Of pens scratching and pages turning - ''at least two would-be poets in this hut alone'' - and, in his own diary, tells us why these men write: ''I think it's a way of claiming immunity. In Pat Barker's novel ''The Ghost Road,'' the final volume in a trilogy that makes this war the close and pressing history of our present moment, Lieut. But still they were written it was, after all, a prodigiously literary war. Countless letters and poems and diaries condemned their own habits of eloquence as a betrayal of truth. The very notion, now so worn with use, in fact marked a sharp reversal of our most enduring literary impulse, from the ''Iliad'' and Moses' song over the drowned Egyptian cavalry through to Tolstoy.īy the second year of the Great War, amid unprecedented carnage and the sense that no one could explain anymore what cause it served, there grew up in Britain a soldiers' literature obsessed with the divide betweenĪvailable language and actual experience. T was not until 1914 that words became inadequate to describe the horrors of war. DecemShell Shock By CLAUDIA ROTH PIERPONT
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