Janet S. K. Watson

I wrote this for a graduate seminar so it's a little heavy:

Watson, Janet. S. K. Fighting Different Wars: Experience, Memory, and the First World War in Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

In Fighting Different Wars, Watson argues that the common perception of the First World War—that of a futile war marked by the sufferings of men in the trenches and a sense of disillusionment—was not a product of the war experience itself but of the output of a "disillusioned school" whose war books overwhelmed literary society a decade after the armistice and caused society to re-remember their war experience in these terms (217).
She makes comparisons between the ideas of "work" and "service"—usually divided along class lines. Those who thought of their war work in terms of "service" were more likely to be middle or upper class, capable of volunteering without pay and less likely to already be in the professions of soldiering, nursing, or working in factories. They were also more likely to later think of the war in terms of disillusionment (266). Like McClintock, for Watson the language of class and gender is blurred; class differences were genderized and visa-versa.
Fighting Different Wars is divided into two parts which represent the "different wars" of the title. The first part deals with the contemporary "experience" of war—a good description of the cultural aspects of the war dealing with both men and women at home and on the Western Front which goes a long way towards filling in the holes left by military historians such as John Keegan. Although this section was well-informed and interesting, the second is more controversial and represents "new" work in the field, and so the focus of this summary will be on that half.
The second half is concerned with the memory of the war. Watson analyses the different between contemporary war writings--letters and diaries (which correspond with the "experience" section of the book)--and later accounts of canonical "war poets" Robert Graves and Seigfried Sasson, and Vera Brittain and Irene Rathbone. Her comparisons clearly indicate that the war memories of the authors have been edited to fit the trend with disillusionment. For Watson, the "war book controversy" (so called because, although works such as Graves' Goodbye to All That have become cemented in popular ideas of what the First World War is about, at the time of publication it and similar books were highly criticized by an opposing literary camp—213) is significant because it represents not only the literary change (discussed by analyzing contemporary reviews of war books) but affects the view of all society from the war—from their own "experience" (which has been described in the first half of the book) to the creation of a disillusioned memory. This re-remembered version of the war, the "soldier's story," re-wrote the societal memory of the way in terms of futile suffering of men and death in the trenches of France, themes that are associated with Graves and Sasoon, Non-combatant soldiers and women, such as Brittain and Rathbone, were forced to reinterpret their own war stories within the lines of the "soldier's story," often less than successfully (220, 265).
The most obvious problem with Watson's argument, as with any generalization, are the exceptions to the dominant literary trends—the disillusioned accounts that were written during the war years, or the adventurous and personally satisfied accounts of the war that were published in the era marked by disillusionment. And although there is some room for reconciliation with her theories and the books that fall out of the norm, this is limited to retrospective accounts that were written long after the "war book controversy" (263). The only explanation must be that, in Watson’s view, the exceptional accounts are not significant because they do not reflect the societal norms or the time, nor did they change these norms, as the books she discussed did. But this is speculation, as these exceptions are left out of Watson’s discussion.
Although Watson admits that people were publishing disillusioned accounts from the end of the war on, the "war book controversy" didn't take place until a decade later (188). She ignores such accounts that were published during the war years themselves. Some discussion and an offered explanation of these accounts would have strengthened Watson's argument. The lack of such gives the impression that Watson is attempting to fit the complex war and post-war literature into neatly labeled types and simply ignoring that which does not support her argument.
One such account was that of Sarah Macnaughtan, whose war diary was peppered with disillusioned sentiments. "England is still cheerful, I hear, and going to hold race-meetings as usual... "On the whole,�? someone said to me in England, “I suppose you are having a good time.�?…When I said I saw another aspect of [the war], the kind, soothing suggestion was that I must be a little over-tired.�?
Another exception would be the war book of Isabel Emslie Hutton, published in 1928, at the start of the "war book controversy." Although upfront and descriptive about the horrors of war she saw and experienced as the Chief Medical Officer of a front-line hospital in Serbia, Hutton's account cannot be said to be nearly as melodramatic as many other personal narratives, and neither is it in keeping with the trend of criticism of authority disillusionment.
Counter-arguments within the literature Watson choses are also not fully explored. One of the books Watson used for her analysis, We That Were Young, is not exacctly a story of disillusionment. Rathbone was upset that her book was not as successful as she had expected (and jealous of Brittain's success). A friend wrote to her: "Feeling, passion, personal faith in human beings, is taboo. Your book is therefore unfashionable at the moment..."
Although Watson states that both Rathbone and Brittain's books are less successful as interpretations of the "soldier's story," she implies that this is simply because their war experiences were not the same as the soldiers who served in the trenches. The possibility that Rathbone was not ascribing herself to the disillusionment school, and was in fact trying to do something entirely different with her war novels, is not considered by Watson. This argument is presented by Jane Marcus in the afterword of the Feminist Press reprint edition of We That Were Young. The fact that this is the edition which Watson cites in her footnotes makes her omission seem deliberate as well as inappropriate.
Macnaughtan, Sarah, My War Experiences, (London: John Murray, 1919), 119.
Hutton, I. Emslie, With a Woman's Unit in Serbia, Salonika and Sebastopol, (London: Williams and Norgate Limited, 1928).… (més)