Atdtda - Chums in WW1

[Monte Davis]

Some nice links there -- thanks, Dave and Michel.

There's no way of knowing whether P had the Grimsby Chums specifically 
in mind. "Chums" was certainly current in the boys' adventure fiction of 
the period. But these posts help me appreciate just how adroitly, later 
in the book, he steps through the minefields of changing historical 
consciousness. And they sensitize me on this re-reading to how he lays 
his own mines from the beginning. 

As the Grimsby link says, "Few people knew [in 1914] that the war would 
drag on for four years, leaving many dead and forever shape the future 
of the 20th Century." The hardest thing a historian or historical 
novelist can do is "not to know" how events  -- in this case, WWI and 
especially the Western Front -- would come to be seen in retrospect. 
IOW, to get past the "little did they know" ironies worn smooth over 
four generations and make the original, terrible, unanticipated ironies 
new again.

You can trace a direct line from those "loaves of bread" lined up in the 
Berlin street in GR, or the slapstick in the tunnels at Nordhausen, to 
the fireworks below the clouds in Flanders and Arras that will puzzle 
the balloon-borne Chums in AtD.