Instead I took up a book which has been on my shelf for ages. In fact, I think it was on the grandparents' bookshelves in Walton-on-Thames. (Do you remember we grew up in my grandparents house? They had gone, but when we moved in their books were still on the bookshelves and their old coats and hats were in the cupboards, old tennis rackets and hockey sticks in the hall. They were proper people with a history. But maybe I haven't written about this here.)
The book is Mr Britling Sees it Through and it is a novel, but one with no real plot; it is more like a thinly fictionalised record of how it felt to live through the first two years of the First World War. The main character, Mr Britling, is a writer like H. G. Wells, and he has a certain fame and a certain degree of comfort, and he fools around with women who are not his wife and tells himself some good reasons for this philandering - only, of course, he never calls it philandering; but he admits these serial relationships are a kind of game. A game of ego on two sides.
As well as a wife and another woman a motor-ride away, he has a young secretary, who has a young wife and sister-in-law; Mr B also has a teenage son and two younger sons, and a live-in German tutor for his son. And at the outset, he has a visiting American who is keen to gain understanding of the British way of life. All these people are caught unawares by the war and the drama comes in the way the war treats them all. The book was published in the deepest days of the war before the United States came into it. I shall type up some extracts but I believe it is all worth reading. There is a freshness and vividness about Wells, an honesty that's fresh air in a fuggy room; a shot of hard stuff.
I love the picture of the Georgians before the war - the world of rose gardens and no central heating, when women were struggling for the vote and exhilarating in a degree of independence. It's the moment that Mrs Dalloway's daughter (Mrs Dalloway: Virginia Woolf) catches a bus on her own and goes riding up the Strand just because she can; and suddenly freedom is just possible for her... she starts to envision possible careers, possible professions...
Anyway, to set the scene there's a terrific description of a hockey match involving both sexes, very like one of those old school stories, and you imagine what fun they had in the days before we all got scared of being outside.
After the war breaks out, the people of the village start a run on the village shop (Hickson's), amongst them the well-to-do neighbour Mrs Faber.
" And would you believe me," she went on, going back to Mrs Britling, "that man Hickson stood behind his counter - where I've dealt with him for years, and refused absolutely to let me have more than a dozen tins of sardines. Refused! Point-blank!
"I was there before nine, and even then Hickson's shop was crowded - crowded, my dear!"Mr Britling is just disgusted with women who just want to be dramatic, like this. But then he starts to worry that there will be "a tremendous change in values"; he worries that all his investments will be worthless and there will be bankruptcy. He tells his wife that they may have to leave home and go somewhere safer. But he, too, is as excited as the neighbour.
"Now I am afraid - and at the same time I feel that the spell is broken. The magic prison is suddenly all doors. You may call this ruin, bankruptcy, invasion, flight; they are doors out of habit and routine ... I have been doing nothing for so long, except idle things and discursive things."
"... Writing is recording, not living. But now I feel suddenly that we are living intensely. ...There are times when the spirit of life changes altogether..."
"They speculated about the possible intervention of United States. Mr Britling thought that the attack on Belgium demanded the intervention of every civilised power, that all the best instincts of America would be for intervention. ...
"It would be strange if the last power left out to mediate were to be China," said Mr. Carmine. "The one people in the world who really believe in peace .... I wish I had your confidence, Britling."
For a time they contemplated a sort of Grand Inquest on Germany and militarism, presided over by the Wisdom of the East. Militarism was, as it were, to be buried as a suicide at four crossroads, with a stake through its body to prevent any untimely resuscitation."
Then there are reports of the atrocities in Belgium. Mr Britling's American visitor, Mr Direck, has been on the continent to see for himself, and has returned, shocked.
"They have started in to be deliberately frightful. You do not begin to understand ... Well....Outrages. The sort of outrages Americans have never heard of. That one doesn't speak of.... Well... Rape. ....They have been raping women for disciplinary purposes on tables in the market-place of Liege. Yes, sir. It's a fact. I was told it by a man who had just come out of Belgium.Meanwhile, the British are unprepared and unarmed. Germany expects to win the war in weeks. Direck says:
"Germany today is one big armed camp. It's all crawling with soldiers. And every soldier has his uniform and his boots and his arms and his kit."
"And they're as sure of winning as if they had got London now. They mean to get London. ... They say it's England they are after, in this invasion of Belgium. They'll just down France by the way. ... They know for certain you can't arm your troops. They know you can't turn out ten thousand rifles a week."
So Mr Britling's thoughts take a different turn. He stops being excited at the new world order he dreams of. The English start retreating in disorder. There are rumours of corruption in high places. And Mr Britling decides his country needs him and takes the train to London where he has contacts; he tries hard to find a role in the war machine. He wants to be of service to his threatened country, and finds that he is not alone; other men men of thirty-eight and fifty-four proclaim themselves fit enough to serve and lobby to learn to shoot and use a bayonet. But they are not wanted: the war machine can't cope with them. They have nothing to do. They feel "left out."
"The great "Business as Usual" phase was already passing away, and London was in the full tide of recruiting enthusiasm. That tide was breaking against the most miserable arrangements for enlistment it is possible to imagine. Overtaxed and not very competent officers, whose one idea of being efficient was to refuse civilian help and be very, very slow and circumspect and very dignified and overbearing, sat in dirty little rooms and snarled at this unheard-of England that pressed at door and window for enrolment. Outside every recruiting office crowds of men and youths waited, leaning against walls, sitting upon the pavements, waiting for long hours, waiting to the end of the day and returning next morning, without shelter, without food, many sick with hunger; men who had hurried up from the country, men who had thrown up jobs of every kind, clerks and shopmen, anxious only to serve England and "teach those damned Germans a lesson."
"Everywhere there were the flags of the Allies; [in London] in shop-windows, over doors, on the bonnets of automobiles, on people's breasts, and there was a great quantity of recruiting posters on the hoarding and in windows.. There were also placards calling for men on nearly all the taxicabs. "
Later on the German population in London come under suspicion and some are badly treated, but not so badly, it seems, as the English population in Germany. Mr Britling is really shocked when he reads a bale of German comic papers in the study of a friend in London. They were filled with caricatures of the Allies and more particularly of the English...
"One incredible craving was manifest in every one of them. The German caricaturist seemed unable to represent his enemies except in extremely tight trousers or in none; he was equally unable to present them without thrusting a sword or bayonet, spluttering blood, into the more indelicate parts of their persons. "... "But it's blind fury - at the dirt-throwing stage."
His friend points out: "They want to foam at the mouth. They do their utmost to foam more." and Wells incudes the lyrics of a "Hymn of Hate" which the Germans sing about England. It is extraordinary - but Britling's friend points out that this is war. "We pretend war does not hurt. They know better..."
The important character at this point is the German tutor who had taught Britling's son Hugh before the war, and had been an earnest and loveable character in the household - whenever Britling is inclined to hate the Germans he remembers Heinrich (who has gone back to his country), who "became a sort of advocate for his people before the tribunal of Mr. Britling's mind." He also remembered happy holidays in the hospitable village of the Odenwald. And then he is told of young German soldiers who have shot women and babies. In short, Mr Britling tries hard to be reasonable and understand the Germans, but at the same time the war becomes more and more savage; there is the torture of "gas", the use of flame jets...
I think I won't write more - all this is prelude to the moment that Britling's son Hugh goes to fight at the age of seventeen, and the forthright letters he sends home about the experience of fighting in the trenches form a large part of the middle of the book.
But this book has been written to record the truth as Wells saw it and felt it and experienced it; he meant it to be representative, and he meant it for posterity. It was published a hundred years ago and it still has interesting things to say. I recommend it. I shall be pressing it one everyone. It's not a great story or a great book - but there is a boldness to it that makes it remarkable. Good old Wells! what a long time he lived and how hard he worked.
