Festival Time

The festival season has begun.  Well, to be honest, the festival season never really stops.  There may be a bit of a lull over Christmas, when we're all busy doing other things, but for the rest of the year you can normally find a cultural festival of some kind, somewhere, to attend, if you feel so inclined.  It seems to have become big business.

Even the small market town of Cowbridge (population approximately 4000), which is the nearest place of any size to my house, has two festivals - a Food & Drink Festival in October, and a Book Festival which takes place, er, all year round.  Yes, that's right.  It began as a summer event but has turned into "a calendar of events running throughout the year offering more flexibility to both authors and organisers".  Rather a novel idea (if you'll forgive the pun), and perhaps not so difficult to understand when you bear in mind how heavily potential speakers' time is committed.  To get the best names, an organiser has to be prepared to wait.

"Names" are not really something the SSF has ever bothered too much about.  We look for interesting speakers on interesting subjects when planning our events, and don't chase after big names, although it can't be denied that they attract big audiences.  The Hay-on-Wye Literary Festival, which is in progress as I write, takes place in a town half the size of Cowbridge and has been going since 1987.  This year's speakers include Will Self, Lionel Shriver, Melvyn Bragg and Mark Haddon, to name but a few.  The town is swamped with visitors (including the Prince of Wales) for the duration of the festival, but booking popular writers who are in such great demand has its hazards.  Just a couple of years ago, one notable speaker failed to turn up because he had gone to Ross-on-Wye "by mistake".  Since the two towns are only 35 minutes apart by road, this does sound awfully like an excuse; presumably the audience would have been prepared to wait.

In general, though, festivals are making a lot of money for a lot of people and there is no shortage of potential audience members.  The only thing that stops some of us spending most of our year attending festivals is the cost.  I've just paid over £90 for tickets for a few events at the Chalke Valley History Festival next month, and I don't begrudge it - organising a festival is not exactly an easy job, and the financial outlay must be considerable.  At the same time, I can't help thinking how lovely it would be if such events were more within the reach of the less well-off.

The audiences for these events - if the ones I've attended are anything to go by - are not restricted to the wealthy classes, although they do tend to be educated people.  Certainly all age ranges are represented, though I did cringe when Niall Ferguson, speaking at the Oxford Literary Festival a couple of years back, singled out his teenage offspring from the audience for an embarrassing father-to-son mini-lecture. Chalke Valley is a particularly good example of a community event, since it takes place in a field in the middle of nowhere, is attended by the inhabitants of nearby villages as well as a wider audience, and donates most of its profits to charity.  The organisers, James Heneage and James Holland, have the advantage of being well-known historians in their own right and being able to call on eminent friends and colleagues to speak at their festival. 

Nor is mere attendance a major earning opportunity for most of the speakers.  If you have ever tried to book a speaker, you will know that some relatively obscure "celebrities" insist on a large fee, whilst others who have a far greater right to expect one will do it for virtually nothing, recognising the opportunity to sell books.  Let's face it, people will queue up to get almost anything signed by Ian Hislop or Dan Snow (I just plucked those two names out of the air, knowing that both make frequent appearances on the festival circuit).  Let it not, however, be said that these celebrities don't earn their money.  I was simply astounded by the sheer stamina shown by Michael Wood in the first year of CVHF - speaking for an hour, signing books for another hour (pausing to chat to every single customer and never hurrying anyone along), and then, after only 30 minutes in which to eat his own dinner, chairing a one-hour debate before dashing off to the railway station so he could be in Norfolk at 8am next day to film "The Great British Story".

It has to be admitted that one or two of the speakers you will see and hear at the major festivals will turn out to be a disappointment, but in general it's a very rewarding experience and well worth the £10 or so that is the typical entry fee.  Just look at what's on offer later this year in the quaintly-titled Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival at Harrogate, for example: Jo Nesbo, Ian Rankin, Ruth Rendell and Susan Hill, and furthermore visitors can stay at The Old Swan Hotel, where Agatha Christie was found suffering from amnesia in 1926.   Or, if crime writing is not your scene, there is always the Stratford Poetry Festival, unbelievably in its 60th year, where for the second year running the SSF will be putting on a war poetry session on "Poetry Sunday", entry completely free.  For further details see the website: http://www.shakespeare.org.uk/visit-the-houses/whats-on.html/poetry-sunday.html or just turn up on 7 July.

It's festival time and it's never far away.  If you haven't been to one yet, add it to your bucket list.

All you ever wanted to know about centenaries but were afraid to ask!

We are about to celebrate a centenary - no, not that one!  On 1st June, which would have been the 100th birthday of the novelist Barbara Pym, the Alliance of Literary Societies will hold its annual conference at Pym's alma mater, St Hilda's College, Oxford, hosted by the Barbara Pym Society.

I have been attending the ALS annual meetings for several years now and have enjoyed memorable weekends hosted by the Jane Austen Society (at Bath), the Elizabeth Gaskell Society (at Knutsford), the Charles Dickens Fellowship (Nottingham), the Johnson Society of Lichfield, and, most adventurously, the Dubliners Literary Society.  In 2017, it will be the turn of the Siegfried Sassoon Fellowship to be adventurous, as we hope to host that year's conference, in collaboration with the Wilfred Owen Association, in Edinburgh.  That will, of course, be another centenary, the 100th anniversary of the meeting of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen over a set of golf clubs at Craiglockhart.

Such has been the success of the last few ALS conferences that there is now stiff competition to host them, several years in advance.  The George Eliot Society has already secured 2019, which will be the 200th anniversary of Eliot's birth, and 2016's Charlotte Bronte bicentenary will be celebrated courtesy of the Bronte Society.  These are sure to be major events, with no shortage of delegates.

It is more difficult for a society dedicated to a less well-known author like Barbara Pym, and I say this as a current member of the committee.  To fully appreciate Pym's comic genius (assuming you don't already), it is useful to read her out loud or to see her works dramatised.  In the past, the Barbara Pym Society has enjoyed readings by leading actors and actresses such as Miriam Margolyes and Joanna David, but we find that our D-I-Y efforts, involving members of the society not noted for their dramatic talent, work just as well.  As I told one guest speaker, somehow the worse it is, the better it is.  I can't really explain what I mean by this - you'd have to be there, as they say.

Naturally, with it being the centenary, we have worked hard to organise celebratory events in the current year, often against the odds.  The media have not been particularly helpful, showing little interest in an author whose work has never been adapted for television (though it has frequently been on radio).  This would hardly have surprised Pym herself, who is an inspiration to many writers precisely because she knew the pain of unexplained rejection.  Having had six successful novels published between 1950 and 1961 and become a favourite with library borrowers, she suddenly found herself on the scrap-heap, told by her publishers that she was out of step with the times.  She spent another fifteen years in the literary wilderness, until a chance event made her work more sought-after than ever before.

Although she had not been moving in literary circles, Pym had maintained a long correspondence with Philip Larkin, a (seemingly unlikely) fan of her work.  By coincidence, Larkin was one of two major literary figures who chose her as "the most underrated writer of the twentieth century" in a piece that appeared in the Times Literary Supplement in 1977.  (The other was Lord David Cecil.)  Suddenly, everyone wanted to know Barbara Pym and there was no shortage of publishers willing to take her next book - which was nominated for the following year's Booker Prize.  Sadly, her new-found fame was short-lived, as she died of cancer in 1980.

Despite this late flowering and the posthumous publication of some of her earlier work, Pym remains not exactly a household name, though she does have a tendency to crop up in the oddest places.  Recently I was telling an Oriental lady about the friendship between Barbara Pym and Philip Larkin, and she responded, "Well, I've never heard of that other person, but I love Barbara Pym!"  Her celebrity fans range from Alexander McCall Smith to Jilly Cooper to Sebastian Faulks to the Reverend Richard Coles.  In celebration of the centenary, the BBC has graciously agreed to repeat-broadcast her appearance on Desert Island Discs and a radio adaptation of her novel Jane and Prudence.  

The ALS conference will be replacing the Barbara Pym Society's usual spring meeting in London, but the Pym Society will still hold its annual conference (this year entitled "Remembering Barbara") in September at Oxford.  Many of the delegates will be academics from Europe and from the USA and Canada, where Pym's work is widely appreciated.  In fact, the Society has around the same number of members on the other side of the Atlantic as it does in the UK, and they have their own annual conference in Boston.  As well as the annual conferences, the centenary is being recognised with a short story competition (details here: http://www.barbara-pym.org/contest.pdf ) and a book by society archivist Yvonne Cocking containing all kinds of intriguing information from her research into Pym's papers held by the Bodleian Library (where the young Barbara would carry out her own "research" into the habits of young men she had her eye on).

In addition to Pym's centenary, the ALS will this year be celebrating its 40th anniversary - not quite the same thing, but a notable achievement nevertheless.  After the speaker sessions on Pym and Larkin and a little dramatised reading to whet your appetite, there will, of course, be tea and cake, as well as the opportunity to meet other people who admire a range of authors - Trollope, Woolf, Marlowe, John Clare, Richard Jeffries and Arnold Bennett are just a few of those who will be represented. 

Incidentally, if you are reading this now and thinking, "I wish I'd booked!", it's not too late.  As long as you are a member of any literary society affiliated to the ALS (which includes the SSF, WOA, Edward Thomas Fellowship and most other major societies), you are entitled to attend, and you still have time to get a place if you make your way to http://www.barbara-pym.org/ALS_Booking_Form_2013.pdf  and follow the instructions.  It would be lovely to see you there - we're going to have a great time!

From Mametz to Misrata

I had thought of writing about something very mundane in this blog - then I opened last week's Big Issue and found an article about the late Tim Hetherington.  Not exactly a household name, perhaps, but if I were to jog your memory with the information that Hetherington was a photojournalist who was killed, aged only 40, in Libya during 2011, you might begin to recall the circumstances.

Hetherington was in Libya to cover the so-called civil war (I say "so-called" because I am never quite sure how many of the international conflicts going on in today's world are stoked by foreign interests for their own ends) when he was killed by shrapnel in Misrata, during the three-month battle for control of the city between pro- and anti-government forces.  In the same year, Hetherington had been nominated for an Academy Award for Restrepo, a documentary he made with Sebastian Junger about the war in Afghanistan.  The film followed several U.S. battalions operating in the Korengal Valley, at that time regarded as "the deadliest place on Earth".

Hetherington himself will shortly be the subject of a new film, Which Way is the Front Line from Here?  A biography by his friend Alan Huffman, entitled Here I Am, has also been published recently by Grove Press and is receiving rave reviews on Amazon (if that is anything to go by).  What interests me, of course, is the parallel between the experiences of photographers and journalists in war zones of today with those of people trying to do a similar job during the First World War.

I am not really talking about "official" war correspondents and photographers, but about men (and occasionally women) who take their lives in their hands in order to record what they see as the truth about wars.  Propaganda is still rife, just as it was in the past, and we cannot always rely on "candid" shots from mobile phones and camcorders, which are generally supplied by people who have taken sides in the conflict and are interested in showing only their own side of things to the international audience.  Hetherington's photographs, many of which are now widely available in published books and articles, include photographs of the soldiers, the situations, and the victims, in a way that seeks not to judge but to report, not merely accurately but reflectively.  He described himself, not as a war photographer, but as an "image maker".  Perhaps this is unfortunate, as the word "image" has connotations we do not necessarily associate with the truth.

When I saw a reproduction of the last photograph Hetherington ever took, I was rather moved by the parallels with twentieth-century wars.  A metal helmet with an enormous hole in the centre lies on the barren ground in the centre of the frame, surrounded by the remnants of the contents of an army supply truck captured by rebels.  Whether there was anyone wearing the helmet at the time the hole was made, one cannot be sure, but it is reminiscent of so many of the rusted Great War artefacts I have seen in France and Belgium and which can still sometimes be picked up at the site of battles that happened almost a hundred years ago.

What interests me even more is the way that technology has altered our ability to report on these conflicts in a timely and effective manner (which of course also makes it easier to misrepresent the facts if governments and newspapers so choose).  War photography began long before 1914, as we know from the many tragic visual reminders of the American Civil War.  As long ago as 1853, a Hungarian artist named Carol Szathmari took photographs in the Crimea, which he offered as a present to Queen Victoria.  Tim Hetherington is only one in a long line of war photographers who have been killed as a result of operating on the front line in an effort to report "the truth" about these conflicts.

Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg and many other soldiers made sketches of what they saw on the Western Front, and many took cameras with them, but even this did not guarantee truthful representation.  We know that photographs of soldiers going "over the top" were staged as a way of engaging the British public.  That is one reason why the poetry of the war is so highly prized.  Art and literature offer their own way of presenting a higher truth by way of pictures and words reflecting the individual soldier's view of things, and Sassoon is rightly regarded today as a shining example of someone whose writings made a real difference to our view of World War I. 

Sassoon did not attempt to answer the big questions: whether the war was right or wrong, whether he should or should not be fighting in it.  Yet, in his poetry, he conveyed the truth about the human tragedy it represented in a way that was possibly more effective than any visual image of the time, however accurate.  We must, of course, acknowledge the contribution of Robert Graves to Sassoon's poetic development, and likewise, we must acknowledge how Sassoon's approach to reporting the war made an even bigger impact on the public imagination in the hands of the next great wordsmith, Wilfred Owen.  No doubt none of these men thought of themselves as war correspondents.  Nevertheless, they fulfilled that role in a manner that became a benchmark for later writers and is still greatly admired by the present generation.  This may seem an odd thing to say, but I think it would still be difficult for people like Tim Hetherington to achieve what they have achieved without the example of the poets of the First World War.  I wonder if you agree.

To commemorate or not to commemorate 1914?

A few weeks ago I received an e-mail from a colleague questioning why societies like ours are arranging special events to commemorate the centenary of the outbreak of the Great War.  To quote him verbatim: " surely there must come a time when this tragic event begins to slip from our list of 'celebrations'".  Indeed there must.  Now that the last veterans have left us, along with their memories (although fortunately not without their words and deeds having been recorded for posterity), many of us are probably beginning to wonder where it will all end.  When the centenary of the end of the war has passed, in 2018, will we make a conscious or unconscious decision to tone down our commemoration so that in future the 1914-1918 conflict has a similar status in our minds to the Battle of Waterloo?

One thing I am certain of: as long as there is armed conflict going on in the world, and as long as "The West" is involved in it (which it invariably is, one way or another), there will be a place for the commemoration of Siegfried Sassoon.  So many young people see the words and actions of Sassoon, and his friend Wilfred Owen, as symbolic of something to which they aspire.  Owen is viewed, I believe, as a poetic genius whose tragic sacrifice at the age of 25 represents the need to end all wars.  Sassoon's significance is perhaps less palpable, but more enduring.  In terms of pure literary influence, Owen is clearly out in front, albeit for a small body of work - and perhaps this is part of his charm, in that the less accomplished of his works are easily ignored in favour of the finely-polished jewels that Sassoon helped him perfect, and of course helped to publish.  Siegfried's own lasting influence is of a quite different variety.

"Most people think I died in 1919," the older Sassoon used to say.  That is quite untrue; his prose work appeared in the GCE syllabus during his lifetime, but he suffered from the misapprehension that none of his later achievements measured up to his early success as a poet.  For me, and for many others, it is Sassoon the man who makes the most impact.  The "Soldier's Declaration" of 1917, which he believed to have been an impotent and empty gesture, is nowadays seen as an act of extreme courage.  Put this together with the ground-breaking poetry and the wonderful memoirs and you have a fully-rounded historical figure whose memory will, I believe, endure for many generations to come.

That is why the Siegfried Sassoon Fellowship exists and will participate actively in the English Association's "British Poetry of the First World War" conference, to be held at Oxford in September 2014 (details http://www2.le.ac.uk/offices/english-association/ww1poetry/ww1poetry).  The SSF will be hosting a "panel", the exact theme of which is yet to be decided.  If you have any ideas to contribute, whether or not you are a member, we'll be pleased to consider them.  Alternatively, if you want to give a paper yourself on another subject, the instructions for submission can be found here: http://www2.le.ac.uk/offices/english-association/news-and-events/news-1/british-poetry-of-the-first-world-war-call-for-papers

As you will see from the links, several eminent speakers are already lined up for the conference, including Professor Jon Stallworthy, Edna Longley and Jay Winter, but we have quite a few more in the SSF "bag" who may be drawn out for your delectation.  Several of my correspondents have already commented that the delegate fee for the conference is too expensive.  Well, it certainly isn't cheap, but neither is hosting a conference, and I guarantee it will be over-subscribed.  Because of the timing (8th September being Siegfried's birthday), this event will replace our own annual conference next year, but as always we will be holding a range of other SSF events, including our spring joint meeting with the Wilfred Owen Association, and a special annual dinner, during 2014.  And of course, we still have our 2013 conference in Cardiff to look forward to!

Personally, I think there is still a lot to be said on the subject of the First World War and, for the time being, it holds a level of interest for the "younger generation" that should only be encouraged, in an age group for whom history and literature are not normally closely linked.  The life and work of Siegfried Sassoon can teach us more lessons than he could ever have envisaged, and the SSF's participation in the many commemorative events scheduled for 2014 will, I hope, be a very active one.

Talent in abundance

I have just been thinking how lucky we are, as a society, to be able to call on such a wealth and depth of talent when planning our events.  The speaker programme for September's annual conference in Cardiff is now confirmed as including prolific author and broadcaster Phil Carradice, distinguished editor and anthologist Anne Powell, and one of Wales's top poets, Mike Jenkins.

Last Friday I was fortunate enough to be invited to Phil and Mike's latest book launch, where Phil read from his new children's adventure novel The Wild West Show, and Mike from his new poetry collection Barkin!  It was an evening that emphasized the versatility of these two writers, who are both novelists, poets, and non-fiction writers on a range of subjects. Phil, of course, is a founder member of the SSF and has been a great help to us from a publicity angle, in addition to appearing on the speakers' platform to host the discussion between Dennis Silk and Max Egremont which remains one of our most memorable past events.

Anne Powell is best-known to many of us for her contribution to Cecil Woolf's War Poets series:  Alun Lewis: A Poet of Consequences. Her other works include Deep Cry: First World War Soldier-poets Killed in France and Flanders (1998) and Women in the War Zone: Hospital Service in the First World War (2009).  She is also something of an expert on Edward Wyndham Tennant.  Just to underline her versatility, the title of her talk at our conference in September will be "Gardens of War".

Mike Jenkins, who is a former editor of Poetry Wales, and himself won the Wales Book of the Year title in 1998, taught English at two South Wales comprehensive schools over a period of thirty years, and an extract from one of Mike Jenkins' poems has been used as part of the "public realm regeneration" of Merthyr Tydfil town centre.  Siegfried Sassoon, as you may know, visited Merthyr in 1921, and Mike has found Sassoon's poetry a major inspiration.

Knowing that we have three such illustrious names on our programme has given me a feeling of confidence in the success of this year's conference, and it will be interesting to see whether the composition of the audience differs significantly from our previous conferences, since we have never strayed beyond the borders of England for a major event before.  (Scotland, we haven't forgotten you - plans are afoot.)  This, of course, comes hot on the heels of our recent meeting at The Lamb, where we also welcomed two very distinguished speakers (see my previous post) who did not fall short of expectations.

Some day, I trust, we will be able to afford to pay such speakers the level of appearance fee they have a right to expect.  For now, we rejoice in our ability to draw from a pool of eminent people who are prepared to speak to the Fellowship because of their admiration for the remarkable man in whose honour this organisation was set up.  In life, Siegfried knew all the major literary figures of his day, and many from other fields such as politics, music and the visual arts.  What a legacy he has left us|

Aesthetes and Intellectuals

Well!  Saturday's joint event with the Wilfred Owen Association, at The Lamb in Bloomsbury, turned out to be a memorable experience.  For the benefit of anyone reading this who doesn't know The Lamb, it's a very historic pub with notable literary associations.  It was Charles Dickens's "local", when he lived just a short walk away at Doughty Street, and was also the setting for Sylvia Plath's first date with Ted Hughes.  It's located in Lamb's Conduit Street, which is named after a 16th century philanthropist called William Lamb (or Lambe), who paid for drainage improvements - hence the "conduit".  

This is the third annual event we've held at The Lamb, and it looks like becoming a regular spring fixture in the calendar.  The room we use can only take a limited number, and so far there has always been sufficient demand for places to ensure that we fill the room.  So it can be a hot, sweaty, and intimate experience, but it has so far never been a disappointing one.

This time, however, I felt that the contrast between our two featured speakers was particularly noteworthy.  We began with Dr Santanu Das of King's College London, who gave us a fascinating insight into his task as editor of  the Cambridge Companion to the First World War.  I had first heard Dr Das speak at the opening of the Sassoon exhibition at Cambridge University Library back in 2010, and had looked forward to hearing him again.  On this occasion, his illustrated talk, as the title of this blog suggests, whilst being clear and easy to follow, appealed to the intellectual in all of us, I felt.  It was also very gratifying to hear him talk in detail about the reasons he holds Sassoon in such high regard as a poet.  We must now wait for the book to come out later this year in order to follow through some of the strands of argument that were presented to us so tantalisingly at the weekend.

In complete contrast - but "not in a bad way", as they say - was our second session, at which Christian Major of the SSF committee introduced the distinguished writer, journalist and raconteur Simon Blow.  Mr Blow happens to be a great-nephew of the late Stephen Tennant, with whom Siegfried Sassoon had a lengthy relationship during the 1920s and 1930s.  Stephen, a younger brother of the budding poet Edward Wyndham "Bim" Tennant (who was killed on the Somme in 1916), is a figure most of us find terribly intriguing.  When, in later life, he made the acquaintance of his young great-nephew, he had become a reclusive figure, a shadow of his glamorous youthful self.  Simon Blow's account of his friendship with Stephen was both entertaining and poignant, and made me ponder on what drew Sassoon to him and what kept him so attached to this beautiful but self-centred young man.  Could it, I wonder, in addition to the obvious physical attraction, have had something to do with Siegfried's then unfulfilled longing for a son?  Did he eventually realise that he was playing a game he could not win, and that a heterosexual relationship was the only way he could ever have the family life he craved?

Pure speculation on my part, and there is no need to follow the thread any further.  If your appetite is whetted, Simon Blow's memoir "No Time to Grow" comes highly recommended, and you may also be interested to know that we will hear more of "Bim" Tennant at our annual conference at Cardiff in September - the final arrangements for which will be advertised next month.  For the moment, suffice it to say that both speaker sessions went down very well, as evidenced by the fact that no one was in a hurry to leave when we ran out of time, and both speakers dealt with numerous questions from the enthralled audience.  I love these events for the opportunity to mix with members and hear their various "takes" on the subject of Owen, Sassoon and literature in general.  I hope to meet more new faces at next year's event.

Not About Me

In a way, I'm pleased that there weren't any comments on my last post.  At least it means people weren't annoyed, aggravated or outraged by it.  It could alternatively mean that no one read it, but some people told me they did, which was a relief.

So I'll use this post to talk about something that annoyed me instead.  Yesterday's post brought with it my copy of the Spring 2013 edition of The Author, a worthy journal that often contains thought-provoking articles.  My eye was quickly caught by an article entitled "Scribbling Soldiers" by one Andrew Uffindell.  Mr Uffindell is the author of five books about the Napoleonic era, and evidently knows what he's talking about when it comes to discussing military memoirs of the period.  I'm not so sure that his knowledge of First World War literature is equally great.

One of the best eyewitness accounts of the Napoleonic wars, apparently, is Alexander Cavalié Mercer's Journal of the Waterloo Campaign.  Not having read it, I am not entirely sure why this volume is regarded with such admiration, and the article does not really tell me the answer.  It is more interesting, it seems, mainly because it is written by an officer from an unfashionable regiment, the Royal Artillery, and was written for his own amusement rather than with any thought of publication.  First World War writers, on the other hand (according to Mr Uffindell), wrote their memoirs ten or twenty years after the events they describe, and were able to get them published because disillusionment had become flavour of the month as a result of a film being made of All Quiet on the Western Front.  Owen and Sassoon, he suggests, are famous but unrepresentative.  I found this a curious conclusion to draw, and quite unsupported by the few facts he quotes.

Also, according to the article, Charles Carrington, author of A Subaltern's War, failed to make such a great impact simply because his memoirs were not as negative as those of other veterans.  "Most memoirists," we are told, "actually had mixed feelings about the war".  This statement does make one wonder whether the author has ever read Sassoon's memoirs or Owen's letters, the latter written in the thick of events and the former based largely on Sassoon's own trench diaries. 

I don't really have any quarrel with Andrew Uffindell's statement that military memoirs are difficult to evaluate.  Some criteria he suggests include "accuracy" (an elusive quality if ever there was one), "readability", which I tend to think is generally dependent on the level of literacy of the individual doing the reading, and "realism", an even more nebulous characteristic.  He has also done me the great favour of suggesting some further reading on the subject: Témoins ("Witnesses") by Jean Norton Cru, published in 1929, a study of personal reminiscences of the Great War by French soldiers which brings out the enormous variations in the truth as perceived by individuals who saw the same events from different points of view. 

This is hardly likely to shock anyone familiar with war literature.  Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves, at one time the best of friends, fell out over the publication of Goodbye to All That, by coincidence also in 1929, which Sassoon felt misrepresented events and people, yet towards the end of his life he was not only ready to forgive Graves but to take back most of his criticisms.  What else  would one expect from soldiers in different regiments, from different backgrounds, fighting in different theatres of war using different weapons?  There will be similarities in opinion, and there will be differences.  Sassoon never talked about lions led by donkeys, but from time to time he expressed his frustration at the frequent mismanagement of resources by those in charge - much as all of us do in our day-to-day existence.  The difference, for a soldier at the Western Front, was that it was a matter of life and death, just as it is for today's military forces in Afghanistan.

I shouldn't go on.  The article presumably was written for a readership that is either relatively unfamiliar with the military memoir as a genre or has not seen below the surface.  Unlike my readers.  It would, however, be nice to know what you think...