Book Review: The Great War as I Saw It
May. 11th, 2023 07:53 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archer“How will you protect yourself, sir, if the enemy should get into the trench?” I told him I would recite one of my poems…
Frederick George Scott’s The Great War as I Saw It is a memoir of World War I through the eyes of a chaplain and poet who spent four years at the front with the Canadian Expeditionary Force. I’ve been reading it for quite some time, not because it’s hard going - actually it’s pretty easy reading for a war memoir, especially given that Scott lost his son in the war. But it’s a meandering book, lots of anecdotes, mostly interesting in themselves but without a lot of forward thrust.
Scott generally seems to be having a grand old time: setting up for services in any nook or cranny he can find, hitching rides with staff officers, cheerily telling the people who are supposedly in charge of him “the Lord will provide!” as he heads off to provide spiritual succor somewhere that he is really not supposed to be.
In fact, Scott wasn’t supposed to be in France at all, but posted to a hospital somewhere safe in England. I suspect this devil-may-care attitude toward authority endeared him to the rank-and-file, with whom he seems to have been very popular, no doubt in part because he passed out cigarettes and biscuits whenever he had them on hand, but also because of his indefatigable good humor and cheer.
This is not to say that Scott is indifferent to the tragedy of war. “The aftermath of victory is of course very sad," he notes, and he hopes that in the future people will see war as a sad necessity only to be undertaken when forced by outside aggression. But he mourns, too, the loss of “all the romance and chivalry out of fighting,” and thrills at whatever is left of the glorious and picturesque: “the artillery duel of the two armies waxed loud and furious. I stood on the hill with some of our men, and watched the magnificent scene. Nothing but the thought of what it meant to human beings took away from our enjoyment of the mighty spectacle.”
He’s a happy warrior, who wants to be near the action (“If we had to be at war at all, the happiest place was at the front”), who thrives in the front-line atmosphere of tension and constant change, who loves the dash and spectacle and romance of war - but is too thoughtful to fully forget, for more than a few sentences at least, what those gorgeous artillery barrages mean for the soldiers below.
Frederick George Scott’s The Great War as I Saw It is a memoir of World War I through the eyes of a chaplain and poet who spent four years at the front with the Canadian Expeditionary Force. I’ve been reading it for quite some time, not because it’s hard going - actually it’s pretty easy reading for a war memoir, especially given that Scott lost his son in the war. But it’s a meandering book, lots of anecdotes, mostly interesting in themselves but without a lot of forward thrust.
Scott generally seems to be having a grand old time: setting up for services in any nook or cranny he can find, hitching rides with staff officers, cheerily telling the people who are supposedly in charge of him “the Lord will provide!” as he heads off to provide spiritual succor somewhere that he is really not supposed to be.
In fact, Scott wasn’t supposed to be in France at all, but posted to a hospital somewhere safe in England. I suspect this devil-may-care attitude toward authority endeared him to the rank-and-file, with whom he seems to have been very popular, no doubt in part because he passed out cigarettes and biscuits whenever he had them on hand, but also because of his indefatigable good humor and cheer.
This is not to say that Scott is indifferent to the tragedy of war. “The aftermath of victory is of course very sad," he notes, and he hopes that in the future people will see war as a sad necessity only to be undertaken when forced by outside aggression. But he mourns, too, the loss of “all the romance and chivalry out of fighting,” and thrills at whatever is left of the glorious and picturesque: “the artillery duel of the two armies waxed loud and furious. I stood on the hill with some of our men, and watched the magnificent scene. Nothing but the thought of what it meant to human beings took away from our enjoyment of the mighty spectacle.”
He’s a happy warrior, who wants to be near the action (“If we had to be at war at all, the happiest place was at the front”), who thrives in the front-line atmosphere of tension and constant change, who loves the dash and spectacle and romance of war - but is too thoughtful to fully forget, for more than a few sentences at least, what those gorgeous artillery barrages mean for the soldiers below.
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Date: 2023-05-11 12:04 pm (UTC)The bar is low. >.>
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Date: 2023-05-13 04:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-05-13 02:27 pm (UTC)