
This Book on World War I Changed How I Think of Nonfiction
Paul Fussell, the historian and social critic, didn't think much of optimism — or optimists. Told to have a nice day, he'd respond: 'Thanks, but I have other plans.' He wasn't always such an ogre. But Fussell, who died in 2012, had what George Orwell called 'a power of facing unpleasant facts,' so much so that he took Orwell's phrase and, in a memorable 1988 essay, unpacked it like a baleful shaving kit:
Fussell did some of this killing himself. He served as a second lieutenant with the 103rd Infantry Division in France during World War II; at 20 he was gravely wounded and received a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart. His memoir about this experience, 'Doing Battle' (1996), is notably cleareyed and typically first-rate. Its subtitle — 'The Making of a Skeptic' — is crucial when considering anything this inimitable and lethally witty man ever wrote.
But the book that stands above the rest is Fussell's 'The Great War and Modern Memory' (1975), a bristling history of trench warfare on the Western Front during World War I, as seen through England's soldier-writers. It blends form and function to audacious effect, and is Fussell's greatest claim on posterity.
'The Great War and Modern Memory' turns 50 this year. It did not go unrecognized when it was published. It won a National Book Award and a National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1998, the Modern Library ranked it No. 75 on its list of the 100 best nonfiction books of the 20th century.
It now seems distressingly neglected. 'The Great War and Modern Memory' is worth a revisit, and a new generation of readers. I would slide it forward, like a runaway checkers stone, at least 30 places on the Modern Library's list, on writerly merit alone. It is filled with close and tragic perceptions, yet Fussell's sentences crunch like tanks snapping woodland into twigs.
I first read it when young, and it is one of two books — Jessica Mitford's 'The American Way of Death' was the other — that changed my idea of what nonfiction could be and ruined me for most other writers. If Fussell could write this intrepidly about war, and Mitford about death, topics that have lent themselves to more lugubrious prose than almost any others, I thought, why couldn't every nonfiction book — histories, biographies, memoirs — blend fact-finding with such high-stepping intellection, with such loathing for the bogus and with such literacy, glee and fury?
'Every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected,' Fussell writes. 'Every war constitutes an irony of situation because its means are so melodramatically disproportionate to its presumed ends.' He stretches mortal ironies until they shiver.
Robert Stone called the Vietnam War 'a mistake 10,000 miles long.' Fussell reminds us that the trenches dug by both sides during World War I stretched to about 25,000 miles, 'equal to a trench sufficient to circle the earth.' These furnaces of experience were 25,000 miles of muck and dung and blood.
Those back home, in the early years of the war, were assured that trenches were clean, well-lit and almost jolly places. Soldiers' subscriptions to newspapers, and to The Tatler and The Spectator, were not interrupted. The front lines were achingly close to London. An officer might breakfast in the trenches and, that evening, dine across the Channel at his club.
Even the fighting was made to feel matey — almost like a sporting match. Allied soldiers would sometimes dribble a soccer ball toward enemy lines, and preface their attacks with long, beautiful, arcing kicks.
'The Great War' is about the absolute loss of innocence that would follow. This war would be about squatting in filth, not about questing. First the corners were knocked off men's idealism, and then the foundations crumbled.
Fussell's book is humane because it pays such close attention to soldiers' experiences — to the more than eight million men who died because a single man, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, had been shot. It is provocative because Fussell is such a determined foe of euphemism. Attentive people back home eventually learned, he writes, for example, that military reports of 'brisk fighting' or 'sharp retaliation' meant that 50 or more percent of a company had been killed or wounded.
Fussell singles out Thomas Hardy as the pioneer of modern English poetry because, in verse written before the war, he was 'the first to invite into poems the sound of ominous gunfire heard across the water.' He moves through the work of war poets, novelists and memoirists such as Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves and Edmund Blunden. Words meant more back then, before the arrival of cinema and television. Indeed, Fussell writes, 'Sometimes it is really hard to shake off the conviction that this war has been written by someone.'
He also takes in oral histories, newspaper headlines, letters and personal ads. 'The critic should read everything, all the time,' he wrote in a different book. He was an immense digester; he ate books alive; he was an intellectual who never sounded like an academic.
Modernism was still waiting in the wings. 'There was no 'Waste Land,' with its rats' alleys, dull canals and dead men who have lost their bones: It would take four years of trench warfare to being these to consciousness,' Fussell writes.
Fussell was born in Pasadena, Calif., in 1924. He was educated, before and after World War II, at Pomona College, and then Harvard. He married a fellow Pomona student, Betty Harper, who would become the perceptive food writer Betty Fussell. She wrote a classic memoir, 'My Kitchen Wars' (1999), about their lives together and, yikes, it was not altogether loving.
In 'The Great War and Modern Memory' Fussell analyzes how trench warfare led to widespread hysteria; he charts the spread of pernicious and long-lasting myths; he considers male beauty. Because low sun exposed troops by backlighting them, Fussell writes, in a typical observation: 'Dawn has never recovered from what the Great War did to it.'
Many fine books have been written about this war, including John Keegan's 'The First World War' and Barbara W. Tuchman's 'The Guns of August.' Fussell's book did not attempt to report on the entirety of the thing; he stuck to the trenches, to intense effect.
Eight million dead. Another horsefly of a writer, the art critic Robert Hughes, described some of the war's almost limitless damage this way: 'If you ask where is the Picasso of England or the Ezra Pound of France, there is only one probable answer: still in the trenches.'
Hashtags

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
Mighty Eighth Air Force Museum WWII panel features two veterans' tales of valor
Driving rain fell with the ferocity of machinegun fire while thunder bombarded the National Museum of the Mighty Eighth Air Force's rotunda as if it were distant air strike's. Yet, the elements could not overcome the power of the stories being told by World War II veteran airmen 1st Lieutenant Kenneth Beckman and Staff Sergeant Bruce Cook during the museum's 5th Annual WWII panel. Sean O'Dwyer, the museum's education program manager and panel moderator, said while all four panelists from last year's event were alive, Beckman, 102, and Cook, 99, were the only two who could make the trip. Beckman, originally from Northampton, Massachusetts, now hails from St. Petersburg, Florida. Cook lives in West Columbia, South Carolina. The two told stories about close calls, fellow crewmen's practical jokes and harrowing missions. They did so to the best of their recollections, which were much better than they let on, particularly Beckman's as many of his stories were accompanied by the exact date of the mission. The panel was one portion of Sunday's events, which were part of four days of Memorial Day events that the museum planned in honor of the 26,000 airmen of the Eighth Airforce who never returned from WWII. More of the museum's Flags for the Fallen events have been planned for Monday, May 26. O'Dwyer asked the two centenarians a series of questions, helping them call up long dormant moments from their pasts. He started by asking what they were doing when Pearl Harbor was attacked on Dec. 7, 1941. Cook said he was 16 and standing in a doorway when someone came by saying that the Hawaiian naval station had been bombed. "And to me, that didn't mean a whole lot," he said because he had never heard of it before. Beckman actually resigned from the Naval Academy because his roommate's grandfather was a doctor with the with the Navy, and he had heard that a war with Japan was "just around the corner." So he signed up with the Army Air Corp in November of 1941. For him, Dec. 7 of that year started like any other day until about 4 p.m. when he heard what had happened at Pearl Harbor. Beckman went on to serve as a navigator within the 305th Bomb Group while Cook was a waist/ball gunner and toggler for the 379th. Beckman attributed his desire to be an aviator to his first flying experience when he was five years old. The manager of Northampton airport knew his father and invited Beckman for a ride in a two-seater airplane. During the war, he went on 48 missions over two tours. He signed up for a second tour after he decided he wanted to become a permanent officer. He flew with two U.S. presidents, Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower. Beckman described two close calls he had in service. One involved a German pilot who flew his Messerschmitt Me 262 "absolutely vertical" 20 feet off the right wing, so close Beckman could see he was blond with glasses and a white scarf. "I guess I saw him for all of a split second," he said, but he never forgot it. Another close call occurred when his crew's right wing engine had been hit and caught fire. He called that a death notice because a fire usually proceeded an explosion, which typically meant crew members had five to 10 seconds to grab a parachute and jump. In that moment, he secured his parachute and dangled his feet out the escape hatch and then he heard a copilot tell everyone the fire was out. He did not have to jump. Had he jumped he would have done so over enemy territory and undoubtedly been taken as a prisoner of war. Cook could not recall ever being scared beyond his first mission when he told a peer he could not get into the ball turret with his parachute on. The peer said that they could leave his parachute aside and if they got shot down maybe he could get up and grab it in time. Cook was then worried the whole four hours and fifteen minutes of that first, and likely his shortest, mission. Beyond that, he did not recall being scared very much in the air. He did remember a time when a plane ahead of his caught fire. The flames streamed behind it so much that a crewman on his plane thought their plane had caught fire and a miscommunication led another crewman to grab his chute and jump out over enemy territory. Cook told another story of how he shot at an approaching fighter, taking him out. Later the other gunner on the plane also claimed to have shot the enemy fighter down. When the crew got back to base they flipped a coin to see who would claim the hit. "Malone won," he said. Years later when he looked at the military records it only stated that a bomber shot down a fighter, giving no particular airman credit. Both Cook and Beckman flew dozens of missions throughout their tours of duty. Cook joked that officers and enlisted men such as himself did not always hang out during the war, but it was an honor to be speaking with Beckman about their experiences and the men they served with. Beckman and Cook, while grateful for the museum's recognition, deflected any praise heaped upon them. When asked to reflect on Memorial Day's meaning, Cook said he did not deserve the praise that the museum and community were giving him. To underscore the point of the holiday, he recollected one more story of a fellow airman who was less fortunate. During the war, a young man Cook referred to as Albert was moved to another plane to make way for Cook's return to his crew. Cook said on Albert's first mission with the new crew their plane was shot down. Albert and others bailed out over enemy territory while the crew's pilot went down with the plane. For Beckman, Memorial Day is an "opportunity for me to think about the fellows that didn't make it, they were the real heroes." He then paused before expressing that he was at a loss for words "to describe how wonderful life can be when the world is at peace." Joseph Schwartzburt is the education and workforce development reporter for the Savannah Morning News. You can reach him at JSchwartzburt@ and JoeInTheKnow_SMN on Instagram. This article originally appeared on Savannah Morning News: Mighty Eighth Air Force Museum WWII panel features two veterans

Wall Street Journal
4 hours ago
- Wall Street Journal
‘Annapolis Goes to War' Review: From the Yard to the Fire
It had been a long buyer's market for the U.S. Naval Academy Class of 1940. Its 750 inductees first arrived at 'the Yard' in 1936 following 16 years of peacetime budget cuts; with Congress in an isolationist mood, few midshipmen would have foreseen an American war in Europe and the Pacific when they sat for their entrance exams. But when the 456 graduates left Annapolis in June 1940, war was burning on two ends of the world. Their baptism by fire was a matter of when, not if. Craig L. Symonds, a historian and Naval Academy professor emeritus, has spent decades studying American naval warfare. His 'World War II at Sea' (2018) deftly covers the war on the waves while his biography 'Nimitz at War' (2022) takes a deep dive into the life of the admiral who led history's largest armada. In 'Annapolis Goes to War,' Mr. Symonds shows the struggle through the eyes of young officers thrown into combat 18 months after graduation. The 'Forties,' as the Class of 1940 became known, lost 76 graduates in World War II, suffering the highest death rate of any class from either Annapolis or West Point. The book begins with wide-eyed students converging on the banks of Maryland's Severn River. 'When they arrived in Annapolis, they were filled with confidence and eagerness, innocents who embraced and internalized the conventional values of their era,' Mr. Symonds writes. Over the course of the first four chapters, he chronicles each coming school year, covering the discomfort, exhaustion, minor terrors and small pleasures that followed the young men.
Yahoo
7 hours ago
- Yahoo
Ft. Eisenhower releases statement about name-change
FT. EISENHOWER, Ga. (WJBF) – Seven Army installations whose names were changed in 2023 because they honored Confederate leaders are all reverting back to their original names, the Army said Tuesday. But to be clear, they are being renamed for different people who were not associated with the confederacy, but have the same last name as the original honoree. Fort Gordon was changed to Fort Eisenhower to commemorate the former president's time leading Allied forces in Europe in World War II. It will now be named for Medal of Honor recipient Master Sgt. Gary I. Gordon. He was honored for his valor during the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu in Somalia, where he defended wounded crew members at a helicopter crash site and held off an advancing enemy force. The Cyber Center of Excellence Public Affairs Officer Ms. Lesli Ellis-Wouters, released the following statement on behalf of Ft. Eisenhower. 'As we prepare to receive additional guidance from the Secretary of the Army, we appreciate the support and understanding of our Central Savannah River Area community that has been a stalwart proponent of the installation since its inception in the early 1940s. Our mission remains unchanged in supporting national defense operations and training world-class, highly skilled Signal, Cyber, and EW professionals to fight and win America's wars. We will provide more information as transition timelines are developed and approved. ' Ms. Lesli Ellis-Wouters, Cyber Center of Excellence Public Affairs Officer The six other bases that are scheduled to change names again are Fort A.P. Hill, Fort Pickett and Fort Robert E. Lee in Virginia, Fort Hood in Texas, Fort Polk in Louisiana and Fort Rucker in Alabama. To find out more about what the names will be change to and who they honor, click here. The Associated Press contributed to this article. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.