Stephen Baxter: The Time Ships

     Ever since its first publication, H G Wells’ The Time Machine has fascinated readers and writers with the notion of being able to travel to the past and the future. Various writers have played with Wells’ original idea: I once admired Christopher Priest’s The Space Machine, which managed to combine elements of the original novel with the same author’s The War of the Worlds, but last time I read it, I found it rather disappointing. Roland Wright’s A Scientific Romance is another favourite, which weaves in elements of and characters from Wells’ original story. And now, I’ve finally read Stephen Baxter’s The Time Ships, which Arthur C Clarke lauds on the cover as being almost better than the original.

One of the problems with time travel is that it’s the concept that’s most interesting; secondary are the epochs a writer chooses to visit, and often the plot only comes third. Baxter is hooked on the idea that the very invention or discovery of time travel begins to alter the future as soon as the first journey takes place – link to Ray Bradbury’s ‘butterfly effect’ here – and so Wells’ traveller has set in motion multiple worlds and multiple possibilities, along with the idea that it’s therefore impossible to go return to a time one has already visited, and for it to remain the same as ‘last time’ (if you see what I mean). And this is the start of the hero’s problem, as he wishes to return to the future some 800,000 years hence, the world of the Eloi and Morlocks, and save Weena…

So, attempting to return to Weena’s world, our hero is stopped half a million years into the future in a different world where Morlocks are the future of humanity and have incredibly advanced technology; one of them becomes his time-travelling companion for the remainder of the novel. They return to a different and earlier England and meet the hero’s younger self, are transported to a version of 1938 where the Great War is still going on and both sides are using time travel to try and defeat each other, which leads to our travellers spending some time in the Palaeolothic era, where another future track is seeded by a group of colonists from 1938 who remain behind, and create an astonishing future, while destroying their home planet through global warming…

We get imagined utopias in the far future, warnings about our own present, glimpses from Wells’ other novels where he imagines warfare in the future as well as world government, and an overlap with Olaf Stapledon’s famous Last and First Men, when Baxter also tries to imagine the remote future of our species, or at least what it may become.

There is also a meta-narrative here of course, in that Baxter is not only playing with Wells’ original narrative in his novel, but of course also has all the ideas that other novelists have come up with and explored in terms of time travel available to him… There is so much crammed in here; while it’s an enjoyable yarn, at times it feels a bit ‘Boys’ Own Paper’-ish, and at others it feels almost chaotically out-of-control.

I have realised how long it is since I read Wells’ original tale and feel I ought to go back to it; I do feel that Baxter has achieved a tour-de-force here, and am tempted to agree with Arthur C Clarke’s judgement. I have always been intrigued by time travel tales. Given the choice, I’d want a brief and safe trip back to the time of Bach and Shakespeare, and maybe a visit to ancient Rome; not sure about the future… Where and when would you go?

On a century of Owen’s poetry

This month offers another opportunity to write about one of my favourite poets, and still the war poet par excellence, in my opinion, as we reach the centenary of the first publication of his poetry – posthumous, of course.

In a sense, of course, Wilfred Owen’s reputation is frozen in time because of his untimely death in the final days of the Great War: he left behind his personal story of bravery at the front, his struggle with shell-shock and his time at Craiglockhart. There he met and was encouraged by Siegfried Sassoon, and out of it all came the small volume which is his complete poems. There is no more: would he have gone on to greater things had he survived the war, or would he have faded into obscurity, his best work written in his twenties?

Can you remember when you first encountered his verse, and the effect it had on you? Two poems stand out for me, at school when preparing for my O Levels: the explanation of how the sonnet Anthem for Doomed Youth works, and the sheer horror of the images in Dulce et Decorum Est. They were the two poems everyone knew in those long-gone days, the 1960s, when interest in the Great War was re-awakened by the fiftieth anniversary.

These two poems re-appeared when I was teaching, in anthologies of poetry devised by examination boards to meet various arcane criteria, and later on A Level English Literature offered a unit on Literature and the First World War and there was the opportunity to read much more widely. For me, the Owen poem I have always found most effective and most powerful in the classroom is Disabled (you can read my analysis of it here).

Disabled is about a boy who lied and said he was nineteen in order to join up. You are talking about the age of many of the (male) students in the classes I taught. Subtly, the implications of his horrendous injuries are made clear, and it’s the fact that his age is the age of awakening sexuality which shocks most: you don’t actually need to say anything…

Or you can consider Mental Cases, which has as much of the graphic detail as does Dulce et Decorum Est, but with the added nightmare quality of mental derangement, insanity on top of physical injury. And in the latter poem, the man dies, whereas the men in the former poem survive and have to live with their visions.

There are many other Great War poets, as powerful in their use of graphic detail or in their ability to make the reader think: Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, Ivor Gurney to name several. What makes Owen stand out above the others? for he does, I am convinced. His bravery, his youth and his own tragic end are part of it. His astonishing use of the poetical power and expressive possibilities of the English language must not be overlooked: just read Exposure aloud, slowly and carefully. His stance on the war itself is also important. He was not unpatriotic or anti-British; he did not shirk his duty. He did not merely seek to horrify his readers through descriptions of atrocity. Like Sassoon, he wants his readers to feel very uncomfortable: Owen is writing, as he put it himself, about ‘the pity of war’. His poems say to his readers: these things are going on, these men are suffering and dying, in your name. Implied are such questions as ‘Why?’, ‘Do you approve?’, ‘Now that you know, what will you say?’.

The Virago Book of Women and the Great War

     This anthology was compiled and published over twenty years ago, and it is a worthy but flawed collection, I feel; worth having, but the curating and editing could have been better done. I wasn’t impressed reading in the introduction that the bulk of the literature of the Great War was written by British writers – a sweeping statement which is easy to challenge. And decimal currency was introduced in 1971, not 1972…

Having griped a little, I will admit that this is a pretty catholic selection, from some French and German sources but largely from British women writers. The main interest lies in the individual pictures of life and work in those times, and the way that many excerpts counter the general, broad sweep of ‘official’ history: not everyone partied and rejoiced at the outbreak of war, not everyone was eager to volunteer and join up. We also see British women involved, mainly in medical and caring roles, in all sorts of places I hadn’t expected: Serbia, Russia, Austria and other countries.

The editor ranges very widely in her choice of sources, but even to this experienced and hardened student and reader of Great War literature, there’s rather too much information, as the current saying puts it. And yet, I can accept that such an anthology needed compiling before all sorts of material disappeared. There is a clear focus on women’s very real role and contribution to the war effort, men’s reluctant realisation and acceptance that this was both the case and very necessary to the achievement of Britain’s war aims. Women established themselves widely in the workforce and strove for equal pay and conditions with men; clearly the desire for suffrage and other rights was also in the forefront of the efforts of many, and this is evidenced in great detail from contemporary accounts and material.

And yet, there’s a bit too much here; the best is the personal accounts of front-line experiences.

Joseph Roth: The Emperor’s Tomb

   Time and again literature reminds us of the end of an era which took place in the Western world in 1914, with the coming of the Great War: nothing was ever to be the same again. Joseph Roth is one of the writers who, for me, has captured the essence of this most effectively and powerfully, perhaps because the earthquake that swept away the Austro-Hungarian Empire was so cataclysmic. He succeeds in creating both a sense of ending and also one of nostalgia in the reader for what has been lost, a time of relative innocence compared with what came next, and what was clearly eventually to lead to even worse…

The Emperor’s Tomb (the title refers to the vault in Vienna where the Habsburg monarchs are buried) is written from the point of view of a member of a poor branch of a titled family. We see the effect of the coming of war against Russia and what it does to the hero, his family and a small group of friends. The narrator throws in his army lot with a poorer cousin who is an itinerant chestnut-seller, and a Jewish cab-driver, who he realises are more real, of more significance to him than his so-called city friends.

We see the chaos of the early days of war: he marries a woman because he should, not because he loves her, and their wedding night is ruined because of the death of a family servant. There is the sudden awareness of the incredible fragility and ephemeral nature of existence, which forces the hero to consider what really matters to him, what is really of value. At the front there is the chaos of battle and retreat and suddenly being taken prisoner with his friends; all three of them end up in Siberia, so escaping the horrors of war, but not its consequences or aftermath.

There is an almost hallucinatory quality to the hero’s return home at the end of 1918, to a world of uncertainty, poverty and spivs with vacuous get-rich-quick schemes. It is all very disorienting, as he realises that he is part of a generation which ought to have died, but didn’t, a generation for whom there is no longer a place… The ending, with its foreshadowing of the advent of Nazism, is devastatingly powerful. I was shocked to be reminded just how good this short novel I last read many years ago was.

Philip Johnstone: High Wood

Ladies and gentlemen, this is High Wood,
Called by the French, Bois des Fourneaux,
The famous spot which in Nineteen-Sixteen,
July, August and September was the scene
Of long and bitterly contested strife,
By reason of its High commanding site.
Observe the effect of shell-fire in the trees
Standing and fallen; here is wire; this trench
For months inhabited, twelve times changed hands;
(They soon fall in), used later as a grave.
It has been said on good authority
That in the fighting for this patch of wood
Were killed somewhere above eight thousand men,
Of whom the greater part were buried here,
This mound on which you stand being…
Madame, please,
You are requested kindly not to touch
Or take away the Company’s property
As souvenirs; you’ll find we have on sale
A large variety, all guaranteed.
As I was saying, all is as it was,
This is an unknown British officer,
The tunic having lately rotted off.
Please follow me – this way …
the path, sir, please
The ground which was secured at great expense
The Company keeps absolutely untouched,
And in that dug-out (genuine) we provide
Refreshments at a reasonable rate.
You are requested not to leave about
Paper, or ginger-beer bottles, or orange-peel,
There are waste-paper-baskets at the gate.

When I first used this poem in school many years ago, I imagined it must be some sardonic reflection from long after the Great War, and I was rather shocked to discover that it had been written in 1918. Certainly, tourism of the former Western Front took off pretty rapidly after the end of the war, and the removal of corpses and obvious unexploded munitions; there are Michelin Guides from the early 1920s (some of which have been reprinted by Smiths of Easingwold, if you are interested).

The poet focuses on a real spot – I took the photo on a visit a few years ago, and the site is privately owned and not accessible to visitors – and a real battle, the Battle of the Somme. He mimics perfectly the patter of a bored tourist guide who has done this dozens of times before: the ‘Observe’, and ‘here is wire’ suggest a lecture, and there is the slight frisson implied by the reference to ‘This mound on which you stand being…’ Equally there is the concern for keeping the exhibits in good condition – ‘kindly not to touch’ / ‘the path, sir, please’ – and the references to ‘the Company’s property’. The idea of guaranteed souvenirs is macabre, perhaps, as is the suggestion that the remains of an actual corpse is on display. The ground was secured ‘at great expense’: to what expense and whose exactly is our guide referring here? And then the alliteration of the ‘refreshments at a reasonable rate’ rounds it all off…

Except that this has not been my experience of British visitors to the war sites. I have seen coachloads of teenage schoolchildren stunned into silence at the Tyne Cot cemetery near Ypres and been moved by floral tributes left at many war cemeteries by school parties, including flowers and cards placed on German war graves. I have seen people hunting down the names of relatives on the Thiepval Memorial, seen a wreath from my former grammar school at the Menin Gate, and talked with many people involved in projects where their village had decided to hunt down and photograph the last resting-places of those war dead listed on the war memorials in the village. I noticed that it was no longer just the British who were coming to find the graves of their forebears, Germans were beginning to do the same. The only time I have ever been surprised by what I felt was inappropriate behaviour was by French visitors at their national ossuary at Douaumont near Verdun: some were noisy, loud and disrespectful.

So, although I can understand the poet’s cynicism, the idea that all the horrors would soon be forgotten, I am heartened that he has been proven wrong in his imaginings, and that ordinary people’s responses are largely silent and reverent. When I have stood in any of these places, I have been lost for words, unable to believe what I know to be the truth about what happened, faced with the reality and the enormity.

Balance sheet of the First World War

Earlier this year I did a series of posts which were a translation of a 1930s French poster detailing the true and lasting costs of the Great War. I’ve now created an easy page of links to access them all, if anyone’s interested in such a resource. The last one, for me, was in a strange way the most shocking…

On another centenary…

My father was born a subject of the last Tsar, of a nationality without a nation. My researches have shown me that he will have spent the early years of his life pretty close to the lines of the Eastern Front during the Great War. And then came November 1918, the end of the war, and the re-establishment of an independent Poland, after well over a century of non-existence. The Second Republic was born.

You can read about Polish history elsewhere; if you need a recommendation, the excellent books by Norman Davies are the best I know in English. Although only half-Polish, I do feel some pride in the history of the nation, once the largest on the European continent, in the form of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Somewhere I read, the first country to abolish corporal punishment for children; not quite sure how that actually worked. But a nation which elected its monarch? A great idea in theory, perhaps, but which was one of the factors leading to its downfall. A country with a nobility where membership went with your name, not your status and wealth and importance: though my origins are in the peasantry in the middle of nowhere, our name is in the book, the Index of Polish Nobility. It doesn’t do me any good; the Second Republic abolished the nobility in 1919, I think.

Re-creating a nation after over a century is a pretty impossible task, and the Second Republic didn’t do terribly well, torn between those who wanted Poland to be for the Poles and those who hankered after the old, vast commonwealth encompassing many peoples, and much wider territory. It didn’t take long before Poland was another of the fairly grubby semi-dictatorships that spread over much of central Europe. And then there were the Jews, getting on for a quarter of the population, and not always popular, in a country full of poor peasants who saw some prosperous Jews. Because they couldn’t own land, Jews turned to trade and property to make their living; my father said they sometimes taunted poorer Poles: “You may own the land, but we own what is built on it.”

My father was called up in August 1939; living in the eastern part of the country, his section of the army was not involved in trying to hold back the Germans. On 17 September he and his mates were taken by the invading Russians before they could leave their barracks, and shortly after, Poland once again ceased to exist. He and his fellow-soldiers were marched off to Siberia like many thousands of other Poles, where they endured appalling conditions in various camps for more than two years. Enough has been written about the bestiality of the German occupation; what the Soviets did is less well-known. Once Hitler invaded Russia, Poles were grudgingly allowed to leave and make their way to the West to join Allied forces for the struggle against the Nazis. It wasn’t easy; disease and semi-starvation took their toll. But my father ended up in England, joined the 1^st Independent Polish Parachute Brigade and was trained to be dropped as part of the liberation of his country – which never happened. He was part of the abortive Arnhem operation, and then Poland was sold down the river by the Western allies.

Newly ‘liberated’ Poland shifted a hundred miles or so to the West and my father’s homeland became part of the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, which meant that technically, were he to return home, he would be a Soviet citizen. But Soviet citizens who had been in the West were dangerously suspect, so he did not return, one of many thousands in that plight. He knew some who did return, and who then vanished.

Under the Soviet umbrella, Poland attempted to become a nation again, with a certain amount of success, in the sense that there was stability of a kind for the next forty years or so, and also an ethnically homogeneous nation, almost entirely Polish. However, as recent events have begun to show, that has not been a wholly good thing: Poland does not welcome refugees which, given its own past, is rather sad. And the fact that opposition to the Soviet-imposed regime was centred on the Catholic church has created other difficulties, too, for a nation now free of one set of shackles but seemingly unsure of its future direction…

I’ll not apologise for that personal take on Polish and family history. I’ve wrestled with my origins for over sixty years now, and in many ways I’m as English as they come; I was an English teacher for my entire career. I’ve visited Poland five times, and I would not want to live there, not because I don’t like it – I do – but because I’m English too. I’m entitled to Polish citizenship and a Polish passport if I stump up about €1000, and I’ve been briefly tempted, because of all the Brexit insanity. But I think that currently Poland is in a different kind of mess because of its past. Collectively, though Poles are justifiably proud of their record in the Second World War, they seem as yet unable to come to terms with the fact that not every Pole behaved with honour or decency towards his Jewish fellow-citizens. And I’m not casting any stones here, because the English have not a clue as to what life under Nazi occupation for Poles, whom the Nazis also regarded as an inferior race, was like. Poles have yet to face up to the anti-semitism fostered and fanned by the Catholic church in the inter-war years.

But Poland is a free and independent nation, and has been free of the Soviet shackles for nearly thirty years, even if it has found others instead. I try to imagine what my father would have made of it all. Though he saw the successes of the Solidarity movement, and eventually free elections in Poland, he died a month before the coup against Mikhail Gorbachev, six months before the collapse and disappearance of the Soviet Union, which had so radically altered his life…

Balance-sheet of the First World War – 21

War at sea Total navy and merchant marine force losses during the war 86,000

England alone suffered more than half the losses: 2,468 officers and 30,895 sailors of the Royal Navy,

and 14,661 officers and men of the Merchant Navy.

Tonnage torpedoed or sunk during the war:

England 8.610,000 tonnes

USA 613,000 tonnes Norway 1,287,000 tonnes

France 972,000 tonnes

Italy 923,000 tonnes

Japan 182,000 tonnes

In total, 12,587,000 tonnes with a value of 50,000,000,000 francs, corresponding to 5,000 ships.

(continuing the series of posts I introduced here)

Balance-sheet of the First World War – 20

Progress in war… War has progressed. That is undeniable. Today it kills more quickly and better. If we compare the losses in the 1914-18 war with the losses in the eight great wars of the previous two centuries, a real improvement is noticeable:

Seven Years War 551,000 men killed

Revolutionary Wars 1,400,000

Napoleonic Wars 1,700,000

Crimean War 785,000

War of American Independence 700,000

Russo-Japanese War 624,000

Balkan Wars 108,000

Great War 10,000,000

(continuing the series of posts I introduced here)

Balance-sheet of the First World War – 19

The first four months

During the first 4 months of the war (August to November 1914) we lost (killed) 454,000 men, that is to say one third of our total losses.

(continuing the series of posts I introduced here)