It is not so much that the past, as L.P. Hartley said, is a foreign country, but that the din of the present seems to rob us of genuine understanding of the cultures which preceded us. A language in common can, if anything, deepen our misunderstanding of the past; the subtle alteration of the meanings of words, the tiny cultural incrustations which gather upon every unit of speech like tiny barnacles on a ship, can mean that we miss a wealth of emotion and intent from a text of a generation ago, yet nonetheless remain confident that we understand all.
Worse than our mere failure to understand the cultural contexts of language is the way in which modern writers populate the past with modern people, with modern perceptions and modern ethics; and are applauded for doing so because the anachronistic is so very accessible to the mind and to the tastes of living critics.
Modern homosexual
There is no more grotesque example of this than Pat Barker's highly acclaimed and thoroughly ludicrous trilogy about the Great War. Prizes have been showered on this series for the very reason why it is so ludicrous: it presents the period within an ethical and political structure that is entirely modern. The primary character, Billy Prior, is a thoroughly modern homosexual, as free and easy about his sexuality, or rather his bisexuality, as a character from an American television series. Moreover, the novels are populated with the stock iconic figures which modern culture uses to make the period accessible, the war poets Owen, Graves and Sassoon.
They have come to represent the young men of the time, and their poetry is perceived to speak for the countless damned, shuffling to witless slaughter at the behest of scarlet-faced fools in safely remote chateaux. But of course they were no such thing. They were representative of no one but themselves. Our modern cultural sensitivities prefer to have poets who are pacifists rather than warmongers, who are sensitive and actively homosexual sceptics rather than unquestioningly dutiful and celibately heterosexual soldiers.
Indeed, the voice of the celibately dutiful is probably the least heard from that time, though it would have been the most representative contemporaneously. Yet it is clearly present in letters written from the front; and though of necessity, these are unlikely to tell loved ones at home of brief encounters with prostitutes in Armentieres - if there were any - they do speak a broader and unselfconscious truth which is lacking in the carefully contrived verse of the war poets who are still seen as spokesmen for that generation.
Love letters
There could be no more moving testimony to the realities of soldiering and of young love than Love Letters from the Front, edited by Jean Kelly and published by Marino recently. The book contains the letters from a young English soldier, Eric Appleby, to his Irish fiancee, Phyllis Kelly, and they reveal a world of extraordinary innocence, of unfailing duty and of an almost bewitching naievety - which, of course, made such a war possible. Sophisticated soldiery make poor soldiers.
What makes Love Letters from the Front almost unbearable is the youthful love which fills its pages, and the story whose conclusion we know even before we open the first pages. The fictional convention of the time ends in the death of the soldier on the front, while his loved one at home mourns the rest of her days. This is indeed what happened to Eric Appleby. He was mortally wounded in 1916, and poor Phyllis never married, spending the rest of her days cherishing the letters from her beloved Eric.
It is his voice, and almost his voice alone, that we hear in these letters - there is just one from her, but her reproaches can be heard in his apologies for stealing a kiss in a public place, and in his concern for her ailing father. His voice speaks of a world we no longer know, and which would be almost impossible for modern writers to convey without howls of laughter from critics; it is a virginal world in which the young soldier kisses the opening word of each sentence of his girlfriend's letters, and in which he speaks lines such as: "At present I only seem to see the petals of my white lily, and pray that in years to come I may see the pure, untouched loveliness of the centre of the flower and your love."
Never posted
These emotions are closed us now, as completely gone as the kindred concepts of duty, of moral restraint and sexual continence. That ethos did not survive the conflict which took the life of young Eric Appleby, but which still suffused the final letter from young Phyllis, written after news arrived that he was injured, but never posted:
"My own darling Englishman, I wonder why I'm writing this, which you may never see - oh God, perhaps even now you have gone far away from your Lady - I wonder if another telegram will come. . .I have simply sat and shivered with such an awful clutching fear at my heart since your dad's wire came. . .Oh my love, my love, what shall I do - but I must be brave and believe all will be well - dear one, surely God won't take you from me now. It will be the end of everything that matters because, Englishman, you are all the world and life to me."
Eric Appleby died of his wounds on October 28th, 1916.