Book Review: Fanny Goes to War

[osprey_archer]

Never completely rehabilitated, they remembered their years of captivity with horror, but many also told me their lives would have been incomplete without that experience.

It was hard for me to accept this.

This quote comes from Monica Zgustova’s Dressed for a Dance in the Snow: Women’s Voices from the Gulag, but it kept running through my head as I read Pat Beauchamp Washington’s Fanny Goes to War, a memoir published in 1919 of Washington’s years in France and Belgium as part of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (F.A.N.Y.). She drove ambulances. She worked in the hospitals, nursing both typhoid patients and the severely wounded. She lost her own leg when a shell hit her ambulance.

She writes it all as a jolly hockey sticks romp. The basic tone throughout the book (and this is an exact quote) is “I wouldn’t have missed it for anything.”

It was hard for me to accept this. I went into World War I memoirs inclined to dismiss the jolly hockey sticks stuff as mere propaganda; ditto anything about the glory and heroism of the war. But this is the third memoir I’ve read that takes this approach, and the third time I’ve gone “God, the writer really means it,” and it has occurred to me, finally, that I should actually listen to the memoirists. Otherwise what is the point of reading memoirs?

Not that I need to accept their interpretation of the war as a whole. But I need to accept that this is what they actually felt about their own experiences.

There’s an argument in World War I historiography which kind of memoir captures the “truth” of the war: the jolly hockey sticks memoirs most commonly published during and just after the war, or the brutality-of-war memoirs that tended to come later. (Although Ellen La Motte’s incredibly bitter The Backwash of War was published in 1916, so this is only a tendency, not an absolute division.)

But, as Hornung comments in Notes of a Camp-Follower on the Western Front, “what has interested me ever since [his time near the front lines] is the hopelessness of expecting two persons to give anything like the same account of a violent experience.” Pat Beauchamp Washington can write a jolly hockey sticks romp of a nursing memoir (after, let me repeat, losing her leg) and Ellen La Motte can write an embittered one and they can both be writing the truth of their own lives.

Comments

[lilysea]

I wonder how much of the difference can be explained by people's different experiences BEFORE the war?

After all, if you're escaping a controlling/abusive parent or spouse by going to the war front/behind the lines;

or if you are same-sex attracted and the war front/behind the lines lets you meet sexual/romantic partners for the first time

that is obviously going to make a big difference to people's experience of the war front/behind the lines...

[rmc28]

Or if you just like, get to be competent and useful, and have lots of exciting adrenaline rushes, perhaps for the first time in your life. That can feel really good, even if it's for terrible reasons.

(one of my issues in my job is that solving urgent crises in IT is way more exciting in the moment than carefully planning and setting things up so that everything works very boringly and reliably and there are no urgent crises or at least a lot less of them; I have internalised saying things like "no heroics" and "keep it boring" because that is actually more of a challenge)

[osprey_archer]

For Washington that seems to be a lot of it - the ability to be competent and useful in an exciting job (with lots of chums around, as a bonus). Or if you read about fighter pilots in both World Wars, many of them clearly LOVED the adrenaline rush.

[troisoiseaux]

My impulse - having not read any of the memoirs in question - is that there has to be an element of this that's a coping mechanism?

[osprey_archer]

In Hornung's case yes - I think it's clear that he went to the Western Front in order to feel close to his son (who died there, and whose grave he visits) and to contribute in his own small way to the cause so his son will not have died in vain. For Washington, maybe, but you have to read it in there, and you could read "coping mechanism" into the poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon in exactly the same way.

You could probably say this about most war writing, frankly. Isn't all of it more or less an attempt to cope with an overwhelming experience?

[oracne]

I think for many women, especially upper class women, the freedom to do useful jobs that mattered might have been a big part of it.

[osprey_archer]

Probably for some people it was like that, but on the other hand you have people like Siegfried Sassoon who was same-sex attracted and HATED the war, so clearly there's a lot of individual variation.

[sovay]

or if you are same-sex attracted and the war front/behind the lines lets you meet sexual/romantic partners for the first time

Not pertinent to WWI, but if you have not read James Lord's My Queer War (2010), I recommend it.

[littlerhymes]

I remember studying oral history and this idea of narrative, that people do tend to want to fit their lives into a narrative and the choice of narrative is a sign about the motivations people have for telling their story and where they see themselves. So the person who writes a jolly wartime story perhaps wants to show they had control and agency of this time in their lives; though at other points in their life that narrative might change and they might want to show a darker side to things and tell the story in a different way. I think this kind of framing is so important in memoir which is so personal and subjective.

[osprey_archer]

Oh, that's so interesting! Yes, this is so important to keep in mind - and to remember that everyone does this, we all are trying to make sense of our lives in the stories we tell, and this is just as true in a source that fits my established idea of a World War I narrative ("It was all awful and pointless") as the ones that don't.

Probably my attachment to this narrative is a sign about my motivation in reading history and how I see the world and understand my place in it.

[asakiyume]

This is really interesting and definitely something I can relate to personally. As an adolescent, I altered the type of diary I kept so that I could control how my future self perceived my past self. So yeah, I can definitely understand framing changing for these reasons.

[osprey_archer]

I think you've mentioned this diary-altering before. Did you actually insert new happenings ("Today we had a picnic by the waterfall!" when in fact no picnic occurred), or was it more tidying up your emotions to look better to future-you? ("Today so-and-so got the lead part in the school play that I wanted and I am SO happy for her and not even slightly jealous.")

[asakiyume]

Neither of those--well, sometimes I tore out stuff I didn't like, or crossed it out, but I think lots of people do that.

No, I mean I changed the style/presentation/type of thing I wrote about. Instead of trying to write about my feelings, which would be hopeless and show me in a poor light, I decided just to do things like write artful poems, or copy in other people's artful poems, or write little tiny vignettes about butterflies or rain or what-have-you. I could look back at those (so I thought) and go, "Oh, nice!"

But so, I wasn't trying to fabricate or misrepresent, just trying to highly control what I represented... if that's a valid distinction.

[osprey_archer]

You were writing a diary a la Eepersip from The House without Windows! No feelings, just butterflies and nature vignettes.

[asakiyume]

YES exactly that

in a way that continued with LJ--but inevitably real life and real personality creeps in, LOL.

[osprey_archer]

I think there's much more of an expectation that LJ will be mediated this way, anyway. The audience isn't future and speculative, but present and immediate, so of course most people try to write things that we think will interest other people instead of petty gripes or things like that which end up in a private paper journal.

[oracne]

I like this idea.

[hedgebird]

My main source of WWI recs, George Simmers at his Wordpress blog Great War Fiction, often remarks that the perceived divide in "eras" of memoirs (and other contemporary writing) is seriously overstated. I haven't read a fraction of what he has, but enough to make me smh at current historical fiction whose characters' attitudes to the war chimes perfectly with modern popular consensus. Always seems a bit patronizing.

[osprey_archer]

Oooh! That website sounds exactly up my alley and I'll have to poke through it and... probably end up with an unrealistically long list of books that I want to read, tbh. Do you have any particular book recommendations?

I'm coming around to the view that the popular modern consensus is so thoroughly shaped by what happened after (the war did NOT, in fact, end all wars) that it makes it very hard for modern people to enter into the views of participants on the ground as it happened.

[sovay]

the popular modern consensus is so thoroughly shaped by what happened after (the war did NOT, in fact, end all wars)

I agree that it's all but impossible not to look back through a century of popular reception, but you can see that consensus of futility forming even before it's apparent that a second world war is on the horizon: I know there was more variation in the immediately proximate literature, but silent and pre-Code films about the war are overwhelmingly cynical and/or pacifist. The earliest I have personally seen is Abel Gance's J'accuse (1919)—partly shot in the last months of the war—which legendarily climaxes with a vision of the risen dead of the trenches returning home to demand of their families whether their sacrifice was in vain and ends with the shell-shocked hero denouncing the sun for shining indifferently on the obscenity of war. The latest of my experience is either No Greater Glory (1934) or The Lost Patrol (1934), depending on whether an actual wartime setting is required for purposes of this argument. I suspect some of what changed with the onset of WWII was the depth or perhaps the direction of the futility: it's painful enough in the '20's and early-to-mid-'30's to imagine that empires disintegrated and millions died for a global emoji shrug, but after 1939 it is almost unbearable irony that the war did not only fail to end but directly begat another war. And no one making art before that watershed moment knew it, which is why I have increasingly little time for a certain kind of irony in historical fiction. We don't always have to feel smug about what the characters can't know.

[osprey_archer]

I think what I'm seeing is not so much that there isn't a consensus, but that any consensus, no matter how widespread, will always have dissenters. Some people continued to think that the war was worth it and jolly good fun, too, even when everyone else was getting more All Quiet on the Western Front about it.

I first ran into this when I was in high school in the context of the Vietnam War, actually - veterans writing in to Soldier of Fortune magazine about how they had a great time in the war, actually, and the war was definitely worth it and the US would have won if it wasn't for the stupid politicians! Little high school me did not know what to make of this.

[sovay]

I think what I'm seeing is not so much that there isn't a consensus, but that any consensus, no matter how widespread, will always have dissenters.

Obviously it sounds like a punch line, but I agree with that. I was just observing that the hindsight of WWII was not necessary for the consensus of what was it all for, then—it just helped solidify it.

[hedgebird]

NGL, I've bookmarked far more recs than I've ever followed up on (and my main interest is in the Ottoman fronts now.) The most purely entertaining memoir I've read is probably the chaplain Frederick Scott's The Great War As I Saw It (it's on Gutenberg), who had a sense of humour and a remarkable range of experiences. War Letters of a Young Queenslander by Dr. Robert Marshall Allen (at LibriVox) is one I remember as having useful descriptions of how medical evacuations and so on worked. A Century Back is another blog I used to read daily – it follows an array of mostly UK writers through the war in pseudo-realtime using their letters/diaries/memoirs/fiction. I remember you've reviewed a couple of nurses' memoirs, so Kate Luard, Dorothy Feilding, or Vera Brittain might be of interest to you over there.

Thinking about it, there are two different but easily-conflated axes of feeling about the war in contemporary stuff I've read: I'm having a great time/I'm not having a good time, and the war is worth it/not worth it. And it's the second axis where there really was a big shift afterward. During the war itself, unfun+worthwhile is the most common attitude I've read, but you got all combinations: fun+worthwhile, awful+worthwhile, awful+not worthwhile, though I don't think I've personally encountered "it's not worth it, but I'm having a great time!" Then by the late 1920s far more people had concluded that it wasn't worth it, and that got confused in hindsight with a bad time being had by all.

[osprey_archer]

Oooh, The Great War as I Saw It sounds super useful - I've been curious to see a chaplain's view of things. I've meant to read Vera Brittain for ages (I read her Testament of Friendship a few years ago but somehow never made it back to Testament of Youth) and really ought to get around to it once I've finished Goodbye to All That.

That's interesting about the two axes! And now I will have my eye open for that one weirdo who thinks the war is a lot of rot, but a jolly good lark anyway. You know there must have been at least one (although maybe they wouldn't have written a memoir about it).

[anna_wing]

One has to see through one's own lenses, but not forget that they're not the only ones, and that everyone else has their own...

[osprey_archer]

Yes, exactly.

[rachelmanija]

A lot of British war memoirs have a "jolly good fun!" tone, no matter what's going on. It was clearly a genuine cultural thing of a certain period; not everyone actually felt that way, but I think a lot of people did. It can't all be propaganda or what's expected, as it also turns up in diaries that were kept over a period of years and were only published after (sometimes long after) the death of the writer.

[osprey_archer]

I run into this in British school stories, too. They have a football scrummage and three boys get carried off with broken collarbones and everyone is on the verge of hypothermia by the end and it was "jolly good fun." WAS IT, THOUGH? It doesn't sound like something I would enjoy (although it makes fun reading) but the writers are clearly sincere.

TBH one of the things I have learned from studying history is that humans have an extremely wide range of emotional reactions to things... but any given society (including our own) only ever rewards or even really recognizes a specific set. Anything outside that will make people go "But did people feel that REALLY?"

[anna_wing]

My boarding-school did a ski-trip every winter, and every year, coming back for winter term, there'd be a parade of girls in casts, braces, crutches etc (it is why I have never felt the slightest desire to learn downhill skiing; cross-country, maybe). It was nonetheless always agreed to have been Jolly Good Fun, and there was always a long waiting list.

There was also winter hockey-practice at 6 am. It's really all in what you consider normal.

[asakiyume]

But I need to accept that this is what they actually felt about their own experiences.


It can be really hard to do this when the feelings are hard to understand, but yeah. At least as a starting point. Sometimes how we're understanding what they're saying is skewed (like what you were saying earlier about the words "lover" etc.), and sometimes stuff needs to be contextualized and so on, but yeah, if someone says "I like oranges; they are a delicious fruit," you have to at least start with them liking oranges.

[osprey_archer]

I think there is a tendency when people run into really alien attitudes in the past (anytime in the past, not necessarily just Great War stuff) to go "They COULDN'T have actually believed that"... And if there's one thing I've learned, it's that they definitely could! Whatever it was, no matter how horrible or just plain strange! The human mind is capable of a vast array of things and many of them are disturbing.

[philomytha]

Ooh, I need to read this now (I am also backreading your DW and discovering my TBR list doubling in length). I've also been reading WW1 stuff and one of the books I read has a discussion of men who enjoyed their time in the trenches and who actively preferred being in the front line trenches to being in the reserves or at the rear, and how that could possibly be true. In this case it's less that some people genuinely like being shelled while up to their necks in mud, and more that some bits of the front line trenches were sufficiently peaceful that you could lie in the grass behind the trench all day reading a book and nobody expected you to do any drilling, but it still gave me the same 'huh? this is not the WW1 I had heard about before' feeling. It's 'Trench Warfare 1914-18: The Live and Let Live System by Tony Ashworth.

[osprey_archer]

If i had a choice between "quiet front line trench where I could lie on the grass reading a book" and "drill," I would emphatically choose the trench. Sure, there is the risk of death in the event of an attack, but what is drill if not an unending living death??

For Washington the appeal seems to be adventure and camaraderie. Among the ambulance drivers (I think this is also true of pilots) it seems that individual effort and gallantry could still make a real difference in outcomes, which may account for the fact that Washington doesn't seem to feel the sense of pointlessness that the infantry often suffered.