The Tuition of Manhood: ‘Sapper’s’ War Stories and the Literature of War

Abstract

British combatant authors of the First World War have long laid claim to being the truth-tellers of the war and many historians have used the literary legacy of the war as a source of evidence. Much of this analysis has concentrated on a number of well-known sources, including the poetry of Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, and biographies and novels such as Goodbye To All That (1929), All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) and Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930). The war, however, produced a huge amount of literary expression, including an array of newspaper articles, popular novels, short stories and poems. The recent academic rediscovery of this wealth of literature has complicated the claims to truth-telling that any individual work of literature may make. The literary evidence of the war increasingly provides almost as many ‘truths’ of war as there were writers.