[In the following essay, Murray views Wyndham Lewis's body of World War I short stories as “an original type of war literature” and “an integral part of his development as a writer.”]

WYNDHAM LEWIS AND HIS FICTION OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR

The Great War of 1914-18 was the single most important influence on the development of many European intellectuals, including the English Modernist writer and painter Percy Wyndham Lewis. The general effect of this influence was political in the sense that the issues brought up by the war, such as nationalism, socialist revolution and fascist reaction and the moral dilemma of pacificism, formed the basis of the ideological conflict of the period between the wars in which Lewis was a keen participant. Consequently, it can be seen that there is a definite link between literature and politics within Lewis's own framework of thought. This was manifested in a unique way in his post-war work, particularly in the novel The Childermass of 1928.

The immediate effect of the war on Lewis was to end the Vorticist art movement of which he was the leader and subsequently the first stage of his experiment in literary modernism. This sought to ally the media of painting and literature under a single dynamic of abstraction and is evident in the two issues of the magazine Blast and the first versions of the play “Enemy of the Stars” and the novel Tarr.¹ However, this enforced separation between Lewis's visual and literary work meant that his writing was no longer an intrinsic means of propaganda for a style of visual modernism and, in turn, became a more direct expression of his ideas. The war also brought about a return by Lewis to the format of the short story as a means through which he could best respond to the war, as an observer of both home and fighting fronts. In the same way, he began his literary career by writing a series of sketches of peasant life in Brittany while on holiday there with the painter Augustus John in the summer of 1908.² These Breton stories were later extensively revised for the collection The Wild Body of 1927 and represented his emergence as an accomplished writer with a uniquely satirical style. There is no corresponding collection of Lewis's war writings, but the sequence of pieces he wrote between 1916 and 1918 offers an original type of “war literature” and includes his most renowned short story, ‘Cantleman's Spring-Mate’, as well as another which is published here for the first time.

Although there is no comprehensive collection of Lewis's war writings, it is possible to divide them into four categories, depending upon the way in which they approach the subject of the war.³ Firstly, there are those works which are set against the background of the war and only deal with it indirectly, through its effect on civilian life. These are the play The Ideal Giant and the series of “Imaginary Letters” which appeared in the magazine The Little Review between May 1917 and April 1918.⁴ Secondly, there are the short stories, which feature as their main characters soldiers on the home front and which focus on the malignant effects of nature, rather than man, on the individual. “The French Poodle” was published in The Egoist, III, no. 3, in March 1916. In the same issue was a short piece, “A Young Soldier”, which formed the thematic basis for “Cantleman's Spring-Mate”, which appeared in The Little Review, IV, no. 6, in October 1917. In turn, this was supplemented by a similar story, “The War Baby”, published in Art and Letters, II, no. 1, Winter 1918.

Thirdly, there are the works which were written as a direct commentary on the war. Besides the “War Notes” in Blast, no. 2 (pp. 9-16 and 23-26), these were to consist of fictionally-based accounts of the war which were separate from the stories which eventually made up The Wild Body. In a letter to Ezra Pound (unpublished and held by the Department of Rare Books of the University Library at Cornell, Ithaca, New York), not dated but evidently part of a series that Lewis sent from the French front in 1917, there is a suggestion that these war stories were originally intended for a published collection: “I am writing a book called ‘The Bombardier’: only in my head, of course …” Before the end of 1916, when he joined the Royal Artillery, Lewis drew up a list of his published and unpublished writings, which included a projected collection entitled “The Bull Gun”—‘Consisting of sketches, stories etc. that I may find time to write at the Front’.⁵ This list, which is also held by the University Library at Cornell, was published in Enemy News (the Newsletter of the Wyndham Lewis Society), no. 10, May 1979, with notes by the late Bernard Lafourcade who suggested that at the time they were written and published, the stories “Cantleman's Spring-Mate”, “The War Baby” and “The French Poodle”, as well as the fragment entitled “The Crowd-Master” which had appeared in Blast, no. 2, were not considered by Lewis to be ‘war stories’. This was the description used in the foreword to The Wild Body to distinguish them from the earlier Breton stories and may well have been meant to describe a different type of literary exercise.⁶ The documentary nature of the one piece that was written for this new collection (or at least the only one that has survived), itself entitled “The Bull Gun”, implies that it would not have been a purely fictional endeavour and was something of a contrast to another projected work that Lewis planned to write about the phenomenon of war; the unfinished novel “Crowd-Master”. In fact, the only piece in this category that can be regarded as exclusively fictional is the story “The King of the Trenches”, which was first published in the second edition of Lewis's autobiographical study Blasting and Bombardiering (Calder and Boyars, 1967) and which may well have been written after the end of the war as part of Lewis's retrospective view of his war experiences.

This leads to the fourth and final category of Lewis's war writings, although there is a great continuity between his retrospective and his contemporary impressions of the war. Apart from the memoirs contained in Parts II and III in Blasting and Bombardiering (both editions—Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1937 and Calder and Boyars, 1967), Lewis reworked and extended the “Crowd-Master” project at some time between the end of the war and the preparation of the autobiographical study. When the piece initially appeared in Blast, no. 2 (pp. 94-102), it was the basis of a novel (to be continued in the forthcoming issues of the ill-fated magazine) that was itself autobiographically based and which bore no relation to the stories written during the war period.⁷

Lewis's portrayal of the war differs from others in aspects which may seem obvious to those readers who are well acquainted with his work, but which are nevertheless important. Primary amongst these is an absence of what D. J. Enright, in a study of the English war poets, calls “an expression of a lacerated moral sensibility”; what is most noticable about the work of Wilfred Owen, Herbert Read, Isaac Rosenberg and Siegfried Sassoon is the underlying sense of outrage at the destruction to which they bear witness.⁸ By 1916 and the appearance of his novel Tarr, Lewis had formulated a satirical style of writing that he later defined as non-traditional, in the sense that it did not concern itself with specifically moral issues.⁹ Contentious though this concept of a “non-moral” satire may be (and certainly worthy of a separate discussion), it is evident that throughout his war writings, Lewis replaced the moral impetus of the war poets with a more direct, almost scientific concern with the reality of the situation he was portraying, in all its contexts.

Furthermore, Lewis's aesthetic attitudes to the war were circumscribed by the very nature of the visual art he had practised in the form of Vorticism. The Vorticists tried to portray the reality of a world which existed beneath the automated veneer of industrialized society through a uniquely English style of abstract art. This modernist experiment failed because of the war, the destructive forces of which could not be contained within an aesthetic that sought to subjugate the realm of life to that of art.¹⁰ Total war was a force which, through the extent of its destructiveness, changed a natural landscape, in both urban and rural forms, as much as the abstract art of the Vorticists did. When Lewis and the other Vorticists artists tried to portray the war, it soon became apparent that the purpose of the machine was to destroy nature in its original form. Since the abstract artist needed this original form of nature as a basis for his own view of the world, he had to challenge the machine. It was perhaps due to the naïvety of the Vorticists that this new, machine-orientated nature soon got the better of them. They shrank from artistic ideals that equated modern art with the war, as in the work of the Italian Futurists (with whom they previously shared a machine orientated dynamic), because they failed to reconcile their abstract style with the demands of a subject that required an overtly representational approach. Obviously, the war artists had to compromise their previous style of painting to a great extent and perhaps the subject of a war-torn landscape devoid of buildings or trees was too poor a source of material to work upon.

However, it was the medium of literature rather than that of art which was more effective in coming to terms with the existence of a “new” nature created by the machinery of war. As the war pre-empted the attempts by avant-garde artists to present a world which accomodated man and the machine on equal terms with each other, the mainly representational style of the war artists (whether or not they were, like Lewis himself officially appointed as such), portrayed the landscape of war as part of a pre-industrialized nature.¹¹ The main concession made by the war artists towards a recognition of the existence of a world dominated by the machine was the consistent portrayal of a landscape destroyed by bomshells and trench warfare.¹² Lewis himself showed that he was quite accomplished as such a war artist, as his famous painting “A Battery Shelled” indicates.¹³ However, he later admitted in a letter (unpublished and held by the University Library at Cornell) to T. S. Eliot that “the whole war-time was a sheer loss of time, big war paintings included. Hence I should be the last person to claim for my finished work anything more than a character of essay, and unfulfillment”.¹⁴

On the other hand, the war poets were able to create a more effective meaning for their work through the verbal imagery of the landscape of war; for example, in “Dead Man's Dump” by Isaac Rosenberg (one of the most celebrated poems produced by the war), the imagery has great effect because of its reflection of an environment which does not stem from the Romantic, pre-industrial concept of nature.¹⁵ Such poetry was not modernist in its conception, and most writers drawing from direct experience of the war used conventional formats either because they were already writing in a traditional manner when the conflict began, or because they felt the need to reach as wide an audience as possible in order to express their feelings about the war.¹⁶ Lewis's own style of writing in his war work is perhaps best described as a kind of realism, as he briefly eschewed an experimental form of prose. He was probably influenced by the realist style of the French writer Henri Barbusse, whose novel Le Feu first appeared in 1916 and the episodic structure of which may have suggested to him a return to the format of the short story, or rather a series of short stories, based on the subject of the war.¹⁷

What is remarkable about Lewis's war fiction is that if deals with the situation of war outside the usual scenario of the battleground. In the second of the series of “Imaginary Letters” that he wrote in 1917, Lewis makes a distinction between two attitudes towards writing about war in general, as embodied in the difference between the Russian war-novel and the English. Referring to an article written in an English newspaper, Lewis's imaginary correspondent writes:

A Russian war-novel is discussed. The writer of the article “does not care much for Russian books”, he finds that “the Englishman begins where the Russian leaves off”. The Russian book seems to deal with the inner conflict of a Russian grocer on the outbreak of War. The Russian grocer is confused and annoyed. He asks what all this bloody trouble to do with him—the small grocer. He cogitates on the causes of such upheavals, and is not convinced that there is anything in them calling for his participation. But eventually he realizes that there is a great and moving abstraction called Russia = the old abstraction in fact, the old Pied Piper whistling his mournful airs, and waving towards a snow-bound horizon. And—le voilà in khaki—or the Russian equivalent. At this point he becomes “noble”, and of interest to the writer of the article—But there, alas, the book ends—

Lewis is being overtly satirical here; the “Imaginary Letters” of William Bland Burn to his wife Lydia, written in diplomatic exile in Petrograd during the time of the February Revolution and the collapse of the Tsarist regime, are a fictional device through which he could begin the programme of cultural criticism in which he was so involved in the years immediately following the end of the war. He continues to make a significant point:

Now, (of course the writer of the article continues) we in England do not do things in that way. We do not portray the boring and hardly respectable conflict. No Englishman (all Englishman having the instincts of gentlemen) admits the possibility of such a conflict. We are accomplished beings, des hommes, ou plutôt des gentlemen faits! We should begin with the English grocer already in khaki, quite calm, (he would probably be described as a little “grim” withal) in the midst of his military training on Salisbury Plain. A Kiplingesque picture of that: Revetting would come in, and bomb-throwing at night. He next would be in the trenches. The writer would show, without the cunning, hardly respectable, disguise of any art, how the Balham grocer of to-day was the same soldier, really, that won at Waterloo: You would not get a person or a fact, but a piece of patriotic propaganda (the writer of course being meanwhile a shrewd fellow, highly approved and well-paid).¹⁸

Lewis was aware of the effect that war has on the human consciousness, and was consequently more concerned with the manifestation of this than with the details of exclusively military conflict. In this respect, he was closer to the Russian model of war writing outlined above rather than the English; even so, his almost casual observations of the wartime situation in its domestic setting enable him to draw a crucial distinction between the respective minds of the soldier and the civilian.¹⁹ This is best exemplified in the simple vignette that was the basis for a longer story in “Cantleman's Spring-Mate”—entitled “A Young Soldier”—which I quote here in full:

I asked Peach how he liked war. He seemed intoxicated with the notion of extinction. He winked at me as though to say “Hurry up and come and have a princh!” I felt that military death was the latest dope. But he always winked like that, and he may have no original feeling about his new experience. On the other hand, I saw a young soldier in the Tube yesterday. He was a born warrior, meant to kill other men as much as a woman is meant to bear children. I realized as I looked at him how there is only one thing a woman thoroughly understands in a man, of the things specifically his, and recognizes of equal importance to her own functional existence. When he kills she feels that he is about a business as profound and sinister as her own. This young man was strung to a proud discipline. He was a useful favourite of Death's, something like a sparring partner. He had the equivalent of chewing-gum, too, in the cynical glitter of his face, and his lazy posing. And I have seen many exalted and enthusiastic middle-class masks. The aristocrats have their old indifference, their adamantine Style. There are other styles, too, that come in handy. How young the world is, fortunately. It will certainly maul the constellation of Hercules if that misguided organization should come in our direction.²⁰

Conversely, it is the military rather than the civilian protagonist who tries to come to an understanding of this malignant force of nature in Lewis's first published war story, “The French Poodle”. Characters in Lewis's fiction are continually engaged in a struggle to preserve their existence in the face of an inexorable process of decay and eventual death; in order to survive the mortal condition, they have to maintain an ascendency of the intelligence over the body. In this way, such characters are often no more than elaborate embodiments of Lewis's ideal of artistic creativity, although they do reflect a certain complexity, according to the extent to which they hold a balance between what Lewis sees as the opposing forces of life and art.²¹

“The French Poodle” is a portrayal of how a character fails in his attempts to avoid destruction through the arbitrary balance of what he mistakenly believes to be two opposing forces of nature, rather than a single entity. Rob Cairn is an officer on sick leave in London recovering from a bout of shell-shock. He feels despondent at the fact that he is a victim of a purely mechanical process over which he has no control:

Rob Cairn was drifting about London in mufti, by no means well, and full of anxiety, the result of his ill-health and the shock he had received at finding himself blown into the air and painted yellow by the unavoidable shell. His tenure on earth seemed insecure, and he could not accustom himself to the idea of insecurity. When the shell came he had not bounded gracefully and coldly up, but with a clumsy dismay. His spirit, that spirit that should have been winged for the life of a soldier, and ready fiercely to take flight into the unknown, strong for other lives, was also grubbily attached to the earth. It, like his body, was not graceful in its fearlessness, nor resilient, nor young. All the minutiae of existence mesmerized it. It could not disport itself genially in independence of surrounding objects and ideas. Even as a boy he had never been able to learn to dive: hardly to swim. Yet he was a big redheaded chap that those who measure men by redness and by size would have considered fairly imposing as a physical specimen. It requires almost a professional colour-matcher, as a matter of fact, to discriminate between the different reds: and then the various constitutional conditions they imply in a separate discovery.²²

In order to redress the balance between what he sees as corrupted and uncorrupted forms of nature, Cairn advocates a return to an animal existence in which the act of killing would be less repulsive by virtue of being achieved by more primitive means, rather than by the mechanical. In a conversation with his civilian business partner, James Fraser, Cairn reflects Lewis's own view of the inherent violence of man, albeit through the perverse logic of his shell-shocked mind:

As to the war, his ideas appeared quite confusedly stagnant. He wondered, arguing along the same lines of the incompleteness of modern life, whether the savagery we arrive at was better than the savagery we come from.

“Since we must be savage, is not a real savage better than a sham one?”

“Must we be savage?” Fraser would ask.

“This ‘great war’ is the beginning of a period, far from being a war-that-will-end-war, take my word for it.”²³

Cairn buys a French poodle not out of a need for animal companionship, but as a symbol for his defiance of what he believes to be the inevitability of his death through the mechanical agency of total war. The dog, to which he gives the suitably elemental name of Carp, soon becomes an object of obsessive worship as he fails to realize that the apparently opposite types of savagery outlined above are part of the same nature. When Cairn recovers from his illness and is ready to depart for the front, Carp loses its value as such a symbol for an ideal order of existence; he realizes that animal life cannot survive in the face of a mechanically ordained existence. Therefore, he shoots Carp as an act of sacrifice which anticipates his own death at the front some weeks later because, as Lewis writes in the last sentence of the story: “He understood the mechanism of his destiny better than his partner”.²⁴

In this context, the war is the catalyst for the expression of ideas already formed within Lewis's framework of thought, rather than the sole cause of the creation of new ones. In fact, the philosophical impetus that informs his war-time fiction was best articulated by his one-time close associate and then rival, T. E. Hulme. Hulme was initially an eager participant in the war, becoming an enlisted soldier, rather than obtaining a commission like Lewis.²⁵ He saw war as a natural function of man's existence in a world dominated by a hostile nature; in his “classicist” view, war was a means that prevented a bad world from getting worse, rather than to make a good world better.²⁶ In turn, this pessimistic philosophy finds an effective expression in Lewis's “Cantleman's Spring-Mate”, the best-known and most widely reprinted of all his short stories.

The satirical edge of the story lies in the protagonist's attempt to compete with and to defeat the destructive process of nature which he feels is threatening his existence. Throughout his war fiction, Lewis portrays nature in terms of it being an active agent of warfare and in the opening of “Cantleman's Spring-Mate”, a pastoral setting is shown to function in an almost mechanical way:

Cantleman walked in the strenuous fields, steam rising from them as though from an exertion, dissecting the daisies specked in the small wood, the primroses on the banks, the marshy lakes, and all God's creatures. The heat of a heavy premature Summer was cooking in the little narrow belt of earth-air, causing everything innocently to burst its skins, bask abjectly and profoundly. Everything was enchanged with itself and with everything else.²⁷

Lewis sees nature as a malevolent denial of the ascendency of the intelligence that he consistently strives to maintain. Therefore, the event of war is a mere distraction from the continual cycle of destruction and regeneration which makes up the process of nature:

The only jarring note in this vast mutual admiration society was the fact that many of its members showed their fondness for their neighbour in an embarrassing way: that is they killed and ate them. But the weaker were so used to dying violent deaths and being eaten that they worried very little.—The West was gushing up a harmless volcano of fire, obviously intended as an immense dreamy nightcap.²⁸

There is a certain amount of irony here, in that, given the conventional manner in which many of them wrote, the English war poets still maintained an idealistic view of an English countryside unspoilt by the war—or rather unspoilt by the images they had of the frontline countryside. Some war poets used the theme of the soldier returning home to an England free of the ravages of war as a gesture of escapism, although the contrast between the environments of war and peace were exploited to great satirical effect by Siegfried Sassoon in “The One-Legged Man”.²⁹ The character of Cantleman reacts to the war by trying to become what he imagines to be a ruthless agent of this malignant nature, yet still maintaining the faculty of intelligence with which he intends to defeat it. Initially, he is shown to perceive the trap that nature has set for him, in a passage that further elaborates Lewis's earlier equation between sex and death in “A Young Soldier”:

Cantleman in the midst of his cogitation on surrounding life, surprised his faithless and unfriendly brain in the act of turning over an object which humiliated his mediation. He found that he was wondering whether at his return through the village lying between him and the Camp, he would see the girl he had passed there three hours before. At that time he had not begun his philosophizing, and without interference from conscience, he had noticed the redness of her cheeks, the animal fulness of her child-bearing hips, with an eye as innocent as the bird or the beast. He laughed without shame or pleasure, lit his pipe and turned back towards the village.—His fieldboots were covered with dust: his head was wet with perspiration and he carried his cap, in a unmilitary fashion, in his hand. In a week he was leaving for the Front, for the first time. So his thoughts and sensations all had as a philosophic background, the prospect of death. The Infantry, and his commission, implied death or mutilation unless he were very lucky. He had not a high opinion of his luck. He was pretty miserable at the thought, in a deliberate, unemotional way. But as he realized this he again laughed, a similar sound to that that the girl had caused.—For what was he unhappy about? He wanted to remain amongst his fellow insects and beasts, which were so beautiful, did he then: Well well!³⁰

Trying to cultivate a sense of aloofness from his surroundings, treating the various aspects of nature and his fellow-officers with a contempt rarely matched by Lewis's other fictional characters, Cantleman plans to cheat nature:

He was life's paid man, and had the mark of the sneak. He was making too much of life, and too much out of it. He, Cantleman, did not want to owe anything to life, or enter into league or understanding with her. The thing was either to go out of existence: or, failing that, remain in it unreconciled, indifferent to Nature's threat, consorting openly with her enemies, making war within her war upon her servants. In short, the spectacle of the handsome English spring produced nothing but ideas of defiance in Cantleman's mind.³¹

Cantleman puts his intended gesture of defiance into action when he seduces the girl he meets in the village, thereby convincing himself that he has somehow cheated nature through gaining satisfaction for his own self-interest. However, he does not realize that in becoming a man of action rather than remaining an agent of intelligence, he is merely maintaining the destructive process of nature. Cantleman then becomes the direct object of Lewis's satirical perspective; his action is described in terms that, apart from leading to the initial American publication of the story's being censored in 1917, reveal the futility of any intellectually-based attempts to escape the limitations imposed by physical existence:

That night he spat out, in gushes of thick delicious rage, all the lust that had gathered in his body. The nightingale sang ceaselessly in the small wood at the top of the field where they lay. He grinned up towards it as he noticed it, and once more turned to the devouring of his mate. He bore down on her as though he wished to mix her body into the soil, and pour his seed into a more methodless matter, the brown phalanges of floury land. As their two bodies shook and melted together, he felt that he was raiding the bowels of Nature: he was proud that he could remain deliberately aloof, and gaze bravely, like a minute insect, up at the immense and melancholy night, with all its mad nightingales, piously folded small brown wings in a million nests, night-working stars, and misty useless watchmen.³²

The girl has the name of Stella, which presumably serves as an ironic reminder of the fixity of nature for Cantleman in Lewis's cosmology, just as the stars were for the character Arghol in the play “Enemy of the Stars”.³³ Six weeks after he has been at the front, Cantleman receives news that Stella is expecting a child by him, although by ignoring her appeals to his own better nature, he still maintains a pretence of a superiority over nature in general.

However, Cantleman cannot achieve any lasting victory over nature and this fact is reflected in the way that nature is presented in the narrative, as something that has an animate will of its own. Nature has the power to generate life as well as to destroy it and he fufils this perfectly as he proceeds to kill a German in battle, just as he “devours” his mate with the same automated and detached energy that the creature mentioned in the introduction to the story does in actuality to her male partner. Again, Cantleman's ignorance of his failure is conveyed in terms of violent action:

And when he beat a German's brains out it was with the same impartial malignity that he had displayed in the English night with his Spring-Mate. Only he considered there too that he was in some way outwitting Nature, and had no adequate realization of the extent to which evidently the death of a Hun was to the advantage of the world.³⁴

In this way, Cantleman vindicates the militant attitude of Hulme and Lewis towards both the situation of war and the arguments of the pacifists against it; that it was a function of nature and not the artificial imposition of an ideology upon an otherwise passive environment. The story is a direct statement of the view that the horror of existence lies not with the advent of total, mechanized war, but with nature itself.

Therefore Cantleman is a more significant figure than the military protagonists of Lewis's other war stories. He is the first of Lewis's fictional characters to be used to approach the ideological issues that the author was beginning, through his own experience of the war, to approach himself. Cantleman is primarily a demonstration of Lewis's precept that thought must be separate from action, and although this was extensively examined in “Enemy of the Stars”, he also implies that ideological patterns of thought in themselves are at fault because they belong to the realm of action rather than thought. For Lewis, this particularly applied to the ideas of the German thinker Friedrich Nietzsche, or rather the ideology of “Nietzscheism”—those items of his overall work which had become corrupted through their adaptation from a purely individual and aesthetic premise into a mass political programme.³⁵ In the story “The War Baby”, which directly follows the critical theme of “Cantleman's Spring-Mate”, Lewis makes a satirical appraisal of Nietzscheism and how the ideal of thought becomes corrupted through its translation into action.

The setting of the story is again the home front, in which the protagonist plays out a role which may seem to simulate, though never fully realize, the more fatal strategies of war itself. The military protagonist is Richard Beresin, a lieutenant in the Flying Corps who is waiting to be posted for action. He is similar to Cantleman in the way that he puts a certain pattern of thought into practice and, in following the predestined path that Lewis has set for him in the narrative, demonstrates the discrepancy that lies between intellectual ideals and relatively mindless action. Beresin finds war a perfect complement to his false sense of aristocratic superiority:

In this idle, hectic existence he made the most of his short past, and developed its more flattering veins. He became a little literary—snubbed, in a schoolboy way, with an impermeable contempt, his fellows with less fortunate histories. He wore a bracelet, read Huysmans in his dug-out, wore mufti whenever opportunity offered, acquired a settled consciousness of the aristocratic idea. He began to visualize himself as a young blood—he sought in his ancestry for the bluest seeming streams, courted imaginary ghosts. His Nietzschean illusion almost broke the heart of his subservient soldier-servant. The leather of riding-breeches pipeclayed, buttons burnished, no spot on boot or belt neglected, ever, in the line, even—during pulling out or pulling in, weeks of battles, even, when all stores were lost in retreat? He was liked all the better for that. He was a gentleman. Both he and his soldier-servant saw the same popular image of a perfection.³⁶

One attribute that Lewis gives to his would-be Superman is a particular kind of laughter that may be described as Nietzschean. Like Cantleman, Beresin uses this to assert his imagined superiority over his surroundings, which in this case is the dining-room of the West Berks hotel. However, in the later story, which is longer and more discursive, this appears to be a rather superficial affectation:

That night at dinner Beresin's crowning laugh reached to every corner of the extensive room. It darted like an insolent mask among the voices and sounds of all the other diners. Everyone objected to it except the Russians, who objected to nothing that wasn't Russian: several people administered the glance of annoyance. This caused him a real satisfaction. He had the mania of shocking, the love of facile challenges. Let the aristocratically-minded display at least, by a suitable arrogance, by a flouting of the bourgeois hush, that a master was present. Let no human apprehension within reach enjoy its meal until it had bitterly noted, scowled, paid its tribute.³⁷

However, this laughter is not the same expression of natural gaiety that Nietzsche described in his dictum that “to laugh means: to be malicious but with a good conscience”; neither is it the same expression of bravado that Cantleman exhibits in the face of a destructive nature.³⁸ It is rather an expression of blind faith in Beresin's shallow convictions, but when confronted with a real-life situation, his attitude of stylized arrogance proves to be totally inadequate.

Beresin finds himself desiring a woman to satisfy his sexual needs and so leaves the hotel in order to find a set of rooms that also provides an adequate partner. He has a casual affair with the landlady's daughter, Tets (“… a diminutive of Lutitia (sic)”), although he has some initial reservations about so blatantly expressing his carefully fostered attitudes about women.³⁹ Later, while stationed in North Africa, he receives news that Tets is pregnant by him. The confrontation with the reality of his simple physical existence within the process of nature, added to the undeniable feeling of social inferiority he feels when in the company of the genuine “nobles” who are his military superiors, deprives him of his sense of belonging to an aristocracy:

Beresin in the presence of the real thing was shy. The actual breathing, walking flower to which so many doctrines, Nietzsches and Gobineaus, reverently point: this magical, masterly thing? Could the flesh and blood of the disciple be expected to support that sight with equanimity? He was awed at the polish and purity of the vocables, of the exquisite vowels, when two of the nobles were talking together. Ah, but his middle-class enunciation—? Then the attitude of mind—so free, so cynical—how well calculated to allure the Philosopher, and make him place Truth somewhere where she could learn such beautiful manners! The short, scrubby physique, the thoroughly villainous stupidity of the noble, who was also his colonel, and enemy, appeared to him in the highest sense, peculiarly, attributes. The stupidity, which he also saw, was the divine stupidity of the Noble! The physical commonplace—which he noted—how characteristic, paradoxical, and in fact the “real thing”!⁴⁰

He later receives news that Tets has died, and when he returns to England, discovers that he is left with a child, who serves as a reminder of his complete failure to become an exponent of an existence that is something other than, in Nietzsche's own catchphrase, “human, all too human”.⁴¹

Although it belongs to the third category of Lewis's war writings outlined above, the story “The King of the Trenches” may appear to be completely separate from his other wartime work, both fictional and factual. This is because it is the nearest that Lewis comes to a purely comic exercise, using the setting of the battlefield in the same way as the Breton fishing villages in his earlier stories to portray a particular pattern of human behaviour. The subject of the title is Captain “Burney” Polderdick, an over-zealous bombardier whose reckless feats on the front-line unduly endanger the lives of the men of the companies to which he is assigned. Polderdick has no regard for the consequences of his actions and his fellow officers, making a distinction between their general status as “non-professional soldiers” and his own obsessive interest in the business of war, view him as insane.⁴² One of them, Lieutenant Donald Menzies, offers this insight:

Much of his madness, Menzies proceeded to argue—as they sat at the tin-table of the cafe in Bailleul where they had gone in a lorry for the afternoon to get tobacco and condensed milk for the officer's mess—much of his peculiar wildness, had gone into, had been absorbed by his physical daring, about that there was little doubt. It had had to go somewhere. It had gone into that. Then the wound in the temple stopped that up, brusquely. … The wound, for whatever reason, prevented his madness from any longer flowing into the moulds of physical heroism. It found other outlets. He became a different man. He did not forget his past bravery, however. His new incarnation was its distorted child. The “Ha! Ha!” itself drew the gusto of its note from the cold, cruel, almost intellectual courage of the former Polderdick.⁴³

Even so, Lewis is not content to allow this particular character to indulge in the uninhibited rituals of comic celebration of his earlier stories. He equates Polderdick's terse expressions of laughter, the “Ha! Ha!” described above, with the apparent insanity of his actions. After Polderdick instigates a surprise bomb attack on a distant German installation, which results in a retaliation that disrupts the leisurely pattern of war initially presented in the story, he is summarily dismissed from the scene as if he were a clown who had just finished a rather tiresome routine of slapstick. However, it would seem that the context of war in which the story is directly set inhibits any sort of comic exercise. The real strength of the story lies in its factual portrayal of life at the Front, in which human characters are regarded as mere components in the overall scenario of war. Similarly, in a letter to Ezra Pound sent from the Front in 1917 (unpublished and held by the University Library at Cornell), Lewis describes a “nonprofessional” commanding officer with a comic detachment solely designed to express his own sense of absurdity engendered by the situation of war and which denies the subject any element of individuality:

… I think I told you we had a new C.O.. He comes from Hull, from its slums undoubtedly, and its Sunday Schools. The proud Naval man to whom we were attached would hardly speak to him, and wondered once more at the ways of the Army, in giving such an unspeakable, foolish and dismal muck a Bettery. Bad as are the things I have been witness of, I have never seen as bad a case. I am now absolutely sardine-packed with the quintessence of the prosperous slums of a have been to a neighbouring bourg to buy a few pictures to Protestant country. Two of these charming “boys” today decorate our dugout,—the one in which we shall have to live, probably, through this warlike winter. Yesterday, when for the third time this individual had attempted to prevent my having a square meal in a restaurant, there being nothing to do, I said to him; “I am in your Battery, not in your Sunday School”. He considers, apparently, that a meal in a restaurant and the accompanying half-bottle of wine is a treat for little children, indulgently provided by a kind O. C. (sic) every 3 weeks. He drummed with his fingers for some minutes after my remark, and blushed as—one of Edward's uncles blushes. He stoops, is going bald, and has a hanging crimson underlip.

Excuse me for harrowing you with this picture of war. But I am very full of it at present.⁴⁴

This objective view is maintained in “The Bull Gun”, which describes a scene located midway between the home and fighting fronts. Published here for the first time, “‘The Bull Gun’ (At a Camp of the R. G. A.)” is transcribed from a typescript held by the University Library at Cornell and numbered 7.11 in Mary F. Daniels' Wyndham Lewis: A Descriptive Catalogue. It is dated “1916-17” and its full title refers to the Royal Garrison Artillery camp at Weymouth where Lewis was assigned to for training as a bombardier, specializing in the operation of the six-inch Howitzer, before leaving for action in France in May 1917.⁴⁵ It was the basis for the description of the training camp in the chapter entitled “The ‘Bull Gun’” in Blasting and Bombardiering (p. 101 in the first edition, p. 96 in the second), although only a fraction of this original material was used.⁴⁶ “The Bull Gun” can be seen as a literary precursor to Lewis's visual exploration of the machine in the setting of war which resulted in his “Guns” exhibition at the Goupil Gallery in London in February 1919. Certainly, its use of the metaphor of the bull-fight expressed his desire for an equilibrium between man and the mechanical world which was denied through the visually abstract medium of Vorticism.

“‘THE BULL GUN’ (At a Camp of the R. G. A.)”

This is a training unit for the R. G. A.—I don't know what the rules may be, so I will mysteriously call it W—(Every German whose business it is to know will at once realize to which depot this refers; but this article is written primarily for English consumption.)

After Dover, with its alarm-siren announcing Taubes, artic wind-blasts at night, and super-Swedish instructor, this climate, with its sheltered heat, was peculiarly Southern. It appeared of about the temperature of La Rochelle. But when I was in the Gironde a particularly heavy form of work known as “light shifts” was not with me to doubt the heat of the sky.

This training camp, then, is a sweltering centre for the intensive production of multitudes of gunners. Hundreds of heavy men arrive weekly from Orkney, Tipperary, and Birmingham. They are as far as possible of the carthorse type, for they are going to be very heavy gunners. Our 6 inch Howitzer (let every free German in England immediately make a note of this. This article, by the way, Fritz, bristles with information) cannot be served by midgets, of feather-weights. Our draughts lumber up through the gate in massive parties, and flood the huts with some of the best beef remaining in England, chiefly married (N. B. THIS IS THE END OF THE FIRST PAGE OF THE TYPESCRIPT AND SOME WORD ARE MISSING HERE) (and I may say, for the information of their wives, almost pleasantly uxorious) beef. They sit down on their straw mattresses, gaze round them, and after a period of reflection, open their kit-bags, and begin polishing their buttons. Next day a perspiring Bombardier, perhaps, like myself, will have to propel these trampling hulks about the field with the usual word of command; and after they can form squad on either flank in a steady, dogged, though not brilliantly pretty way, they get directly on to the business for which they have come, the working of guns of an ungainly type.

From this preliminary picture the reader will see nothing but cart-horses, and my companions, if they read this article, might accuse me of a romantic, and perhaps unflattering exaggeration. So I had better add that in the Royal Garrison Artillery men of every calibre (size I mean), are required, and obtained. But the thing that must always distinguish that corps from others, is the stately avoir-du-poids necessary for the work to be done by the navvy-gunner. On the other hand, as its role in the field develops, (and today the R. G. A. covers all guns in the field over the 70-pounder of the R.F.A. not counting other things like Anti-aircraft, Trench mortars, or Mountain batteries) that certain deliberate weight may cease to be such a characteristic of it as a detachment of its men march down the street. But they surely will never have a monopoly of the nimble. The Infantry, with their tremulous fifes, quick, gay stepping, flashing bayonets, gladiatorial conditions, seek, evidently, another and more palpably exhilarating perfection, than the heavy, grimy groups of men, who work a big gun. The recoil of that gun—its sweep backwards, and its return to the “firing position”—is probably the most graceful thing about the gunner's life. The gun's harsh and acrid slam when it “goes off” mixes strangely with this quick, graceful movement. The romance of the “big guns” which has boomed loud for over a century and whose frantic bellow will be the last echo in Europe as the German bull expires, is, anyhow, the gunner's property. And (talking of Corridas) as it is questionable if there is any living Espada equal to the task of ending the Teutonic buffalo, we have brought (or are in the process of bringing) as good a bull as he into the ring, and who can roar as loud. It is only a pity that the steel cannot be pitted against the steel, instead of goring such multitudes of gladiators. The crowds of crêpe in the auditorium, instead of the white mantillas, make it too heavy, indigestibly Germanly heavy a spectacle for even a decent super-God. But we are not the showmen, although we are forced to contribute to the success of the spectacle. Let us piously hope that the wicked promoter, once the show is done, will be forced to give the money back and even (for we are metaphorically in Spain) be stabbed to death by someone of the many he has wronged.

There is not so much then, even in the human material of which our corps is composed, of the splendour of the Espada, or Banderillo, as in the huskiness of the Bull. Batteries of Howitzers seen together must be rather like a drove of bulls and R.G.A. are bull-tenders rather than bull-fighters. They train their bulls, that is, their guns, to fight other bulls, or bull-guns. They make them bellow like immense toys by pulling a string. They push them about in peaceable moments, sweating, cursing them. And a certain solidarity grows up between these clumsy dusky objects and their drovers and attendants. This solidarity must evidently be different to that existing between a cavalryman for instance, and his horse. It is a peculiar relationship when you consider that the nature of these monsters is to destroy, that they are as idle, and useless otherwise, as a Turk, and that the nature of man is so composed, generously violent and peaceable on the whole.

WYNDHAM LEWIS

Overall, Lewis's war fiction shouldn't be seen as a brief hiatus in his literary career, but as an integral part of his development as a writer. The combination of a more realist style of writing with a specifically critical attitude towards the increasingly ideological condition of the world was used to great effect in Blasting and Bombardiering, one of the classic works about the Great War. Certainly it presents a response to the war more complex and individual than the more general one of “passive suffering”.⁴⁷

Robert Edward MURRAY.

Notes

1. Lewis was the editor of Blast (Review of the Great English Vortex) and besides his own work, published other writers, notably T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and Ford Madox Ford (Hueffer). The first version of “Enemy of the Stars” appeared in the first issue in June 1914 and the second, revised and enlarged, in book form in 1932. Both versions are reprinted in Collected Poems and Plays, ed. Alan Munton, Manchester, Carcanet, 1979. Tarr initially appeared in serial form in the magazine The Egoist (Vol.s III, no. 4, April 1916 to IV, no. 10, November 1917 inclusive) before being published in book form, first by Alfred A. Knopf of New York in June 1918 and then by the Egoist Press in July 1918. It was later substantially revised and re-appeared in 1928, this version being the one subsequently re-issued.

2. Lewis later wrote about his beginnings as a writer: It was the sun, a Breton instead of a British, that brought forward my first short story “The Ankou”. … I was painting a blind Amorican beggar. The “short story” was the crystallization of what I had to keep out of my consciousness while painting. Otherwise the painting would have been a bad painting. That is how. I began to write in earnest. (From an essay included in Beginnings, editor not named, Nelson, 1935. Reprinted in Wyndham Lewis On Art, ed. Walter Michel and C. J. Fox, Thames and Hudson, 1969, p. 295). However, the story “The Death of the Ankou” was not published until its inclusion in the collection The Wild Body (Chatto and Windus, 1927).

3. These do not include the novel Tarr, the story “A Soldier of Humour” or the essay “Inferior Religions”, which were also published during the wartime period.

4. The Ideal Giant is reprinted in Collected Poems and Plays and was also the title of an edition, privately published by the London Office of The Little Review in 1917, which included the story «Cantleman's Spring-Mate” and the third in the series of “Imaginary Letters”, more commonly know as “The Code of a Herdsman”. These last two items were also translated into French by the late Bernard Lafourcade in a bilingual edition entitled Cantleman's Spring-Mate Code of a Herdsman: Cantleman et la Saison des Amours, Le Code d'un Bouvier, Paris, M. J. Minard, 1968.

5. As quoted in Enemy News, no. 10, May 1979, p. 12. In Blasting and Bombardiering, Lewis also wrote that “revolving in my mind was a book about the war” (second edition, p. 6) and then goes on to describe briefly what eventually appeared in Part III (“A Gunner's Tale”) of the autobiography.

6. This description also appears in the reprint of the original book in The Complete Wild Body, ed. Bernard Lafourcade, Santa Barbara, California, Black Sparrow Press, 1982, p. xiii. In his notes to the list of Lewis's early writings, Lafourcade wrote that the designation of a separate section for a collection entitled ‘The Bull Gun’ “suggests that Lewis, at least at the time, did not consider ‘Cantleman's Spring-Mate’, ‘The French Poodle’ and ‘The Crowd Master’ as ‘war stories’” (Enemy News, no. 10, p. 13).

7. “The Crowd Master” story was the basis of a projected novel that Lewis later worked on in the 1920s and 1930s. It concerns a young lieutenant Thomas Blenner, who is recovering from a leg injury and who travels by train from Scotland to London in order to return to his military duties. While in London, he meets an American novelist, Brown Bryan Multum, who has just published a book, itself entitled “The Crowd Master”, and this device allows Lewis to make some observations of the behaviour of the crowds in war-time London. The original story is revised in Blasting and Bombardiering and there is a longer, unpublished, narrative held by the University Library of Cornell entitled “Cantelman”. In this, Blenner is renamed Cantelman, but even disregarding the slight change in spelling, the character portrayed is an artist and not the philosophically-minded soldier of “Cantleman's Spring-Mate”.

8. In “The Literature of the First World War”, in The Pelican Guide to English Literature; Volume 7—The Modern Age, ed. Boris Ford, Harmondsworth, 1961, pp. 162-177, p. 170.

9. This satirical style was accompanied by a developing body of theory in which Lewis prescribed the principle of “non-moral” satire in terms that related directly to his short stories rather than his first novel. In an essay, “Inferior Religions” (first published in The Little Review, IV, no. 5, September 1917 and then in revised form in The Wild Body of 1927—both versions are reprinted in The Complete Wild Body), he describes his comic vision as lying in the observation of human characters behaving like puppets, moving with a pre-determined pattern of an automated being. In the revised essay, he writes:

   The wheel at Carisbrooke imposes a set of movements upon the donkey inside it, in drawing water from the well, that it is easy to grasp. But in the case of a hotel or fishing-boat, for instance, the complexity of the rhythmic scheme is so great that it passes for open and untrammelled life. This subtle and wider mechanism merges, for the spectator, in the general variety of Nature. Yet we have in most lives the spectacle of a pattern as circumscribed and complete as a theorem of Euclid. So these [i. e. the stories in The Wild Body] are essays in a new human mathematic. But they are, each of them, simple shapes, little monuments of logic.

   (From The Complete Wild Body, p. 149.)

10. As Lewis writes in the first issue of Blast:

    The actual approximation of Art to Nature, which one sees great signs of to-day, would negate effort equally.

    The Artist, like Narcissus, gets his nose nearer and nearer the surface of Life.

    He will get it nipped off if he is not careful, by some Pecksniff-shark sunning its lean belly near the surface, or other lurker beneath his image, who has been feeding on its radiance.

    Reality is in the artist, the image only in life, and he should only approach so near as is necessary for a good view.

    The question of focus depends on the power of his eyes, or their quality.

    (From “Futurism, Magic and Lire”, in the section entitled ‘Vorteces and Notes’, pp. 134-135.)

11. Lewis was commissioned by the Canadian War Memorial scheme in December 1917, along with his fellow Vorticists William Roberts and Edward Wadsworth.

12. As, for example, in Paul Nash's “We Are Making a New World” (1918); in Dennis Farr, English Art 1870-1940 (Oxford History of English Art series), Oxford University Press, 1975, Plate 85.

13. In Wyndham Lewis. Paintings and Drawings, ed. Walter Michel, Thames and Hudson, 1971, Plate 25. See also plates 33-36.

14. From my transcription of an unpublished letter to T. S. Eliot, held by the University Library of Cornell. The date is not given, but it was probably written Circa 1921.

15. From “Dead Man's Dump” (1917)
    The air is loud with death,
    The explosions ceaseless are.
    Timelessly now, some minutes past,
    These dead strode time with vigorous life,
    Till the shrapnel called “An end!”
    But not to all. In bleeding pangs
    Some borne on stretchers dreamed of home,
    Dear things, war blotted from their hearts.
    Maniac Earth! howling and flying, your bowel
    Seared by the jagged fire, the iron love,
    The impetuous storm of savage love.
    Dark Earth! dark Heavens! swinging in chemic smoke,
    What lightning and thunder from your mined heart,
    Which man's self dug, and his blind fingers loosed?

    (In The Collected Poems of Isaac Rosenberg, ed. Gordon Bottomley and Denis Harding, Chatto and Windus, 1932; reprinted 1962, p. 82.)

16. Of the Anglo-American literary modernists, Lewis was only one of three directly involved in the war, along with T. E. Hulme and Ford Madox Ford.

17. Lewis mentions Le Feu (Journal d'une escouade) in two unpublished letters, held by the University Library of Cornell, written to Ezra Pound in 1917. Barbusse's novel was published in English translation in 1917 as Under Fire (The Story of a Squad) and was widely read, but Lewis may well have already read the original French version.

18. From “Imaginary Letters” II, The Little Review, IV, no. 2, June 1917, pp. 22-26. Reprinted in edited form in The Little Review Anthology, ed. Margaret Anderson, New York, Hermitage House, 1953, from which this quotation is taken, pp. 114-115.

19. Perhaps this is not so surprising, given Lewis's own interest in Russian literature. In Blasting and Bombardiering, he was to note with approval Rebecca West's review of Tarr (in The Nation, XXIII, no. 19, 10 August 1918) in which she drew a comparison with Dostoyesky.

20. In The Egoist, III, no. 3, March 1916, p. 46.

21. This is notably demonstrated in the partnerships of the characters Arghol and Hanp in “Enemy of the Stars” and Frederick Tarr and Otto Kreisler in Tarr.

22. From “The French Poodle”, in The Egoist, III, no. 3, March 1916. The story is reprinted in Unlucky For Pringle: Unpublished and Other Stories, ed. C. J. Fox and R. T. Chapman, Vision Press, 1973, pp. 53-54.

23. Ibid., p. 56.

24. Ibid., p. 59.

25. Lewis was initially trained as a non-commissioned officer, or bombardier, but by the end of 1916 was finally accepted at the Artillery Cadet School in Exeter for training as an officer before arriving at the French front in May 1917 as a subaltern in a Seige Battery.

26. As Hulme wrote:

    … the evil in the world is not merely due to the existence of oppression. It is part of the nature of things and just as man is not naturally good and has only achieved anything as the result of a certain discipline, the “good” here does not preserve itself, but is also preserved by discipline. (From “Why We Are in Favour of this War”, in The Cambridge Magazine, V, 12 February 1916; reprinted in Further Speculations by T. E. Hulme, ed. Samuel Hynes Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1955, p. 184).

27. From “Cantleman's Spring-Mate”, in Blasting and Bombardiering, second edition, p. 304.

28. Ibid., p. 310.

29. “The One-Legged Man” (1917)
    Propped on a stick he viewed the August weald;
    Squat orchard trees and casts with painted cowls;
    A homely, tangled hedge, a corn-stalked field,
    And sound of barking dogs and farmyard fowls.
    And he'd come home again to find it more
    Desirable than ever it was before.
    How right it seemed that he should reach the span
    Of comfortable years allowed to man!
    Splendid to eat and sleep and choose a wife,
    Safe with his wound, a citizen of life.
    He hobbled blithely through the garden gate.
    And thought: “Thank God they had to amputate!”

    (In Collected Poems, 1908-1956, pp. 27-28.)

30. From Blasting and Bombardiering, p. 305.

31. Ibid., p. 310.

32. Ibid., pp. 310-311. This passage led to the suppression, by the United States postal authorities, of the number of The Little Review in which the story first appeared. The editor of the magazine, Margaret Anderson, fought the ban in court, and was defended by John Quinn, a patron of modern art who bought several works by Lewis and other Vorticists. However, the appeal was unsuccessful, the story being considered by Justice Augustus N. Hand to be excessive in the details of its description of Cantleman's relationship with Stella. In the following issue of the magazine (IV, no. 7, November 1917), Margaret Anderson gave a brief but succinct description of the story, which also serves as an ironic appraisal of the legal decision:

    “This story, by a distinguished man of letters, a man who at present is in the English Army and is fighting in the trenches, is about a young soldier, who has a rustic encounter with a girl in the offending fires of spring” (p. 43).

33. In both versions of the play, Lewis writes of the character Arghol that “the stars are his cast” (in Collected Poems and Plays, pp. 97 and 145 respectively). When Arghol tries to change nature, by transforming his position as a man of thought into one of a man of action, he is killed.

34. From Blasting and Bombardiering, p. 310.

35. By the time of the outbreak of the First World War, the popularization of Nietzsche came to an end, as the most commonly perceived aspects of his ideas, such as his disdain for Christianity and democracy, became associated with German militarism. Nietzsche had become one of the main targets for anti-German propaganda, an anomaly that Lewis was quick to point out in his “War Notes” in Blast, no. 2:

    This contempt of law, regulation and “humanity” is popularly supposed to be the outcome of the teachings of the execrable “Neech”, and to be a portion of aristocratic “haughtiness”. Nietzsche was much too explicit a gentleman to be a very typical one. And his “aristocraticism”, so gushing and desperate athwart his innumerable prefaces, raises doubts in the mind of the most enthusiastic student; for he did not merely set himself up as the philosopher of it, but discovered simultaneously the great antiquity of his Slav lineage (although Prussia, we learn, swarms with “Neeches”) (p. 10).

36. From “The War Baby”, in Blasting and Bombardiering, p. 317.

37. Ibid., p. 319.

38. In The Gay Science, section 200. Also in A Nietzsche Reader, ed. and trans. R. V. Hollingdale, Harmondsworth, Penguin, p. 159, from which this quotation is taken.

39. “Titsy, as she was called, was a diminutive of Lutitia (sic). Tets, appeared to Beresin to sum her up”. (From Blasting and Bombardiering, p. 325.)

40. Ibid., p. 333.

41. The title of a book by Nietzsche published in 1878.

42. In this way, Polderdick is one of the “puppets” of the ‘Wild Body’ stories rather than the more complex characters in Lewis's other war-time stories.

43. From “The King of the Trenches”, in Blasting and Bombardiering, pp. 175-176.

44. From my transcription of an unpublished letter, dated September 1917, held by the University Library of Cornell.

45. After enlisting in March 1916, Lewis spent a week at Fort Burgoyne in Dover before moving on to the Artillery training camps at Weymouth (referred to in “The Bull Gun” as ‘W’), Horsham and Lydd and becoming a non-commissioned officer until the end of the year.

46. Lewis quotes directly from the original article in Blasting and Bombardiering: “The ‘Bull Gun’, an article which I wrote at the time, speaks of ‘the romance of the big guns, which has boomed loud for over a century’ (second edition, p. 96). In the original typescript, he mistakenly refers to “Our 5 inch Howitzer” and I have taken the liberty of correcting this to ‘6 inch’. Perhaps Lewis was thinking of the weight of the shell which the gun fired, rather than the gauge of the barrel of the “Bull Gun”.

47. This is the phrase that W. B. Yeats used in giving his reason for excluding the work of the war poets in his edition of The Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936). His introduction is reprinted in Poetry of the First World War, ed. Dominic Hibberd (Casebook series), Macmillan, 1981, p. 75.