Wednesday Reading Meme

[osprey_archer]

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Robert Gerwarth’s The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End. I thought the title was a metaphor, but no, Gerwarth’s point is quite literally that the First World War didn’t end for many of the combatants until the early 1920s. Only France, Great Britain, and America enjoyed a cessation of hostilities on November 11, 1918. Germany and Austria continued to suffer street-fighting and internal turmoil, while the smaller successor states that emerged in the wake of the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Ottoman empires spent the next few years fighting each other about exactly where their borders ought to lie, and also fighting internally about who ought to run the place anyway. If you have recently felt your faith in humanity to be worryingly high, this is an excellent antidote. Quite depressing.

On a cheerier note, I read Laura Amy Schlitz’s The Bearskinner: A Tale of the Brothers Grimm, with splendidly moody and atmospheric illustrations by Max Grafe. A hungry soldier, wandering after the wars, makes a deal with the devil. For seven years he will wear a bearskin. In all that time, he will always have plenty of money - but never cut his hair or trim his beard or clip his nails or wash himself. If he keeps the bargain all seven years, he’ll keep his soul and his money, but if he fails…

Okay, that may not sound exactly cheery, but there’s a dreamy lyricism to the writing, and I enjoyed making the acquaintance of a fairytale I hadn’t read before. And I always enjoy stories about the folktale devil.

What I’m Reading Now

Zipping along in The Woman in White! With the result that everything I want to say about it is a The bit where Count Fosco writes a note in Marian’s diary after she falls all! Sir! SIR! It would be so horrible to arise from your sickbed and find that the scariest man you know has read your whole diary, knows all about your suspicions, and thinks that your attempts to thwart his plans are adorable.

I’m not entirely sure why it suited Count Fosco to leave Laura alive and bury Anne Catherick in her place. Obviously it’s convenient to the narrative to allow Laura and Walter Hartright their inevitable happy ending, but surely it would be safest for Fosco to shuffle both Anne AND Laura off this mortal coil? Although it was fiendishly clever to lock Laura up in an asylum and tell the asylum keeper that one of her delusions is to believe that she’s Laura!

What I Plan to Read Next

I’ve decided to put off Laura Amy Schlitz’s Amber & Clay for now, as comparing it head-to-head with Caroline B. Cooney’s Goddess of Yesterday simply wouldn’t be fair. Also, as Amber & Clay a very recent release, I figure I could find it at most any library, and I want to focus right now on reading the Central Library holdings that aren't readily available elsewhere. Lots of Mary Stolz and Rosemary Sutcliff!

Comments

[sovay]

Only France, Great Britain, and America enjoyed a cessation of hostilities on November 11, 1918. Germany and Austria continued to suffer street-fighting and internal turmoil, while the smaller successor states that emerged in the wake of the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Ottoman empires spent the next few years fighting each other about exactly where their borders ought to lie, and also fighting internally about who ought to run the place anyway.

This is interesting to me because it matches my knowledge of the histories of Germany and Austria–Hungary, but I have never before heard anyone suggest that the violence should be considered a literal continuation of the First World War rather than horrific aftershocks of the ways in which it was concluded or putatively resolved.

[ethelmay]

I think there's something in Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon about a plaque giving the dates of the war with the final year being 1920-something.

[ethelmay]

It was in the chapter on Montenegro: "[A] young man who had been asleep in the long grass beside the memorial rose up in such white immobile handsomeness as Disraeli would have ascribed to a duke, and told us that [the memorial] commemorated the members of the Vasoyevitch tribe who had fallen in the wars. The Serbs who took refuge here after Kossovo split up into tribes, each with its own chief, very much after the order of our Scottish clans, and the Vasoyevitches were among the most powerful. All four sides of the needle were covered with names; there must have been seven or eight hundred of them. I exclaimed aloud when I saw that the inscription gave the dates of the war as 1912-21, but of course it is true that this country was continually under arms for nine years."

[osprey_archer]

Yes, Gerwarth talks about this in the Balkan section - for many of the countries in that area, World War I was more or less a continuation of wars that had already started.

[osprey_archer]

I think in Germany and Austria-Hungary, the immediate violence after the war was muted enough that it really was more of an aftershock than a continuation of war. But in a lot of countries further east, war just continued, albeit with different aims, which perhaps does make it a different war? But still a full-blown war, often even more violent than what came before.

But also if you are a peasant and the armies just keep rolling over your crops, maybe the change in war aims doesn't make much difference - maybe you just experience it all as "MORE war goddammit."

[lokifan]

The part where he reads the diary! So terrifying!

I had no idea re: the continued conflict.

[osprey_archer]

Just imagine poor Marian getting her diary back after she's recovered and finding Fosco's note in it. Just a spine-crawling moment for her.

I went into The Vanquished with bits and pieces of knowledge about various conflicts following World War I, but until I'd read the book I'd never quite put it together that all these conflicts were part of a wider pattern of conflict that continued long after World War I "ended" - because the Armistice really only ended the war for France and Great Britain and the US.

It made me think on a wider scale about the difficulty of assigning dates to a war - and the fact that one of the thing the victors win is often the ability to say, "This is when the war ended," even if things continue to be messy for the vanquished areas for quite some time thereafter.