Great War Fiction

[This is a version of the chapter I wrote for the Handbook of British Literature and Culture of the First World War (2021) (edited by Ralf Schneider and Jane Potter).]

We read some war books because of their excellence as novels, others for what they tell us about the war itself. Ernest Raymond’s Tell England, while not without literary and documentary merits, is most interesting for what it suggests about the needs and enthusiasms of its readers. Reprinted fourteen times in 1922, and six times in the next year, by 1939 it had sold 300,000 copies, and subsequent editions stayed in print for forty years. (Raymond 1969, 69) The book’s material, however, would, over the next fifty years, be re-imagined, by Raymond and others; Tell England would become a major film in 1930, and Raymond would return to its subject, the Gallipoli landings, in two more novels, and in his autobiography.

The book appeared a a time when most publishers were convinced that there was no market for novels about the war. A nation counting its dead had little taste for the thrilling tales of military action that had encouraged public morale during the war years. War books that appeared now were mostly pious memorials, proud regimental histories and the memoirs of generals and politicians. There was no market for any novels that might try to cast a less than flattering light upon the soldiers who had given so much for their country. Tell England, however, managed to appeal exactly to the taste of the times.