The result of that unreflective acceptancenof writerly authority is a conventionalnbook that never asks the more interestingnquestions of its materials.nWhere, for instance, did Pound get hisnemotions about civilization and war? Itnis no use insisting, as the myth requires,nthat the experience of war must authenticatenthe art and poetry based on it,nif we then say that Ezra Pound wrote angreat war poem without ever setting footnin a trench. If he did, then the whole thesis,nthat it was the soldiers’ unprecedentednexperience that created a new reality,ncollapses. It appears that one can get justnas worked up about a “botched civilization”nfrom reading newspapers as fromnsuffering a bombardment—a methodnPound was to employ for the rest of his career.nNor is Hynes very informative aboutnthe war poets themselves, whom he treatsnfor the most part as passive embodimentsnof his thesis. One would hardly guessnfrom his account that there was anythingneccentric or personal in the backgroundsnof Graves, Sassoon, or Owen that mightnhave affected the poetry they wrote.nIn short, this book confuses art and historynin ways not cleared up by the evasivenword “myth,” and the result is not sonmuch the history of a culture as of the developmentnand transmission of a receivednidea about it. And even so, having grownnup in an England that remembered thenFirst World War very well, I’m in a positionnto say that as a book about the Englishnpeople’s understanding of the war’sneffect on their culture, A War Imaginednis as wrong as many of the writers whomnit quotes. It represents the opinion of antiny minority. In my experience, evennpeople who enjoyed the war writers’ workndid not always believe the version of thenwar presented; they accepted it as anyn40/CHRONICLESnLIBERALARTSnL.A. GAY LAWnreader accepts a writer’s fiction or personality.nAs for the ex-servicemen, the warnhad been a terrible and unique experiencenfor them. All the ex-soldiers I knew hadnbeen in some way marked by it, but nonenof them believed that it was either anunique historical event, or that it had separatednthem from their past. In some casesnit made the past more precious tonthem. And they all treated the silly journalisticnideas that it had been foughtn”to make the world safe for democracy”nor “to end wars” as meaningless rant.nThey knew well enough they had servednfor king and country, as serviceable anway of putting things as any.nVery eady on, too, I understood somethingnthat never surfaces in Hynes’s book,nthat in important ways the Boer War hadnmade a strong prior impression on thatngeneration’s imagination. The Boer Warnexposed the weakness of the empire, andnits losses had been keenly felt. The elegiacnfeelings it aroused, expressed in thenWaggon Hill epitaph (sneered at bynHynes), in Elgar’s and Stanford’s music,nand in the poetry of Kipling and Newbolt,nprepared and strengthened people’snminds for the losses of the GreatnWar. In fact Newbolt’s “Vigil,” printednas Hynes tells us in the Times on Augustn5, 1914, but written as Newbolt said “innmystical anticipation” 16 years eariier, appearsnin his Collected Poems of 1912namong poems about the Boer War.nThose poems (like the soldier poems ofnHousman not even mentioned by Hynes)nalso make the contrast between pastoralnEngland and foreign batdefields that wasnso basic to the best poetry of the 1914-18nwar, including Siegfried Sassoon’s.nAnother fact not mentioned by Hynes,nbut relevant to his thesis, is that the AmericannGivil War anticipated the high ca-nLaw firms in major cities are stepping up efforts to recruit homosexuals,nthe New York Times reported last Febmary. Two NewnYork firms “have amended their anti-discrimination policiesnto include sexual orientation,” and Munger, Tolles & Olson ofnLos Angeles “sends recruitment letters to gay and lesbian studentngroups and arranges interviews between homosexualnstudents with gay lawyers.” Bmce Deming, co-chairman of thenCommittee on Gay, Bisexual and Lesbian Legal Issues atnHarvard Law School, “wanted to go to a place where I felt Incould put a picture of my lover on my desk, take him tonfirm functions—where people treat you as’a normal person.”nnnsualty rates of the Great War. The unpleasantnrealities of the American warnmade a strong impression in England, andnthat may be why The Red Badge ofnCourage, arguably the first modern warnnarrative, was initially more successfulnthere than in America. What happenednon the battlefields of the Great Wkr couldnhardly have been a surprise to everyonenin England.nThe notion of “radical discontinuity”nreally is a myth, and like other myths it hasnvarious uses. Used by a writer likenLawrence to explain the war as a uniquelynmodern event, it was a self-fulfillingnprophecy. After all, historical discontinuitynwas one of the premises of modernism.nThe myth also expressed the trauma andndismay of some of the men who experiencednthe war. In that case it conveyednan intensely personal emotion. It was certainlynnever a fact: the most obvious thingnabout postwar England was its continuitynwith the past. No doubt that is whatnso irritated the disappointed prophetsnof apocalypse like Pound and Lawrence.nThe Great War was an immense tragedy,nbut no more than any other event did itnvalidate the modernist anticipation of thenend of history.nAfter the lapse of over seventy years wencan see that it is best to take longer views.nHistory always has tricks up its sleeve. Thenmusic of Chades Villiers Stanford, for instance,nwhom Hynes consigns to the deadnpast, is now being played again. He wasna kind of Anglo-Irish Dvorak, a nationalistnwhose style was a dialect of a commonnEuropean musical language, and so, bynmodernist principles, unacceptable. Yetnthe music proves to be very good indeed,nand his setting of Newbolt’s “Farewell”nand “The Middle Watch” are intenselynfelt pieces.nBut one doesn’t have to argue from details.nIn England the same classes thatnprovided the subalterns of the first warnprovided the fighter pilots and juniornofficers of the second, and to say, as Hynesndoes, that they went “expecting nothingnexcept suffering, boredom and perhapsndeath” misses the point of their performancenjust as the jingoistic formulas ofn1914 misrepresent their predecessors’.nThis is a book to read for its information.nAs a portrait of a period describednby Anthony Powell as “given over to mixednand changing symbols,” it is a disappointment.nFrank Brownlow is a professor ofnEnglish at Mt. Holyoke College.n