Max Plowman (1883–1941)

I expected A SUBALTERN ON THE SOMME (1928), by 'Mark VII,' a pseudonym for Max Plowman (1893-1941), to be more of a memoir from that veteran of the Great War. Instead it is little more than a sporadic diary of his time as a junior officer in and out of the trenches from July 1916 until January 1917, when his position took a near direct hit from an artillery shell, leaving him dazed and bleeding from both ears, probably badly concussed, with significant memory loss. He was then evacuated back to England, and there the narrative rather abruptly ends.

This 2009 reprint edition, put out by The Naval & Military Press out of East Sussex, England, offers no additional information about Plowman or his life, which I found to be a glaring shortcoming. A Wikipedia search told me more about the man than this book did. Plowman was a pacifist, and didn't get into the war until he was over thirty and newly married. Following his hospitalization, he refused to go back to the trenches and applied for conscientious objector status, which was denied. Although he was court-martialed, he did not serve any time and was released from service. He was a poet, writer and active socialist in later life, and a contemporary and acquaintance of Orwell.

Parts of the book were interesting. Plowman did show a real concern for the welfare of his men. He also displayed a delicacy of attitude that set him apart, with his numerous allusions to literature art and music. He also frequently questions the war itself, deploring how the "machinery" has taken it over.

"We have endowed machinery with the power once confined to a man's right arm, and now the machinery continues to function long after our natural impulses have spent themselves ... If all the machinery of war were now suddenly taken from our hands, I am certain the war would stop at once."

Something to think about, certainly, even moreso perhaps with today's more advanced and deadly war machines.

Plowman's narrative becomes somewhat tedious otherwise. And, except for the troop movements and marches around the French countryside with the names of the villages and towns, it can almost be summed up in just a few words: mud, mud and more of the same. This was, after all, trench warfare, with its long periods of stalemate. Even such misery becomes boring after while.

Recommended, but mostly for students of military history.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the Cold War memoir, SOLDIER BOY: AT PLAY IN THE ASA… (mais)

For most people, the Battle of the Somme is just 1 July 1916, a day when infamously nearly 20,000 British soldiers were killed and tends of thousands more wounded. In fact the Battle was a four month business, and the author of this work was a junior officer in the West Yorkshire regiment posted there shortly after that appalling first day, and serving there over the following months. He writes very fluently and with erudition of his experiences as the months roll by, until he is wounded by a shell and invalided back to Blighty in January 1917. The Western Front tropes of shells, mud, lice and trench foot are all here, but also some less obvious killers: the uncertainty of surviving from one moment to the next during an attack - "To be deprived of reasonable expectation - even of the next moment - is the real strain. I had not thought of that. Certainty, even of violent death, would often come as a relief. It is the perpetual uncertainty that makes life in the trenches endurance all the time"; and the intense desire for a measure of control over one's fate: "I understand desertion. A man distraught determines that the last act of his life shall at least be one of his own volition; and who can say that what is commonly regarded as the limit of cowardice is not then heroic?", or when, during a brief period away from the Front Line in Amiens while on a training course, he writes: "Best of all is the relief from life by order. To be one's own master, just for an hour or two, is to me relaxation beyond belief".

I read elsewhere (on Wikipedia) that, after refusing to return to his unit later on in the war, the author was court martialled. His experiences led him to becoming a pacifist and he founded the Peace Pledge Union twenty years later.… (mais)