humanities are constrained by its “exclusive core practice” of “attributing meaning to the world (or, to use an older topology [ . . . ] extracting meaning from the world)” (52). The notion of adding non-interpretive strategies of analysis, such as ones focused on “substantialist” concepts as “being,” he concedes, “has long been a symptom of despicably bad intellectual taste in the humanities”; it is “synonymous with the utmost degree of philosophical naïveté” and would provoke “potentially devastating and embarrassing criticism” (53). Despite the dangers of such an approach, however, following its leads allows us to sidestep the problem exposed by this question: if we see the writing and reading of literature as the site for the production of meaning, then how can we account for what happens when literature confronts what so many consider an inherently meaningless event? Such a sidestepping permits a richer and more compelling answer to this last question than asserting simply that the war’s participants did, in fact, see a meaning in what they were doing. While we can consider the texts studied here as forming a catalog of attempts to overcome the epistemological challenges of the war, consequently, we can also review them productively as having created the presence of the war in the minds of their readers. If readers of these texts may not have finished them with a clearer (or more settled and reassuring) understanding of what the war meant, at least they had become more aware of what the war was like, to recall the formula used by Adams’s questioner—what it was like to feel the material presence of the war. I say this because the daily experience of the war was, for its participants, not a matter of spheres of imperial influence or the defense of abstractions like

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“civilization.” It was a matter of physical matter: bodies, wounds, and corpses; shell-holes and trenches; barbed wire and piles of rubble. Furthermore, it is in this sense that a fuller view of apposite relation of modernism to the Great War emerges. We already recognize that the modernist aesthetic, with its stylistic ruptures and discontinuities, not to mention its prominent themes of alienation and chaos, formally imitated its subject matter in war literature devoted to the chaotic violence of the battlefield. Also, modernism would be privileged for several of the reasons furnishing the explicit organization of this book: for modernism’s skepticism toward the intelligibility of the signifier and emphasis on subjective mental processes (as in the contrast between maps and mapping), for its appropriation and questioning of some inherited aesthetic categories (West and the sublime), and for its sense of the flux of experience (as in the mechanisms of connectedness and transposition in Conrad and Woolf ). Yet modernism additionally played a privileged role for creating presence to the extent that one of the hallmarks of modernist art in general is its property of calling attention to the work’s status as a work of art. The thickness or presence of the medium thus analogically suits its representative aim. Furthermore, we can cite modernism’s attention to materiality, as in Dowell’s wampum, for example, as another point of confluence between the creating of presence in modernist texts and writing coincident to the war. The willingness to pursue these analogies and connections reminds us how much modernism’s characteristics encompassed more than the formal experimentations for which canonically modernist texts are often best known. For the war’s participants, to make present a lived experience through the aesthetic qualities of a text amounted to a strategy for overcoming the problems of battlefield vision described above, as well as the widespread absence of so much material from the battlefield. For instance, while some corpses kept turning up in the trenches and shell-torn ground of no-man’s-land, many more bodies were never found, and the Great War made tombs of the unknown soldier a universally employed monument in a war of unrecoverable dead. Furthermore, whole forests and towns disappeared from landscape riddled with a variety of other lacunae. The terrain’s dominant feature was shell craters: randomly occurring voids whose sudden emptiness often left a profound impression on observers. For example, Paul Nash entitled a painting of Passchendaele Void and named his first exhibition after the war “Void of War” (Hynes, A War Imagined 196). H. C. McNeile writes evocatively in No Man’s Land (1917) that “the whole ground is one huge hole. Holes are the only features of the landscape: big holes, little holes, damp ones, smelly ones; holes occupied and holes to let; holes you fall into and holes you don’t—but, holes. Everywhere holes” (95). This pockmarked landscape, where the only

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evidence of man’s activity (apart from strands of barbed wire) was excavation, graphically reinforced the prevailing sense of the physical and figurative experience of the war as a confrontation with absence. In this respect, war writing replicated modernist techniques for creating presence through the aesthetic qualities of the text, as a way of overcoming the limitations on meaning imposed by frustrated vision and absence—qualities that also appear across a range of modernist writing. For instance, Conrad may famously claim in his preface to The Nigger of the “Narcissus” (1897) that “art itself may be defined as a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe, by bringing to light the truth, manifold and one, underlying its every aspect,” and that his own task is “by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see” (131, 133). However, in his fictional works, characters’ own attempts to see, especially to see any underlying patterns of truth beneath the visible universe, regularly meet with failure. The entire narrative of Heart of Darkness (1899), in one sense, records a pervasive inability to see and even a denigration of the power of seeing, as evidenced by Marlow’s entreaty to his listeners: “Do you see him? Do you see the story? Do you see anything?” he asks. “It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream—making a vain attempt [ . . . ]” (27). Kurtz’s ambiguous death cry, the “hints” and “deep sighs” of the Russian, the “mask”-like jungle with its “air of hidden knowledge,” and Marlow’s own inability to explain anything substantive to Kurtz’s “Intended” all participate in this story of frustrated vision (56, 72). In The Secret Agent (1907), Winnie Verloc states (or has it described of her by the narrator) no fewer than six times that “things do not stand much looking into.” By implication, these are such things as Stevie Verloc’s death (which is never described directly but is instead related to us through Winnie’s imagination) and Winnie’s suicide, as Conrad makes clear to us in the repeated refrain of the newspaper account of her death: “ ‘An impenetrable mystery seems destined to hang for ever over this act of madness or despair.’ ”2 Numerous other modernist authors incorporate this theme of simultaneously desired and frustrated vision. John Dowell in Ford’s The Good Soldier characteristically laments of human nature, “It is all a darkness” (14, 179). An “impenetrable mystery” similar to that in Heart of Darkness hangs over the narrative of Forster’s A Passage to India (1924)—specifically, over the ambiguous event of the alleged assault on Adela Quested, which takes place in the darkness of the Marabar Caves. There seem to be an unknowable number of these secret caves, of which the most striking example is the one purported to be in the middle of the perfectly balanced spheroid rock of the Kawa Dol: a symbolic representation of the unknowable truth hidden in the inaccessible

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center of things. A related aesthetic advocating an art of surfaces (addressing the interior in order to deny it) appears in Wyndham Lewis’s Tarr (1918), in which Tarr tells Anastasya, “This is another condition of art; to have no inside, nothing you cannot see” (300). In Mrs. Dalloway (1925), Woolf informs us that “[d]eath was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them”—explicitly reproducing the same terms of center, mystery, and impossibility used by so many other modernist authors (184). One method of accessing that which is not personally observable would seem to lie in the use of maps. We have seen how the experience of the war provoked skepticism toward maps, and numerous modernist texts likewise feature instances of maps that fail to serve their epistemological purposes. For example, at three different points in Conrad’s career, he writes of a moment of looking at a map and saying “I shall go there,” and wishing to fill in the “blank spaces” thus represented; yet in Heart of Darkness, famously, the blank space at the heart of Africa never adequately yields its secrets.3 As Robert Hampson has pointed out, Marlow concedes that Africa “was not a blank space any more. It had got filled [ . . . ] with rivers and lakes and names. It had ceased to be a blank space of delightful mystery [ . . . ].”4 In Hampson’s words, Marlow’s “ ‘fascination’ with maps” consequently becomes “rather a matter of projection,” in which the narrative calls into question Enlightenment values of cartographical progress and turns mapping into a process of creating darkness and the “ ‘unspeakable’ ” (37–38). In A Passage to India, a map of the Marabar Hills appears in the courtroom during the inquest into the “assault” on Adela Quested, but immediately the court’s attention wanders and the accuracy of the map is challenged (247–48). That this map is mislabeled, and the correct interpretation comes from someone whom the narrator cannot identify, gives additional uncertainty to a narrative whose incorporation of a map only points out the unreliability of its representational effects. Other modernist texts also invoke maps specifically to exemplify the failure of representation. In Mrs. Dalloway, Septimus Smith’s detachment from reality becomes particularly clear to us when Woolf describes the contents of his papers: “Diagrams, designs, little men and women brandishing sticks for arms, with wings—were they?—on their backs; circles traced round shillings and sixpences—the suns and stars; zigzagging precipices with mountaineers ascending roped together, exactly like knives and forks; sea pieces with little faces laughing out of what might perhaps be waves: the map of the world” (147). The world as it is mapped in this way, by the incomprehensible doodles of a shell shock victim, is not the world of objective experience open to conclusive (or collective) interpretation. In the “Ithaca” section of Ulysses (1922), James Joyce introduces a theme of cartographic uncertainty in a passage that

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opens by exploring the possible link between “astrological influences” and “sublunary disasters,” and culminates in the narrator’s confession that the theory of their association “seemed to him as possible of proof as of confutation and the nomenclature employed in its selenographical charts as attributable to verifiable intuition as to fallacious analogy: the lake of dreams, the sea of rains, the gulf of dews, the ocean of fecundity” (701). In this handling, lunar nomenclature (for dry oceans, ironically enough) is supremely emblematic of epistemological uncertainty and cartographical inadequacy. The shortcomings of maps in modernist literature, like the desire and inability to see, constitute a key aspect of modernist authors’ engagement with the changing sense of seeing. These examples serve as evidence of a particular conceptual context: a modernist theoretical, epistemological, and aesthetic concern with vision impinging on our understanding of mapping and vision as imagined by British authors of the Great War. Specifically, this concern coincided exactly with the intersection of warfare and observation in the imaginative work of authors who wrote as modernists and saw as soldiers. I cite this intersection because the science of military topography, like the art of modernist literature, similarly grappled with the problems of seeing, coupled with the problems of how to represent the product of vision on paper—carrying into the milieu of trench warfare the perceptual revolutions and unresolved tensions inherent in the modern ways of perceiving and describing the world. Thus, while war writers may not have considered themselves modernists in accordance with our categorization of the literary history today, our sensitivity to certain characteristics of modernist writing enables us to understand more completely the techniques and themes demonstrated in the war literature examined here. Meanwhile, the parallelism of technique and theme between war literature and modernist writing allows us to expand our conception of modernism to include those pieces of war fiction whose traditionalist form would otherwise seem to justify their exclusion. My introduction of military cartography into modernist perspectives might also provide a corrective for the extent to which current criticism focuses so much on relations of power as an underlying factor of mapping.5 Critics tend also to see landscape, like maps, as irreducibly implicated in the same power networks. Traditionally, landscape (as a noun) has three definitions: the view of scenery or the physical ground, a representation of that view, and the branch of the visual arts dealing with that representation. The trend of much recent theory, though, has expanded these definitions beyond discussions of genre toward the notion of landscape as a medium and an idea: an aesthetic means toward an ideological end, typically grounded in imperialism and other relations of power.6

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As tempting and obvious as it may be to align such mapping- and landscape-discourses of power consolidation with the exertion of national or military power in the wartime context of 1914–1918, however, I have focused instead on the exegetic capacity of maps and landscape under the stresses of the war experience. In a number of the texts examined in this book, maps and landscape function as key instruments of both interpretation and what Gumbrecht calls “presence effects,” placed in the service of grappling with the complex phenomena of war and articulating its significance for a readership of noncombatants. Thus, while the current theoretical consensus claims that maps and landscape do not represent reality so much as create it for imperialist and hegemonic purposes, my study of wartime literary topographical descriptions indicates that power relations are far less influential paradigmatically on their authors than questions about the limitations of knowledge and the uses of literature in describing the indescribable. This discussion of maps and landscape as instruments of literary description invites the unavoidable question, however, about how verbal and visual representation explicitly intersect. Addressing this topic, even only briefly, requires considering W. J. T. Mitchell’s key ekphrastic theories, and qualifying (through amplification) Vincent Sherry’s account of the language of modernism in The Great War and the Language of Modernism (2003). For Sherry, the war exposed the inadequacy of traditional forms of verbal language, and the fractured syntax of high modernist poetry and narratives announced the signal adequate response to a war that defied the logic of prewar liberalism, grammatical reason, and literary realism. Before the war, Sherry argues, Pound’s, Eliot’s, and Woolf ’s sentence structures had followed the conventions of “the movement from subordinate to main clauses [that] follows a sequence of cause to effect, condition to consequence” (11). Afterward, sentences withhold unwritten logical antecedents, exhibit nonlinear reasoning, and frustrate conventional readerly expectations. “The internal record of that historical experience [the war] is revealed in the consistency of the shift these three writers exhibit,” he writes. “In their varying fashion, they reenact the disestablishment of a rationalistic attitude and practice in language, in the verbal culture of a war for which Liberal apologies and rationales provided the daily material of London journalism” (14). Furthermore, for example, Pound’s poetry implicitly attacks the “reason-seeming nonsense” of Liberal justifications of the war (92). Eliot’s prose criticizes the empirical reasoning of Enlightenment discourse as (in Sherry’s words) “pretense” and “the ‘degenerate’ condition of a specifically ‘verbal disease’—call it verbalism” (156). Finally, Woolf, especially in Mrs. Dalloway, exposes the logical failure and empty rhetorical gestures of the “language of the state” (264). As the war highlighted the inadequacy of customary modes of language, the

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new forms of modernist literary language constituted a reaction against Liberal rationalism and a representative methodology adequate to its historical context. However, some of the texts I examine indicate the existence of a potential haven of rational linguistic reference, equally apposite to the war, located outside Sherry’s analysis—namely, at the intersection of pictorialism and literary topographical representation. My principal aim, though, has not been solely to demonstrate that these texts offer either examples or counterexamples for Sherry’s evaluations, but to argue for a broader understanding of the important role played by topographical description in giving voice, through literature, to the experience of the war and the anxieties underlying its aftermath. For example, Sherry cites Montague’s Disenchantment as an exemplary instance of texts that “set out to subvert the power of Liberal reason but, in the process, only endorse the core principles of the partisan intellectual tradition” (61). Indeed, Montague’s excoriation of the Liberal logic for war does terminate in what Sherry terms a nostalgic appeal for a return to “[a]n older ideal of Liberalism [that] exerts an influence that is undiminished, being enhanced despite—or because of—its recent disproofs” (334n74). Yet, for all the force of Sherry’s argument, citing Disenchantment alongside the works of canonical modernist authors in terms of their response to the didactic language of logic leaves out a crucial part of what makes possible any informed commentary on the experience of the war and its effects: the language of description. In the case of Disenchantment, as in The Return of the Soldier, the differentiation of descriptive from didactic language is exemplified by a resort to visual language in a verbal text, focused on topography. Examining this technique has allowed us to recast West and Montague not as peripheral or contrasting figures in the history of modernism, but instead as parallel practitioners of their own uncommon aesthetic. The distinction between these two languages also explains why Pound, Eliot, and Woolf can furnish Sherry with so many examples for his claims, but Ford resists placement in Sherry’s scheme. Unlike the other authors, Ford had combat experience, and thus should have been in a better position than Pound, Eliot, or Woolf to judge the adequacy of language in the face of the war. However, Ford’s most experimental text, The Good Soldier, was largely complete before the war began, and the Parade’s End tetralogy (1924–1928) exhibits a marked retreat from stylistic innovation. Sherry explains this anomaly by characterizing Ford as an intermediate figure who never fully embraced the modernism in which The Good Soldier participates. Given Ford’s seemingly ideal position as a literary innovator who confronted the war experience first hand, however, Sherry’s argument seems incomplete—until we reexamine such books as The Good Soldier and No Enemy in terms of the topographical language of description that they deploy.

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These works demonstrate a turn to a language of spatial description as an alternative for rendering experience. Seen in this light, Ford’s absence from Sherry’s roster of syntactical experimenters seems less anomalous when we realize that when Ford turns to topographical language as a vehicle for epistemological grounding, he pursues an aesthetic option that is equivalent, in its unique appropriation of spatial vocabulary to circumvent linguistic limits, to the new syntactical patterns of Pound, Eliot, and Woolf. In a related move, one of Mitchell’s most useful formulations is his characterization of ekphrasis as an epistemological “problem”: the “pervasive sense of ambivalence” about what the verbal representation of visual representation can achieve. In Mitchell’s words, “A verbal representation cannot represent— that is, make present—its object in the same way a visual representation can. It may refer to an object, describe it, invoke it, but it can never bring its visual presence before us in the way pictures do. Words can ‘cite,’ but never ‘sight’ their objects” (Picture Theory 152, 156). I would take these arguments in a more overtly historiographical direction by considering the possibility that the war itself provided consummate and pressing examples of the problem of ekphrasis as Mitchell defines it. Furthermore, while words may “cite” but not “sight” their objects in Mitchell’s formula, the verbal-visual combinations in Disenchantment and The Return of the Soldier, especially, constitute efforts to “site” painters, paintings, and painterly techniques and conventions in a system of referential meaning that alone furnishes authors and readers with an adequate means to describe the indescribable. Of course, the most explicit and accurate visual representations of the war experience would have been photographs. But in an age of thorough censorship of combat images, photographs with graphic content were rare and not for public distribution. In any case, there we no official photographers in the front lines until 1916, and from then on, only sixteen photographers total were assigned to cover every theater of the entire war (Robb 121). The “ekphrastic problem” therefore arises, for such participants as Montague and Owen, when describing the “accuracy” of official war art. For Owen, as we saw, some of that art became the object of soldiers’ ridicule through the apparent naïveté of its presentation. For Montague, however, these pictorial works served a vital expressive function alongside descriptive words. Furthermore, Montague would have thought so despite reservations he may have had about limits on the capacity of paintings to tell a story, in comparison with the capacity of narratives (even had he never heard of Gotthold Lessing’s Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry [1766]). Montague bypasses the conditions of the “ekphrastic problem” highlighted by war by supplementing narrative with description and overcoming the limits of expression through valorizing the unknowable. By anchoring

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understanding to points of reference from the realm of visual representation, Montague exploits the homology between the ekphrastic problem (how does one adequately relate a visual artifact in words?) and the problem of wartime epistemology (how does one adequately relate a visual experience in words?). Similarly, West’s resorting to the familiar nineteenth-century language of topographical description in The Return of the Soldier performs the same function. She recasts the unfamiliar in terms of the familiar, reproducing the problem of understanding the war as the protagonist’s problem of understanding himself and his past—presented as a dilemma of choosing between different kinds of landscapes in a narrative preternaturally attentive to topographical representation. Topographical writing has been a compelling subject of study here in part because it seeks to create the feeling of presence within a particular physical space. To that extent, this book has ultimately been about the intertwining of topographical writing and the aesthetic dimension of literature, an association productively illuminated by Gumbrecht’s argument for a return to aesthetic analysis as a counterweight to the hegemony of meaning interpretation in contemporary literary criticism. In his suggestion that we “conceive of aesthetic experience as an oscillation (and sometimes as an interference) between ‘presence effects’ and ‘meaning effects’ ” there lies a point of orientation that may help bring into final focus the significance of topography in war writing and its relation to modernism (2). First, according to Gumbrecht, the tension between meaning and presence emerges in narrative moments of spatial representation, and this emergence, or “aesthetic epiphany [ . . . ] necessarily involves an element of violence” (114, emphasis in original). Topographical representation in fiction thereby prepares the ground, so to speak, for the occurrence of such epiphanies in a historical context of violence. Moreover, such writing also promises to fulfill what Gumbrecht identifies as the universal desire to establish “the presentification of the past, that is, the possibility of ‘speaking’ to the dead or ‘touching’ the objects of their worlds” (123)— or that desire so poignantly described by Adams. Finally, while modernist literature often highlights the presence effects of language, topographical writing invokes the presence of landscape; hence such a modernist topographical work as Ford’s No Enemy takes the lead role in making the experience of the Great War come alive in the minds of its readers. These literary efforts consequently help us place an appropriate cultural context around the physical evidence of war that does survive on and in the ground. The Great War left the topographical legacy of a countryside shaped by the violence of the conflict and continuing to yield its detritus. The many cemeteries and architectural memorials in France and Flanders materially testify to the war, as do surviving trenches, fortifications, and mine craters.

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Even today, crop markings indicate the presence of bunkers and underground munitions deposits, and at certain times of the year the fields of Picardy show zigzagging bands of whiter soil: the result of the underlying chalk beds having been disturbed by the trench lines and artillery bombardments. Every year, on average, nearly two thousand tons of munitions, equipment, and other detritus continue to be unearthed by plowing, or otherwise find their way to the surface of the former battlefields, in what is called the “iron harvest” (Dave Brown B1). One recent account of the activities of a Belgian Army bomb disposal unit reports that “up to a third of the 1.5 billion shells fired in Flanders from 1914 to 1918 failed to explode, instead lodging in the soil to form an ominous substrata of explosives” and resulting in forty thousand unexploded shells destroyed since 2000 (Wilson 7). Hence, the physical landscape of the Western Front still records the violence visited upon it, even while it served for its contemporaneous authors as a cognitive fastening point: something upon which to anchor meditations about the limits of knowledge at the limits of human endurance, descriptions of the indescribable, and the search for meaning in loss. Thus, the peculiar topography of the war—both the ground and the writing about that ground—furnished modernism a vocabulary adequate to the task of engaging the war’s ensemble of psychological and epistemological ruptures by invoking presence effects. Meanwhile, modernism offered a structure, particularly the invocation of absence (the negative likeness of presence) formally appropriate to certain aspects of the physical experience of the war. Modernism’s accomplishments in transmitting the war experience thereby (if paradoxically) combine representational fidelity to fragmentation with redemptive artistic engagements. Those redemptive creations of aesthetic experience include Ford’s crafting of emotional reconstruction, Conrad’s staging of relief at crossing a line that is a simulacrum of the front, and Woolf ’s compensating for the absence of Jacob Flanders. In a larger sense, for us to read these works in this way points to the value of reconsidering the aesthetic dimension of literature at a moment when historically informed aesthetics are poised for a return to critical methodology. For those witnesses confronting history—those who, like Adams, tried to speak but could not—such writing held the promise to heal over the wounds that the front lines had opened.

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Conclusion

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Introduction 1. “Death of Last Tommy Will Be Marked by National Memorial”; J. M. Winter, The Great War and the British People 72. 2. See Heidegger; Bachelard; Tuan, “Geography, Phenomenology and the Study of Human Nature” and Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience; de Certeau; Harvey; Malpas; and Thacker. 3. Ellis 9–20; Fussell, Great War 36–42. 4. Keegan, The Face of Battle 231; Coolidge 160–61, 189–90. 5. See, for instance, A Soldier’s Diary of the Great War 166, qtd. in Hynes, The Soldiers’ Tale 12; Keegan, The Face of Battle 258–59; Gristwood 69; and Kipling ix–x.

Chapter 1 1. A paraphrase published in the London Times; see “Thinking in Maps: The New Importance of Geography” 5. 2. Map Reading and Panorama Sketching 37–41; Sherrill 47–58. 3. Manual of Map Reading and Field Sketching 77–79; Map Reading and Panorama Sketching 65–66. 4. “War Today, 1909” [“Der Krieg in der Gegenwart”] 198–99; Finch 2. 5. This and all subsequent citations are from the 1928 edition except as noted. 6. See also Aldington 382. 7. This wording is from the 1956 edition, where the full sentence is “So engaged had I become in my walks abroad down the pollarded lanes, piecing out the local life and turning my map into realities, with the big sheepdog whom my host let me take as company, that I scarcely reckoned on so quick a recondemnation” (56). Curiously, the 1928 edition omits the reference to maps and the locality; it reads “So engaged had I become in my walks abroad down the pollarded lanes, with the big sheepdog that my host let me take as company, that I scarcely reckoned on so quick a recondemnation” (47). 8. The 1956 text reads “The maps so far issued for this part” and has “humanely thin” rather than “agreeably thin” (78). 9. This is from the 1956 edition. Again, the 1928 and 1956 texts differ on the treatment of maps. The original 1928 text reads “came without unusual event to the

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10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15.

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flimsy outlandish village of Monchy-Breton” (84–85); by the 1956 edition, the line is “came without unusual event and with usual misreading of the map to the flimsy outlandish village of Monchy-Breton” (100). Had Blunden’s later memory of relying on maps to write the book in 1924 reminded him of the crucial need to read maps correctly? Or did he realize, many years after the war, just how mistaken his fellow soldiers’ map reading had been? In any case, mapping and misreading clearly continued to dog—or illuminate—Blunden’s memory of the war for a long time afterward. The 1956 edition has the symbols as “gaudy green and violet” (128). A contemporary description of Hampton Court’s extraordinary natural attractions appears in Baedeker, London and its Environs 406–11. Saunders, introduction to Ford Madox Ford: War Prose 3–12. Ford’s name was Ford Hermann Hueffer until July 1915, then Ford Madox Hueffer until June 1919. Ford, Letters 204; Stang 479. Hoffmann 105; Moore 49; see also Greenwald 143. Mapping can thus succeed in overcoming trauma, whereas narrative alone fails; on the latter, see Boulter 85–88.

Chapter 2 1. Edwin Asa Dix, Travel (June 1908). Qtd. in “Baedeker of the Guide-Books” 104. 2. A. B. W. 12. 3. Limitations of space prevent me from relating Baedekers to the full cultural surround of civilian travel in this period. For a broader perspective on the competing and evolving discourses of travel leading up to 1914, including distinctions between exploration, travel, and tourism, see Fussell, Abroad 38, 43, 62; Buzard 18, 47–48, 152–53; Leed, The Mind of the Traveler; and Larabee, “Baedekers as Casualty.” 4. Mendelson 396–97; “Death of Herr F. Baedeker” 9. 5. Dix on the Rhine Handbook (1839); “Baedeker of the Guide-Books” 104. 6. Qtd. in “Baedeker of the Guide-Books” 104. 7. Beaman’s stance places him in the company of Victorian “anti-tourists,” who, according to Buzard, similarly attempted to establish identities as “real travellers” in opposition to mere tourists following guidebooks. On the larger issues at stake in the characterization of travel as adventure, see Buzard 153, 156–57; and Larabee, “Baedekers as Casualty” 469–70. 8. For more on this chapter as a portrayal of symbolized sexual initiation and shifting versions of tourism, see Buzard 296–300; on the former topic, see also Rosecrance 92. 9. Baedekers perhaps intentionally following the lead of Murray guidebooks, which were also covered in red; see Harris 496 and Buzard 67. 10. On the significance of August 4, see Mizener 245; Moser xxxiii–xxxvi; Stannard 180–89; and Bergonzi, “Fiction and History.”

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11. See Saunders, Ford 1:314, 1:339, 1:410–12; and Mizener 202–03 for details of Ford’s visits to Marburg. 12. Scozzari 59–60; Ceci 49. 13. See “Wampum,” “Wampumpeag,” in The Oxford English Dictionary. 14. Scozzari 64–65; Snyderman 471. 15. Smith 227–28; Snyderman 469. 16. See “Wampum,” The Cyclopædia; or, Universal Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, and Literature; and Williams 150. 17. “Wampum,” New American Supplement to the Latest Edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. 18. “Wampum,” Encyclopedia Britannica. 19. See “Penn, Granville (1761–1844)”; “Penn, John (1760–1834)”; and Speck, “The Penn Wampum Belts” 9. 20. Strong-Boag and Gerson 267–68; Keller 97. 21. Hale 8; Keller 32–33, 37. 22. Keller 94–99; “Steinway-hall”10. 23. Keller 137; “Flint and Feather” 575; “A Mohawk Poetess” 590. 24. A discussion of the philosophical implications of wampum as a material object— a modernist “thing”—appears in Larabee, “Wampum in Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier.” 25. See especially Poole 118–19 and the other essays on this novel in Hampson and Saunders. 26. See, for instance, J. Hillis Miller’s discussion of Swann’s Way in Topographies 1–3; also Black. 27. See Kern 267–74; and Keegan, The First World War 59, 65–69.

Chapter 3 1. Thompson 213–18; Elton. For more on the political dimension of Disenchantment, see Grieves. 2. Elton 100; O. E. 369–70. 3. Commentary on Bone vol. 1, part IV, plate LXXI, Ruins near Arras (n. pag.). 4. Porsen—or Lars Porsena—was an Etruscan king who attacked Rome ca. 500 b.c. According to legend, the Roman hero Horatius held up the Etruscan Army’s advance while Roman forces destroyed a Tiber River bridge behind him. Horatius then swam the river to the Roman side; Porsena admired Horatius’s bravery and granted honorable terms to the Romans. The episode appears in Thomas Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome (1842). Field Marshal Frederick Roberts, first Earl Roberts (1832–1914), was the second British commander in chief during the Boer War (1899–1902). He defeated the Boer general Piet Cronje at the major battle of Paardeberg (1900). Sir Henry Newbolt (1862–1938) was a novelist and a poet known for his nautical and patriotic verse. During the war, he supervised wireless and cable communications; afterward, he was commissioned to write the official history of the Royal Navy during the conflict.

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5. Dale Brown 65–67; G. Williamson 45–46. 6. See G. Williamson 46; Bréal 146–58; Aman-Jean 119–20; Lafarge 171–72; Huneker 385–86; and Hind 128. 7. Allnutt 28–29; Clarke 84. 8. The “three mighty battles” could include, for instance, the 1328 defeat of Flemish rebels by French knights of Philip VI during the Hundred Years’ War. Perhaps, in a spirit of historical parallelism, Montague is also thinking of the three Battles of Ypres (1914, 1915, and 1917). 9. Introduction x–xi. For more on attitudes toward suburban expansion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Flint; Keating 319–26; Trotter 128–32; Porter 320–23; Sheppard 273–79; Inwood 568–89; Hapgood, “Literature,” Margins of Desire, “New Suburbanites,” and “Unwritten Suburb”; Kuchta; and Whelan. 10. Crawford 58; Kant 100–01. 11. lines 103, 104, 119, 129, 144. 12. Leese 103, 106; Leed, No Man’s Land 163–92. 13. This detail appears in Pat Barker’s novel Regeneration (1991), a fictionalized narrative of Siegfried Sassoon’s treatment at Craiglockhart in 1917 and based on actual accounts of the hospital’s procedures (95). 14. The Pity of War 348. Ferguson cites Simpson 71, 81; and Sheffield 416.

Chapter 4 1. Frederick R. Karl and Laurence Davies date this letter as “18[?] March,” given its content and the record of its receipt (Conrad, CL 5: 457–58). 2. Karl 779–80; Hawthorn, Note on the Text xxxvi. 3. See Jessie Conrad, Joseph Conrad As I Knew Him 91–99; and Joseph Conrad and His Circle 193, 197, 202, 205. 4. This lineation and punctuation reproduced from the 1917 Doubleday edition (n. pag.). All other citations are from the 2003 edition. 5. Conrad 111; Berthoud 8–9. 6. Larabee, “A Mysterious System” and “A Funny Piece of Water.” 7. Jessie Conrad, Joseph Conrad As I Knew Him 95–96; Joseph Conrad and His Circle 194. 8. Conrad, CL 5: 504, 508, 520–21, 560. 9. Borys makes his claim in My Father (1970) 105–06; Karl’s dating of the title change to the time of Borys’s enlistment appears in Joseph Conrad: The Three Lives (1979) 770. Borys, like Karl, must have been unaware of Conrad’s March 1915 letter, as it was first published in CL vol. 5 in 1996. 10. Booth, Postcards 93. The British tactic of linear assaults took place most memorably at the Somme; see especially Taylor 100–03; and Keegan, The Face of Battle 226. For the selection of the enemy’s lateral communication lines as objectives, see Keegan, The First World War 191; and Strachan 250.

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11. Blunden (1928) 53; Booth, Postcards 95. 12. “The Race for the Sea” 7; “The War Day by Day” 5. 13. The use of the word “concentric” here is only apparently misleading; the term can refer not only to figures sharing a common center (circles), but also to figures sharing a common axis (lines). 14. See, for example, “The German Line Pierced in the West”; “The Advances in the West”; “The Advance in Champagne”; and “More Severe Fighting.” 15. See Hawthorn’s explanatory notes in Conrad, The Shadow-Line 120–21; and Norman Sherry 220–24. 16. Compare with Eliot’s “Phlebas the Phoenician” in “The Waste Land” (1922), who drifts in an undersea current (lines 312–21). 17. For example, see Jünger, Storm of Steel 58. One also thinks of the sprouting corpse in The Waste Land (71–73). 18. “New Technical Weapons” 9; “The Poison Gas” 7. 19. “Late War News” 7; “House of Lords” 12. 20. Conrad, Lord Jim 10; “The End of the Tether” 199. 21. Marinetti, “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism” 50; Brooke ll. 1–4. 22. Robb 138; CL 6: 37. 23. Ferguson 219; CL 5: 474. 24. “A Cabinet for War” 8; “More Atrocities at Athens” 8. 25. Roe’s note in Woolf, Jacob’s Room 170n6; Woolf, “On Not Knowing Greek” 59. 26. See also Monte. 27. Mahan 12; Wilks 10. 28. Bazin and Lauter 16; Woolf, Jacob’s Room 136. 29. In particular, part of the passage may well have been inspired by the accidental loss of the Royal Navy submarine A7 on January 16, 1914, off Plymouth in Whitsand Bay. The submarine failed to rise to the surface during exercises, without having sustained any apparent damage. She lies intact at the bottom of the bay with her crew of eleven still aboard (“British Submarine Disaster” 8). 30. Roe has observed the use of this image (Woolf, Jacob’s Room 173n13).

Conclusion 1. As a starting point, see Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works 18: 12–14, 18: 29–33; Ferenczi; Leed, No Man’s Land; Felman and Laub; Caruth, ed., Trauma; Caruth, Unclaimed Experience; Hartman; Jacobus; Leys; LaCapra; Leese; Kingsbury; Das; Hipp; and Detloff. 2. The Secret Agent 172–73, 178, 185, 219, 222, 266–69. 3. Heart of Darkness 8; A Personal Record 27; “Geography and Some Explorers” 16–17. 4. Conrad, Heart of Darkness 8; Hampson 37.

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5. See Cosgrove, Social Formation 8; Gillies 54; Harley, “Maps, Knowledge, and Power” 277, 285, 289 and “Deconstructing the Map” 232, 234; Barnes and Duncan, Preface xii and Introduction 2; Gregory 391; and King 49. 6. See Cosgrove, Social Formation 13–15; Tuan, “Geography, Phenomenology and the Study of Human Nature” (1971) 183, qtd. in Cosgrove14; Meinig 288–89, qtd in Cosgrove 35; Lefebvre 26, 33; and Mitchell, “Imperial Landscape” 5–13.

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A. B. W. “Baedeker: Guide-Books as Books; Sir R. Philips’s Morning Walk.” Times (London) 22 Apr. 1925: 12. Adams, Bernard. Nothing of Importance: A Record of Eight Months at the Front with a Welsh Battalion; October, 1915, to June, 1916. London: Methuen, 1917. “Admiral Mahan: Death of the Historian of Sea Power; Naval Theory and Practice.” Times (London) 2 Dec. 1914: 7. “Admiral Mahan on the War: Advice to England; Forecast of the Naval Operations.” Times (London) 5 Aug. 1914: 5. “The Advance in Champagne: Fighting at the Second Line; Crown Prince Defeated; The Capture of Loos.” Times (London) 29 Sept. 1915: 8. “The Advances in the West.” Times (London) 28 Sept. 1915: 9. Aldington, Richard. Death of a Hero. New York: Covici-Friede, 1929. Allen, Jerry. The Sea Years of Joseph Conrad. Garden City: Doubleday, 1965. Allnutt, Sidney. Corot. London: T. C. & E. C. Jack, 1910. Aman-Jean. Velazquez. Paris: Félix Alcan, 1913. Andelman, David A. A Shattered Peace: Versailles 1919 and the Price We Pay Today. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2008. “Another Village Captured: Sir J. French on our Success; Triumph of Cooperation.” Times (London) 13 Mar. 1915: 8. “An Appeal to the Nation.” Times (London) 28 May. 1915: 10. Army War College. Landscape Sketching. Washington: GPO, 1917. Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Trans. Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994. “Baedeker as an Office of Military Intelligence.” Scientific American 2 Nov. 1918: 354, 63. Baedeker, Karl. Egypt and the Sudân: Handbook for Travellers, with 24 Maps, 76 Plans, and 57 Vignettes. 6th remodelled ed. Leipzig: Karl Baedeker, 1908. ———. Great Britain: Handbook for Travellers; with 28 Maps, 65 Plans, and a Panorama. 7th ed. Leipzig: Karl Baedeker, 1910. ———. Italy: Handbook for Travellers. First Part: Northern Italy, including Leghorn, Florence, Ravenna, and Routes through Switzerland and Austria; with 30 Maps, 40 Plans, and a Panorama. 13th remodelled ed. Leipsic: Karl Baedeker, 1906. ———. London and its Environs: Handbook for Travellers; with 10 Maps and 19 Plans. Leipzig: Karl Baedeker, 1911.

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Note: References to figures are printed in bold Adams, Bernard, 1, 2, 6, 84, 179, 180, 188, 189 Aldington, Richard, 5, 10, 16, 25, 31–8, 39, 40, 51–4, Ch1 n6 Allen, Jerry, 135 Allnutt, Sidney, Ch3 n7 Aman-Jean, Ch3 n6 Amiens, 78 amnesia, 91, 114–15, 121, 130 Andelman, David A., 3 Archipenko, Alexander, 173 Asquith, H. H., 165 Athenaeum, 72 Athens, 163, 164–6, 175, 176 Bachelard, Gaston, Intro n2 Bad Nauheim, 75 Baedeker, Fritz, 55, 57, 86, 87 Baedeker, Karl (1801–1859), 55, 56–8, 67, 86, 88 Baedeker, Karl (d. 1914), 55 Baedekers, 55–68, 74–6, 77–8, 83–9 Egypt and the Sudân (1908), 58–9 and experience, 59–65, 67, 78, 84 Germany (1842), 64 Handbook to Northern Italy, 59 London and its Environs (1911), 192n11 Northern Italy (1913), 63, 66 and meaning, 66 and morality, 61–5, 66–7, 77 Northern Germany (1913), 56

postwar repudiation and alternatives, 85–9 prewar praise, 56–8 and travel preparations, 58 in wartime, 77–8, 80, 83–4 Baldick, Chris, 99–100 Bangkok, 134–5, 148, 150, 151 Bapaume, 83 Barker, Pat, 4, 194n13 Barnes, Trevor J., 196n5 Barrie, J. M., 95 battleship race, 167 Baudelaire, Charles, 16, 34–6, 38 Bazin, Nancy Topping, 160–1, 170 Beaman, Ardern, 5, 58–60, 61, 77–8 beautiful, the, 114–22, 124, 128–9 Beaverbrook, Max, 101 BEF (British Expeditionary Force), 146, 159 Bergonzi, Bernard, 99, Ch2 n10 Berthoud, Jacques, 136–8 Bible Joel, 106 John, 158 Black, Martha Fodaski, 193n26 Blackwood, William, 135 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 135 Blast 1, 73 Blunden, Edmund, 4–5, 25, 26 “The Prophet,” 78–80 Undertones of War, 5, 16, 26–31, 38–9, 43, 51–4, 78–80, 94, 99, 105, 142 Boccioni, Umberto, 173

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bodies, see corpses Boer War, 81, 101, 142, 193n4 Bone, Muirhead, 78, 93, 94–5, 111, 112, 129 The Battle of the Somme, 93, 109 The Western Front, 95, 96–9 Booth, Allyson, 142, 161–2, Ch4 n10 Boulter, Jonathan, 192n15 Boyce, Edmund, 79–80 Bradford, William, 69 Brangwyn, Sir Frank, 82 Braque, Georges, 176 Bréal, Auguste, 103–5, Ch3 n6 Breda, 101–2 British Artists at the Front (C. R. W. Nevinson and others), 95, 98 British Expeditionary Force, 146, 159 British Museum, 73, 74 Brooke, Rupert, 157, 177 Brown, Dale, 104, Ch3 n5 Brown, Dave, 189 Brown, Lancelot “Capability,” 117 Buchan, John, 142 Burke, Edmund, 122–4, 125 Butterworth, Hezekiah, 71–2 Buzard, James, 56, 192n3, 192n7, 192n8, 192n9 camouflage, dazzle, 176 cartography aesthetic objects, maps and sketches as, 16, 19, 28, 31, 39, 48, 52–4 and emotional reconstruction, 15, 16, 26, 39, 43, 48–52, 54 military training in, 14, 15–21, 22, 26, 48, 52 military units dedicated to, 14–15, 16 and power, 11, 26, 184–5 reality versus representation in, 15, 16, 20, 22–4, 28, 29–31, 32–3, 38, 39–41, 42–3, 52–3, 183–4 scientific basis of, 7, 8, 17, 20–21, 22, 25, 48, 53 and subjectivity, 19–21, 24, 25, 28, 52, 54 surveys of war zone, 14–15

and technology, 13 see also landscape; panorama sketch; place names; range-taker’s card; topography Caruth, Cathy, 195n1 Cassel, 108, 109 casualty lists, 125, 159 Cavell, Stanley, 53–4 Ceci, Lynn, 193n12 censorship, 85, 143, 187 Certeau, Michel de, Intro n2 Chasseaud, Peter, 14, 15, 16, 24 chivalry, 100–3, 105–6, 111–12, 129–30, 155 Clark, James, 159, 160 Clarke, Michael, 107, Ch3 n7 class, 4, 32, 81, 92, 115, 118, 119, 125, 127–8, 130, 158 Clayton, Anthony, 156 Clewell, Tammy, 162 Colvin, Sir Sidney, 139, 159, 160 “Comic Cuts” (Corps Intelligence Summary), 83–5 Conrad, Borys, 134, 135–6, 137, 139–40, 147, 157, 160, 177, Ch4 n9 Conrad, Jessie, 136, 139 Conrad, Joseph, 4–5, 66 “Autocracy and War,” 134 Collected Letters, 135, 136, 138, 139, 140, 147, 157, 160, Ch4 n8 “The End of the Tether,” 157 “Falk,” 151 Heart of Darkness, 182, 183 Lord Jim, 157 The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” 182 The Secret Agent, 182 “The Secret Sharer,” 147 The Shadow-Line, 134–40, 147–60, 176–8, 189 “The Tale,” 134 “The Unlighted Coast,” 133 see also Otago Constantine I, king of Greece, 163–4 Coolidge, Hamilton, Intro n4 Cooper, H. H., 11

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Cork, Richard, 101, 176 Corot, Jean-Baptiste-Camille, 91, 106–9, 111, 113, 130 corpses, 46, 82, 94, 126–7, 154, 162, 175, 181 Cosgrove, Denis E., 7, 196n5, 196n6 Country Life, 95 Crawford, Donald W., Ch3 n10 Cronje, Piet, 101, 193n4 Curle, Richard, 135 Darlington, Beth, 127 Das, Santanu, 195n1 Davies, Laurence, Ch4 n1 Descartes, René, see space, absolute Detloff, Madelyn, 195n1 disillusionment, theme of, 91, 96, 99–100, 106, 130 displacement and transposition, 6, 49, 140, 151–60, 162, 181 Dix, Edwin Asa, 57, 192n1 Dodd, Francis, 95 Duncan, James S., 196n5 Durey, Michael, 153 Edinburgh Review, 157 Einstein, Albert, see relativity, theories of ekphrasis, 185, 187–8 see also language; verbal and visual representation, intersection of Eksteins, Modris, 10, 141–2, 143, 159, 160 Eliot, T. S., 32, 33, 72, 185–7 “Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar,” 67 “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” 37 “Ulysses, Order, and Myth,” 37 The Waste Land, 195n16, 195n17 Ellis, John, Intro n3 Elton, Oliver, 78, 95–7, 103, 112, 193n1, 193n2 emotions and Baedekers, 56 and experience, 25, 60–1, 64–5, 91 and landscape or mapping, 16, 19, 25, 43, 48, 49–50, 52–3, 91

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and painting, 91, 97, 99 and personality, 76 and reconstruction, 15, 16, 49–50, 52–3, 189 and transformation, 138, 149 and violence or loss, 1, 123–4, 129, 175, 177 English Review, 135, 136 Enlightenment, 7, 53, 58, 83, 185 equator, 152–3 Euclid, see space, absolute exploration, vs. travel and tourism, 172, 192 Faulks, Sebastian, 3–4 Felman, Shoshana, 195n1 Ferenczi, Sándor, 195n1 Ferguson, Niall, 3, 127, 158, 159, 162, 179–80, 195n23 Finch, J. K., 13, Ch1 n4 Findlay, Alexander George, 150 Fliegende Blätter, 55, 58 Flint, Kate, Ch3 n9 Florence, 60–4 Ford, Ford Madox, 4–5, 16, 25, 32, 33, 39, 72, 73, 157, 186–7 “Arms and the Mind,” 39–40 at the British Museum, 73 The Good Soldier, 28, 56, 65–9, 70–1, 73–4, 78, 88, 131, 158, 182, 186 “Last Words about Edward VIII,” 47 Letters of Ford Madox Ford, 192n13 A Man Could Stand Up, see Parade’s End No Enemy, 16, 38–9, 41–54, 186–7, 188, 189 No More Parades, see Parade’s End “On Impressionism,” 108 Parade’s End, 5, 42, 50, 91, 100, 186–7 “War and the Mind,” 40–1, 50 Ford, Richard, 55, 88 Forster, E. M., 5 A Passage to India, 182, 183 A Room with a View, 59–65, 66, 77–8

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Foucault, Michel, 53 fragmentation narrative, 41–2, 65, 75 perceptual, 75, 161 representational, 38, 189 sensory, 123–4 French, Sir John, 145–6 Freud, Sigmund, 37, 121, 195n1 Fricourt, 2 Fromkin, David, 3 Froula, Christine, 161 Fussell, Paul, 3, 4, 10, 11, 26, 29, 30, 31, 36, 39, 56, 94, 179, Intro n3, 192n3 futility, theme of, 37, 99, 103, 111, 141, 180 futurism, 93–4, 112 Gallipoli campaign, 163, 166 geographical societies, 7, 167 geopolitics, advent of, 167, 173 Gerson, Carole, 193n20 Gide, André, 157 Gilbert, E. W., 172 Gillies, John, 196n5 Gilpin, William, 117, 118 Girard, René, 127 Gladstone, William, 169 global connectedness, 134, 163, 170–3, 174–8, 181 Gordon, Ambrose, Jr., 41–2 Gosse, Edmund, 157–8 Graphic, 159 Graves, Robert, 4 “A Dead Boche,” 94 Good-bye to All That, 5, 23–4 Greece, entry into the war, 163–5 see also Woolf, Virginia, interest in Greek civilization Greenwald, Elissa, 42, 192n15 Gregory, Derek, 196n5 Grieves, Keith, 193n1 Gristwood, A. D., Intro n5 Guardian (Manchester), 4, 78, 95, 146 Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich, 180, 185, 188

Hacker, Louis M., 168 Hager, Philip E., 32 Hague Conference, 156 Hale, Horatio, 193n21 Hall of Remembrance, 101 Hampson, Robert, 183, 193n25 Hampshire, HMS, 45 Hampton Court, 34, 192n11 Handley, William R., 161 Hapgood, Lynne, Ch3 n9 Harley, J. B., 196n5 Harris, Charles, 57, 192n9 Hartman, Geoffrey, 195n1 Harvey, David, 7, Intro n2 Hawthorn, Jeremy, 138, 194n2, 195n15 Heffernan, Michael, 10 Heidegger, Martin, Intro n2 Hemingway, Ernest, 5 Herodotus, 57 Hind, C. Lewis, Ch3 n6 Hipp, Daniel, 195n1 historical painting, 104–5 Hodge, Frederick Webb, 70 Hoffmann, Charles G., 41 Horace, 113 Horatius (Publius Horatius Cocles), 101, 103, 193n4 Hubert, Henri, 127, 128 Hulme, T. E., 24–5 Huneker, James, Ch3 n6 Hynes, Samuel, 5, 42, 93–4, 96–7, 99, 109, 115, 181, Intro n5 Illustrated Michelin Guides to the Battle-Fields (1914–1918), 89 impressionism, 16, 40, 41, 42, 47, 108 Intelligence Summary, Corps, 83–5 interpretation and meaning, 180, 188 Inwood, Stephen, Ch3 n9 Jacobus, Mary, 195n1 Japrisot, Sebastien, 4 Joffre, Joseph, 145 Johnson, Chief John Smoke, 73

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Johnson, E. Pauline, 72–4 “Dawendine,” 72 Flint and Feather, 74 The White Wampum, 72, 74 Jones, David, 9–10, 91 Joyce, James, 183–4 Jünger, Ernst Copse 125, 11 In Stahlgewittern (Storm of Steel), 5, 8, 195n17 Justin of Nassau, 101–2, 102 Jutland, Battle of, 170 Kant, Immanuel, 117–18, 123–4 Karl, Frederick R., 135, 140, Ch4 n1, Ch4 n2 Keating, Peter, Ch3 n9 Keegan, John, 3, 9, 141, 156–7, 164, Intro n4, Intro n5, 193n27, Ch4 n10 Keller, Betty, 73, 193n20, 193n21, 193n22, 193n23 Kern, Stephen, 8, 172, 173, 193n27 King, Geoff, 53, 196n5 Kingsbury, Celia Malone, 195n1 Kipling, Rudyard, Intro n5 Kitchener, Horatio H., 45, 156 knowledge categories of, 17–18, 19, 110 relational, 56, 75 Koshar, Rudy, 56 Krauss, Rosalind E., 133 Kuchta, Todd, Ch3 n9 LaCapra, Dominick, 195n1 Lafarge, John, Ch3 n6 landscape architecture, 115–21, 124–5, 130 defined, 6, 184 enemies and, 10, 25 destruction of, 15, 22–3, 24, 27, 32–3, 38, 78, 82, 98, 181–2, 188–9 home front versus front line, 16, 31, 33, 35–8

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painting, tradition and conventions of, 91–5, 96–97, 104, 107, 109, 112, 114, 128–31 physical and psychological, 31, 33–8, 40, 42–54, 75, 96, 98–9, 108–9, 147–60, 162, 177, 189 and power, 11, 26, 184–5 production of, 11, 42, 44–54, 185 sketching, see panorama sketch and wampum, 68 see also beautiful, the; picturesque, the; sublime, the; cartography; pastoral, conventions of the; topography; space; place, defined; place names Lane, John, 72–3 language inadequacy of, 94, 179, 189 and meaning, 179 and modernist form, 185–6 see also ekphrasis; verbal and visual representation, intersection of Larabee, Mark D., 147, 148, 149, 192n3, 192n7, 193n24, Ch4 n6 Laub, Dori, 195n1 Lauter, Jane Hamovit, 160–1, 170 Lawrence, D. H., 32, 33 Leed, Eric J., 192n3, 194n12, 195n1 Leese, Peter, 194n12, 195n1 Lefebvre, Henri, 8, 21, 44, 196n6 Lessing, Gotthold, 187 Levenback, Karen L., 160, 161, 165, 177 Lewis, Wyndham, 32, 33, 94 Blasting and Bombardiering, 8 Tarr, 183 Leys, Ruth, 195n1 Liant, Cape, 149, 150 Liberalism, 185–6 light, speed of, 7–8, 174 Lighthall, William Douw, 72 lines latitude, 139, 149–55, 153, 157, 177 linear logic, 142, 144, 153 maturity as boundary crossing, 147–8, 152

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lines—continued of position, 152, 153 and the supernatural, 149–51, 153 see also siege warfare, trench warfare, equator London, topography of, 16, 33–7 Longinus, 122–4 Loos, 14, 31 battle of, 103, 106, 142 Luther, Martin, 66–7, 76 Lutyens, Sir Edwin, 162 Macaulay, Thomas, 101, 193n4 Mackinder, Halford, 13, 167, 172–3 Mahan, Alfred Thayer, 163, 166–70, 172–7 The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 163, 166–70, 172, 173–4 The Influence of Sea Power upon the French Revolution and Empire, 166–9 The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future, 166 The Life of Nelson, 169 see also sea power, and sea space; space, constitutive Malay Archipelago, 148–9 Malpas, J. E., Intro n2 Manning, Frederic, 5 Mansfield, Katherine, 72 Manual of Map Reading and Field Sketching (General Staff ), 17–20, 18, 20, 48, 52 Map Reading and Panorama Sketching (An Instructor), 16–17, 48 maps and mapmaking, see cartography Marathon, Battle of, 165 Marburg, 66, 193n11 Marinetti, F. T., 112, 157 Marne, first Battle of the, 144 Masefield, John, 95 Masterman, C. F. G., 93 Mauss, Marcel, 127, 128 McNeile, Herman C., 13, 23, 83–4, 181

meaning and Baedekers, 66 and experience, 5–6, 11, 42, 52, 92, 94–5, 107–8, 111, 112, 129, 130, 179–89 and interpretation, 180, 188 and language, 179 and place names, 81–3 referential or relational, 92, 129, 187 and space, 44 and wampum, 72 Meinig, D. W., 196n6 Mendelson, Edward, 55, 56, 192n4 metric system, 7 Metropolitan Magazine (New York), 135, 136 Meyer, G. J., 3 Michelson-Morley experiment, see light, speed of militarism, 86–7, 89, 106, 113, 114 Miller, J. Hillis, 6, 44, 193n26 Mitchell, W. J. T., 44, 185, 187, 196n6 Mizener, Arthur, Ch2 n10, 193n11 modernism, general characteristics of, 181–9 Mondrian, Piet, 133 Monkey Island, 115, 118–20, 122, 124, 125 Montague, C. E., 4–5, 78, 95, 96 Disenchantment, 91–2, 94, 95, 96, 99–114, 128–31, 180, 186–8 “In the Regained Territory,” 98 “Outside Arras, Near the German Lines,” 98 The Right Place, 91, 96, 99, 107, 111 “Road Liable to be Shelled,” 98 “Ruins near Arras,” 98 “The Somme Battlefield,” 24, 97, 129 “A Square in Arras,” 98 “Strange, But True,” 98 “The Western Front,” 96–7 Monte, Steven, 195n26 Moore, Gene, 41 Morrow, John H., 3 Moser, Thomas C., Ch2 n10

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Much Ado About Nothing, 114 Muirhead, Findlay, 55, 89 Muirhead, James F., 55, 57, 64 Murray, John, 57, 85, 86, 88, 192n9 Napoleonic Wars, 8, 79–80, 125–6, 167 Nash, Paul, 94, 98, 181 navigation celestial, 152–3, 153 dead reckoning, 152 local apparent noon, 152–3, 153 running fix, 153 see also lines, latitude; lines, of position Nelson, Horatio, 169, 171 Neuve Chapelle, battle of, 146–7, 151, 158 Nevinson, C. R. W., 94 Newbolt, Sir Henry, 101, 164, 193n4 Newton, Sir Isaac, see space, absolute North-Eastern France, 89 O. E. (Oliver Elton), 193n2 Officers Training Corps, 156 Ordnance Survey, 15, 16 Otago, 134–5, 137, 139, 151 Owen, Wilfred, 4, 93, 97, 100, 180, 187 Oxford Book of English Verse, 4 Paardeberg, battle of, 101 Panofsky, Erwin, 21 panorama sketch, 16–20, 18, 22, 27–8, 47–51, 53 pastoral, conventions of the, 16, 30, 39, 94 Patch, Harry, 179 Penn, William, 68, 70, 72, 77 Penn treaty belts, see under wampum Pennsylvania Castle, 70 perspective, 7, 15, 17, 19–22, 20, 23, 25–6, 28, 33, 58, 98 Philip IV, king of Spain, 101 photography, military, 13, 85, 187 Picasso, Pablo, 176 picturesque, the, 114–22, 124–5, 126, 128–9

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Pinker, J. B., 135, 136, 138, 139, 159 Piraeus, 162, 163, 164, 165, 174–5 place, defined, 6 place names, 15, 24, 29, 35–6, 39–41, 47–8, 49, 75–6, 79–85 and meaning, 81–3 Poincaré, Henri, 8 Poole, Roger, 193n25 Porsen, 101, 103, 193n4 Porsena, Lars, see Porsen Porter, Roy, Ch3 n9 positivism, 6–8, 15–17, 20, 25–6, 48, 52, 56, 58, 59, 65, 66, 68, 69, 74, 76–7, 78, 84–5, 89 Pound, Ezra, 37, 185–7 presence, 180–2, 185, 187–9 Price, Uvedale, 117, 118 “race to the sea,” 141, 144, 145 Raemaekers, Louis, 95 range-taker’s card, 17, 18, 19, 20, 48, 49, 51 Ratzel, Friedrich, 167 Ready, HMS, 137 regeneration, cultural, 92, 112–14, 129–30, 158 relativity, theories of, 8, 173 Remarque, Erich Maria, 5, 180 Remembrance, Hall of, 101 Remembrance Sunday, 3 Repton, Humphry, 117 Revolution, French, 125, 126, 127, 167 Robb, George, 187, 195n22 Roberts, Frederick, 101, 193n4 Roe, Sue, 161, 165, 170, 195n30 Romania, entry into the war, 164 Rosecrance, Barbara, 192n8 Rosenberg, Isaac, 94 Ross, Robert, 101 Royal Geographical Society, 7, 167 Ruskin, John, 61, 109, 120 Rutherford, Andrew, 99 sacrificial figures, 114, 127–8, 158–9 Said, Edward W., 136–7, 138 St. Jacques, Cap, 150, 151, 152

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Salamis, 164, 165 Salonika, 163–4, 166 Sappho, 122–4 “Sapper,” see McNeile, Herman C. Sassoon, Siegfried, 4, 194n13 Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, 10 Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, 5, 23, 29, 42, 80–1, 84–5 Saunders, Max, 73, 192n12, 193n12, 193n25 Scarborough (and Scarborough Raid), 162–3, 166, 169, 175, 176, 178 Schaefer, Josephine O’Brien, 161 Schlieffen, Alfred von, 22 Schlieffen Plan, 87, 141 Schwarz, Daniel R., 137–9 science attitudes towards, 10, 57, 85–7 progress of, 7, 10, 85 see also technology, advances in Scientific American, 86–7 Scozzari, Lois, 69, 70, 193n12, 193n14 sea power and fleet battles, 166, 169, 170 and sea space, 166, 170, 172–4, 176 see also space, constitutive; Mahan, Alfred Thayer seeing, problems of, see visibility, problems of Shackamaxon, Treaty of, 70–1 Shaw, Bernard, 95 Sheffield, Gary, 194n14 shell shock, 4, 39, 91, 114, 115, 118, 120, 127, 179, 183 Sheppard, Francis, Ch3 n9 Sherrill, C. O., 22, Ch1 n2 Sherry, Norman, 151, 195n15 Sherry, Vincent, 185–7 Siam, Gulf of, 134, 135, 138, 139, 140, 147, 149–54, 150, 160, 176, 178 siege warfare, 101–2, 144–7, 176 see also trench warfare Simpson, Keith, 194n14 Singapore, 134–5, 148, 154–5, 158, 159, 177 Sketch, 73

Skinner, Paul, 41, 44 sky, view of, 9–10 Smith, Adam, 168 Smith, Timothy J., 69 Snadden, John, 151 Snyderman, George S., 69, 193n14 Somme, Battle of the, 23, 27, 45–7, 82–3, 84, 103, 106, 125, 129, 162, Ch4 n10 space absolute, 6, 7, 8, 14, 17, 21, 22, 25, 48, 51, 53, 99, 133, 173 constitutive, 134, 163, 173–7 defined, 6 and meaning, 44 rationalization of, 7, 14, 17, 20, 173 see also sea power, and sea space; Mahan, Alfred Thayer; place, defined; place names Speck, Frank G., 71, 193n19 Sphinx, 59 Spínola, Ambrosio, 101–4, 102, 105 Sprout, Margaret Tuttle, 168–9 Stannard, Martin, Ch2 n10 Stephen, Thoby, 160, 165 Stang, Sondra J., 192n13 Stevenson, David, 3 Strachan, Hew, 3, 5, Ch4 n10 Strong-Boag, Veronica, 193n20 sublime, the, 114, 122–5, 128–9, 181 submarine sinking, 170, 195n29 suburbs, 115 Suprematism, 34–35, 36 Swinburne, Algernon, 73 Tamanend, Chief, 70 Taylor, A. J. P., 143, 146, 155, Ch4 n10 Taylor, Desmond, 32 technology, advances in, 7, 8, 13–14, 85–6, 141, 166, 172–3, 174 see also science Tekahionwake, see Johnson, E. Pauline Thacker, Andrew, Intro n2 Thompson, Eric, 193n1 time zones, 7, 17 Times War Atlas, 23

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Tintern Abbey, 92, 125 Todman, Dan, 3, 180 Tomlinson, H. M., 81–3, 172 topography defined, 4, 6 see also cartography; landscape; place, defined; place names tourism, 59, 61–3, 192n3, 192n7, 192n8 battlefield, 89 transposition, see displacement and transposition trauma, 179, 192n15, 195n1 travel, 56–62, 88, 172, 192n3, 192n7 trench maps, 1, 2, 14, 26–7 trench warfare, 8–11, 23, 24–5, 85, 154–5, 179, 181–2 breakthroughs, 146–7, 151, 153–5 and corpses, 154 gas, 141, 155–6 as metaphor, 35–7 stalemate, 134, 140–7, 154 tactics, 141, 154 see also siege warfare Trojan War, 165 Trotter, David, Ch3 n9 Tuan, Yi-Fu, Intro n2, 196n6 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 167 Turner, Joseph M. W., 109 Usui, Masami, 162, 163 Vauban, Sébastien Le Prestre de, 145 Vedaigne, Mt., see Vidaigne, Mont Velázquez, Diego Baltazar Carlos (Prince Baltazar Carlos on Horseback), 104 La Rendición de Breda, o Las Lanzas (The Surrender of Breda, or The Lances), 101–6, 102, 109, 113, 129 Venizelos, Eleutherios, 163–4 verbal and visual representation, intersection of, 92, 185–8 see also ekphrasis; language Verdun, battle of, 142

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Versailles, Treaty of, 100, 105, 113 Vidaigne, Mont, 46–9 visibility and modernism, 184 problems of, 8–11, 22–5, 27–8, 36–8, 40, 43–4, 184 visualization, logic of, 15, 21–2, 24–6, 38, 39, 42, 44, 48, 52 voids destroyed towns as, 33 and emptiness in pictorial representation, 98, 104, 181 front lines as a world of, 91, 124 in modernist texts, described, 182–3, 177 sea as, 133–4, 163, 173 shell craters as, 181–2 space as a void, 7, 25, 173 typographical, 174–5 vorticism, 93–4 wampum, 56, 66, 68–74, 76–7, 181 description and Native uses, 69–71 and interiority, 74, 76, 78 and landscape, 68–9 and meaning, 72 as a modernist “thing,” 193n24 Penn treaty belts, 70–2, 71, 74 Wadsworth, Edward, 176 War Memorials Committee, 101, 129 War Office, British, 15, 95, 121, 155 War Propaganda Bureau, 93 War writing, phases of, 99–100, 111–12 Watts, Cedric, 134 Watts-Dunton, Theodore, 72, 73–4 Wealdstone, 115, 125 weapons lances, 102, 103, 104, 109 technological advances of, 8–9, 85 Wellington House (War Propaganda Bureau), 93 Wells, H. G., 95 West, Rebecca, 5 The Return of the Soldier, 91–2, 95, 114–22, 124–31, 158, 186–8 Whelan, Lara Baker, Ch3 n9

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Wilde, Oscar, 73 Wilhelm II, kaiser of Germany, 168 Wilkinson, Spencer, 95 Wilks, Philip E., 195n27 Williams, Roger, 69, 70 Williamson, George C., Ch3 n5, Ch3 n6 Williamson, Henry, 24 Wilson, Peter, 189 Winter, Denis, 154 Winter, J. M., Intro n1 Withers, Hartley, 137 Woolf, Virginia, 4–5, 72, 185–7 “Heard on the Downs,” 162 interest in Greek civilization, 165–6 Jacob’s Room, 134, 160–3, 165–6, 170–1, 174–8, 181, 189

“Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” 8 Mrs. Dalloway, 174, 183, 185 “On Not Knowing Greek,” 165 A Passionate Apprentice, 163 Wordsworth, William “Adventures on Salisbury Plain,” 114, 125–7, 128 “The Discharged Soldier,” 114, 125–7, 128 “Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey,” 125 Ypres Salient, 39–40, 46–9, 108, 142–3 Ypres and the Battle of Ypres, 89 Zappa, Stephanie, 161

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