UBC: The Old Lie

[truepenny]

Parker, Peter. The Old Lie: The Great War and the Public School Ethos. 1987. London: Hambledon Continuum, n.d.

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Home sick with a nasty hacking cough (and good LORD the prescription cough syrup is nasty--it's like drinking a teaspoon's worth of cough-syrup flavored honey), and finished reading Peter Parker's The Old Lie.

The Old Lie is about World War I and British public schools, more specifically about the way in which the public schools created an officer caste that believed the greatest achievement possible for them was to die young in battle. (Apply the words "glory" and "heroism" and "chivalry" to taste.) Parker goes into great detail, with seemingly endless primary sources, to show that not only were the young men of Britain being told that that was what they should want, but for many of them, it was true. They internalized this ethos, interpolated themselves into its systm, and participated enthusiastically in the indoctrination of their younger brothers (both literal and metaphorical).

And they died. Horribly. Unheroically. Unromantically. For reasons that had nothing at all to do with the reasons they were willing to die. "Poppies for young men," as Sting says, "death's bitter trade."

This is a fascinating book, and an appalling one. The alien lunacy of the primary sources belies the fact of their historical proximity. Although it trivializes Parker's project to reduce it to merely a useful secondary source, it is true that The Old Lie helped me understand the undercurrents of The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club.

Parker is so steeped in his subject, that I suspect some of his argument was actually lost to me because I'm not familiar enough with either the British public school system or the poetry of WWI. Or World War I itself. (I could seriously have used an apparatus of annotations.) But despite that, this was an illuminating read on a subject I find difficult to get my head around.

Comments

[thinkum]

Excellent review -- this just went on my list on Amazon.

[oracne.livejournal.com]

I think I must add this to my GIANT MOUNTAIN of books on WWI. If you want any book recs on any particular WWI subject, feel free to ask!

[stillnotbored.livejournal.com]

The second book in my series takes place in 1917. I am, alas, way too familiar with WWI and the way young men marched blightly off to war for King and country. I love the war poets, but they make me cry. They died much too young and wanted so much to drink life in forever.

The Library of Congress has a series of pictures taken by the Bain News Service archived online in the Flickr archive known as "The Commons". These photographs range from the naive, almost romantic, early years of the war, to photos of mass graves for horses killed in battle, to photos of POWs and wounded soldiers in hospitals.

Those photos dispel any idea of war being full of glory or heroism, or that dying is a noble aspiration.

[larryhammer]

I just reread The Penguin Book of World War I Poetry the night before last, plus collections by Sassoon and Graves, and, yeah. Watching that ethos getting blasted into shreds of uniform caught on barbed wire = powerful stuff.

(The attitude also shows up refracted interestingly in Angela Brazil's boarding-school novels of the War, via the girls' brothers. And, to an extent, the girl characters themselves.)

edit to fix syntax!fail

---L.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

That sounds very horrifying to read.

. . . but now I want to read it, just so I can then go back and re-read The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club and see what it's getting at.

[pixel39.livejournal.com]

The non-prescription cough syrup isn't any better. You know, when it's so nasty that you involuntarily shudder after swallowing? Mucinex DM, baby...

[marycatelli]

Hmmmm.

On one hand, it might be interesting. Then, I read The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman, by Mark Girouard, and even its chapter on the topic of World War I was rather ugly. . . .

[nipernaadiagain.livejournal.com]

Interesting. I wonder how much the Soviet propaganda learned from the way the Brits did it (as to die for the homeland as hear was a big, big thing - many Soviet children WANTED war, as they had read from fiction - both movies and books - that being a war-hero was the most honorable way to get fame.

[marypcb.livejournal.com]

so from a UK perspective... I grew up knowing my grandfather had come home from WWI with shell shock and my uncle had died in WWII (my mother worked in the ops room and her first fiancé was also killed in the war) and that entire towns had lost vast numbers of sons who joined up together in a 'pals' regiment, so Peter's shell shock and Bunter's attachments always made perfect sense - remember in Gaudy Night when it turned out Padget the porter served with Peter and Bunter and they tell a story about a fight in the regiment and 'this absurd story of a mop and a broom had made them Peter's slaves for life'? The war poets were routinely set as an O level book. The penumbra of the war in the Flambards books is a really interesting view - or listen to the jokey horror of Steve Hacket's Spectral Mornings...

I'm not sure from what you say how far the book explains its title, which is from Wilfred Owen's powerful/ghastly Dulce et Decorum Est http://www.warpoetry.co.uk/owen1.html although I'd translate decorum as 'proper' which is a peculiarly british word - correct, expected, fitting, good behaviour, to be aspired to, undemonstrative, demonstrating service and loyalty and belonging and dignity and being approved of (and all the concomittent repression and rigidity that goes with those ideas)

[starlady38.livejournal.com]

The suicide of European civilization, indeed.

I suspect I shall have to read this - the glorification of death in the cause is a topos so often associated with the Japanese military in the Asia-Pacific Wars, and from what you say the level of internalization has to be comparable.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

The average survival time in WW 1 of a British 2nd lieutenant -- which was the entry grade for these young public school men -- was 2 weeks. It's heartbreaking to think of. You might like to read Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth. VB went on to be a significant figure in liberal politics, but this book is about her experiences as a nurse for the British Army during the first world war, and about the experiences of her brother and his friends in the army.Wonderful and sad and very informative.

[gauroth.livejournal.com]

Have you read any of Lyn MacDonald's books on WWI? She writes extremely well. She uses quotations from interviews, diaries and letters in her histories. They are superb, heartbreaking books.

[smills47.livejournal.com]

Re background to the Great War, one book you might find interesting is George, Nicholas and Wilhelm: three royal cousins and the road to World War I, by Miranda Carter (Knopf, 2010).

Inbreeding: not just for Kallikaks!