Atdtda - Chums in WW1

[Dave Monroe]

On 3/9/07, Monte Davis <monte.davis at bms.com> wrote:

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

Thank Michel.  Again, good catch ...

> 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.

   "'Damn you all. You have no idea what you're heading into. This
world you take to be "the" world will die, and descend into Hell, and
all history after that will belong properly to the history of Hell.'
   "'Here,' says Miles, looking up and down the tranquil Menin road.
   "'Flanders will be the mass grave of History.'
   "'Well.'" (AtD, Pt. III, p. 554)

> 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.

Thnaks again ...
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