Before I could begin the story that
became The Goose Road I had to give
myself permission to write about a subject as shocking & sad as the First World
War.
Now, after years of research, that
seems odd. Today I feel on firm mental ground in WW1, eager in fact to return. But
back then I felt presumptuous. Almost guilty. How could I possibly begin to
imagine what it was like?
Yes, I did a ton of research in books
and online, in lecture halls and museums. I had to get the facts right out of
respect for the dead. But that wasn’t enough. I needed a deeper, more visceral
connection. With hindsight, two types of research were critical to building that
emotional bridge to the past.
First was place, by which I mean being
there physically, walking through the cemetery-strewn fields of the Somme and
the rolling hillsides of Verdun, or standing in a zigzag trench at Beaumont
Hamel, or paying my respects to the broken & greying skulls of French and
German soldiers, laid to rest together.
Second came a few, critical books.
Out of everything I’ve read about World
War One, fiction and non-fiction, I now believe it was just five books that led
me to a sufficient level of understanding that I finally felt I had the right
to trespass into – and then to inhabit – the world of the Great War. They were
stepping stones, and I’ll always treasure them.
The first, chronologically, was a
venerable copy of The Complete Works of
Wilfred Owen which I took with me to Étaples, the Channel port where I knew
my story had to end. Owen (pictured above) himself spent time in this place. Like all
British Empire infantrymen & officers, he passed through the huge
reinforcement and hospital camp, which dominated Étaples’ old town, on his way
to the Western Front. I’d been deeply upset by his war poems when we studied
them at school. And here I was, a grown woman, weeping over them again.
The second book, The Price of Glory – Verdun
1916, is a brilliant piece of narrative non-fiction by
Alistair Horne. First published in 1962, he resurrects the dramatic personae of
that gruelling battle with dexterity and detail, populating the horrific statistics
of slaughter with living, breathing men.
The third book that opened unexpected
doors in my mind was Storm of Steel
by Ernst Junger, a German officer who survived the war. Dedicated to The Fallen,
Jung gives an alternative perspective to the ‘pity of war’ that is deeply
embedded in the British tradition of remembrance, thanks in part to the
anti-war poets such as Owen. I brought Jung’s unapologetic account of
courage and comradeship under fire in the bookshop at Thiepval, the
Commonwealth war memorial to the missing of the Somme – that is, to soldiers
whose bodies were so torn apart (evaporated even) by artillery bombardments
that they were beyond identification as individual men.
The fourth & fifth books which
stand out in my memory are both by Pat Baker, being the first and last in her Regeneration trilogy. If anyone asked me
which single WW1 novel they should read, I would say The Ghost Road, the finale, every time. It may be that Owen is important here
too, since he is a character in these stories, and his death vividly told. His
fellow war poet Siegfried Sassoon – at the time far better known than Owen – is
central to the narrative as well. But I think it is the complexity of Dr Rivers
that makes these novels so compelling, and the depth of the irony that, as a
military psychiatrist, his job is to make officers who are suffering the most awful
mental torment as a result of what they’ve seen and done in battle, well enough
to go back to fight and kill and quite probably die, like millions upon
millions of others.
Dear God, never again.
My own contribution to the stories inspired
by this ‘war to end all wars’, The Goose
Road, is a coming-of-age quest set in France in 1916. It will be published
by Walker Books on April 5 and is available to pre-order on Amazon
and from local bookshops now.
@houserowena (Twitter) @rowenahouse
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