The Great Lakes Journal of Undergraduate History
Volume 6 Issue 1 Article 2
12-2018
Echoes of War: The Great War’s Impact on Literature
Samuel R. Williams
University of Minnesota - Twin Cities, will4548@umn.edu
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Recommended Citation
Williams, Samuel R. (2018) "Echoes of War: The Great War’s Impact on Literature," The Great Lakes
Journal of Undergraduate History: Vol. 6 : Iss. 1 , Article 2.
Available at: https://scholar.uwindsor.ca/gljuh/vol6/iss1/2
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Echoes of War: The Great War’s Impact on
Literature
Samuel Williams
The First World War instilled in the young men surviving its
horrors a sense of a half-life; those who walked away from the
trenches sacrificed a part of themselves on Europe’s battlefields.
This sense of loss was manifested most compellingly in postwar
literature created by what came to be known as the Lost Gener-
ation. The Lost Generation embodied a shift in the tone of lit-
erature following the war. Specifically, the attempt to capture as
well as define the physical, mental, and emotional suffering of
those that survived the war. Originally a small group of writers,
over the course of the twentieth century, The Lost Generation has
come to be referred to as the style or genre of postwar authors
and artist.1 This group of writers included Ernest Hemingway, F.
Scott Fitzgerald, T.S. Eliot, and other contemporary writers. While
those authors are most commonly thought of as the Lost Gener-
ation, it did not take long for other artists apart from novelists to
join the ranks of the lost, such as Percy Wyndham Lewis and Will
Longstaff. These other artists added to the collective remembrance
of veterans’ trauma of the war. Still, these original writers set the
stage and created the works that veterans and civilians both most
heavily identified with during the 1920s and 30s, and continued
into the twentieth century with following generations. The Lost
Generation’s works of literature encapsulated the collective suffer-
ing felt by many survivors of the First World War. These writers
sought to explain first the part of themselves they lost on the battle-
fields of Europe, secondly to find a remedy for their conditions of
hopelessness, disillusionment, and regret. Authors such as Ernest
Hemingway and Erich Maria Remarque never completely found
closure after the war, while J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis experi-
3
4 Samuel Williams
enced relief through their insertion of lived experiences into their
imagined worlds.
War literature created up until World War I often lacked the vis-
ceral firsthand experience with death these soldiers brought into
their works. Before World War I, war novel authors, such as
Stephen Crane writer of the Civil War novel The Red Badge
of Courage,were not soldiers themselves. They penned stories
learned from others about the drama of a battlefield. They did
not have the experiences that could directly or subtly influence
their work. The postwar era of the 1920s started this change with
the wide increase in authorship of former soldiers. For example
when stationed on the Western Front, J.R.R. Tolkien wrote to a
school friend, Geoffrey Smith, after learning of the death of Robert
Gilson, a mutual friend and member of their self-created four per-
son society called Tea Club, Barrovian Society, or TCBS. In this
lettered he lamented, “I now pin my hopes, and pray God that the
people chosen to carry on the TCBS may be no fewer than we
three.”2 Tolkien later echoed this experience of helplessness at the
death of a dear friend in his novel The Two Towerswhen Aragorn,
the lost King of Gondor, reassured the dying Boromir, son of the
Lord Steward of Gondor, “you have conquered. Few have gained
such a victory. Be at peace!”3 Tolkien in his novel reflected greatly
the sentiment he held for Robert Gilson, referring in his letter to
Geoffrey Smith several times to Rob’s having won greatness in his
death.4 The novels written by former soldiers were no longer just
stories; they took on a deeper meaning to the authors as ways to
cope with what they witnessed during the war. These direct ties to
the experiences of soldiers allowed survivors of the war to more
closely relate to these stories.
The Lost Generation set itself apart from other genres by this use
of personal experience from the war, and the ideas that they sought
to explore and understand through their writings did not manifest
in authors of only one nation after the war. A broad blanket of exis-
tential suffering cast itself over the young men of the 1920s and
it extended beyond national identity. Ernest Hemingway and Erich
Great Lakes Journal of Undergraduate History 5
Maria Remarque, one American, the other German, both produced
works that spoke to the collective sense of disillusionment toward
life that started during the war years and grew out into the postwar
world. Their work relied on their characters’ experiences with the
war and how they coped with the horrors witnessed. They did this
with the use of their own war experiences both during and after the
war through their writings.
As Remarque himself stated in the introduction to his 1929 novel
All Quiet on the Western Front,“This book is to be neither an accu-
sation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is
not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will
try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they
may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war.”5 Remarque
sought to speak directly to individuals, not to a particular nation or
government. He affirmed this intent in a 1929 interview with Ger-
man broadcaster Axel Eggebrecht. Remarque told how the book
itself was apolitical and incomplete as a book about the war, and
that it deliberately focused on only a few soldiers in the trenches
to show readers the reality of the war rather than its pageantry.6
Through this focused storytelling Remarque conveyed the com-
mon experience of soldiers who fought and died in the trenches.
This style resonated with readers of the time because it allowed
readers to experience what soldiers went through and more impor-
tantly they saw the personal smallness a soldier felt in the envi-
ronment of the war. The narrator of All Quiet on the Western
Front,Paul Bäumer, occasionally reflected on this state of insignifi-
cance. In one of the novel’s episodes Bäumer escapes the war for a
night with two of his comrades to a small house with three French
women. While there the private becomes unsure of himself, “there
is nothing here that a man can hold on to…nothing remains to
recall for me the assurance and self-confidence of the soldier; no
rifle, no belt, no tunic, no cap. I let myself drop into the unknown,
come what may—yet, in spite of all, I feel somewhat afraid.”7 In
this moment Bäumer represented the men who returned to civil-
ian life after the war, and attempted to relearn what civilian life
6 Samuel Williams
meant. These men spent the twilight of their youth in the mud and
blood of the Western Front. As Remarque also mentioned in Egge-
brecht’s interview, “The generation of young people who, no mat-
ter for what motives, was rushed through this time, necessarily had
to be formed differently than all previous generations.”8 Remar-
que experienced this shaping first hand and sought to capture his
generation of war scarred men in his work. Bäumer, as a char-
acter, represented only certain soldiers who could have identified
with him, but as a symbol of a young man robbed of innocence, he
achieved a more universal understanding for readers.
Remarque’s novel drew both praise and criticism in the years
following its 1929 release. The hopeless nature and disillusion-
ment of war, specifically the motivations of the Great War, res-
onated with many survivors. Adversely some governments were
displeased with the book upon its release. As the Nazis rose to
power in the 1930s they adamantly sought to remove Remarque’s
novel from the collective knowledge of the German people, and
rekindle the fire of German Militaristic pride. While a New York
Timesreviewer in the United States praised the book observing
that, “There is one further quality…in addition to its magnificent
physical picture of war and its burden of a lost generation, and
that is its humanity. It is an objective book, an ironic book, but
it is never callous, never hardboiled, never unfeeling.”9 American
readers celebrated the truths of the novel. A telling example that
a German’s, a “Hun’s,” novel drew such praise from those that
fought them and aided in the creation of the trauma experienced by
the author and the characters in the novel. Perhaps after Americans
saw the perspective of the other side the slight pang of guilt made
the American readers a much more receptive audience to the novel
than Eastern Europe.
While Remarque found some praise in Europe, more voices raised
a skeptic or scornful voice toward his novel than in America. In
Austria the Defense Minister, Karl Vaugoin, bemoaned, “the con-
tents of the book are calculated to impair the military qualities of
our recruits. The book emphasizes only the shady side of war while
Great Lakes Journal of Undergraduate History 7
treating all the soldierly virtues skeptically. The Ministry is not
concerned with the literary value of the book.”10 Minister Vaugoin
denounced the book as dishonest when justifying his order that it
be banned from military libraries. He could not allow the reality of
what the book described to influence the new soldiers who had not
yet experienced the brutality of modern warfare. A graphic nature
that Thomas Ware analyzed when he looked at the scene of the
novel where Bäumer and other soldiers took shelter in unearthed
coffins from incoming shells. Ware pointed out that this encounter
drew attention to the blatantly inescapable nature of death in World
War I when soldiers lived daily with the awareness that they faced
death.11 Even though few would have blamed military leaders
for not wanting the lingering presence of the reaper constantly on
the minds of their soldiers. This refusal of, or acceptance of the
book drew hard lines in the sand depending on where the disagree-
ment took place. The criticism extended past the book and to the
author, and these early attacks on the book set the groundwork for
more censorship of material the military and government found
disagreeable into 1930.
Prefacing his analysis of the reception of All Quiet on the Western
FrontSchneider outlined that as the National Socialists grew in
numbers, Remarque’s novel, as well as the American movie adap-
tation that followed closely thereafter in 1930, became early tar-
gets for censorship.12 In Eggebrecht’s interview Remarque pre-
saged, “if you cannot admit a thing, you try to discredit the
author.”13 Eventually, in late 1930 the Weimar Republic banned
the movie much to the joy of the Nazis. This move paved the
way for their growing influence on the Republic until its end in
1933.14 The shadow of trauma lingering from the war served only
to hinder the cause of the warmongering Nazis. Even with divided
opinions on the merit of the piece, most critics agreed that works
about the war and the subsequent discussions they inspired were
still needed in 1929.15 Despite rumours and hearsay surrounding
Remarque and his novel the connection felt between the war’s sur-
vivors and the characters of the book were compelling. The fact
alone that certain groups sought to ban the book showed that they
8 Samuel Williams
feared the populace at large would accept the book and see the war
through Remarque’s eyes. That fear seemed to remain in Germany
and Eastern Europe, while these works of critical narrative about
the war were embraced in other countries.
Not all post-war writers bred the controversy that Remarque did.
Another prolific writer, Ernest Hemingway also transformed his
personal war experiences into works of literature that resonated
with post-war readers, veterans and civilians alike. These two
both reflected the bitterness soldiers developed directed at the war
and eventually toward life outside the war. Two of Hemingway’s
World War I novels gave little account of the characters in the war.
In The Sun Also Risesthe story follows former soldiers several
years after the war, and A Farewell to Arms, while it took place
during the war, used few descriptions of the trenches and the fight-
ing favoring hospitals and Italian cities. The Italian front became
little more than a backdrop for a majority of the story to instead
put focus on those living with the war and not the war itself.
Hemingway’s first novel, The Sun Also Rises directly addressed
the futility of life soldiers could, and did, face following the war.
This post war soldier is represented by the narrator Jake Barns, a
character who passed through the book like wind through a screen
door due to his inability to reconnect with life. The crux of this
indifference is exhibited by his futile entanglement with the free-
spirited Lady Brett Ashley. That sense of futility caused by a war
injury which rendered him impotent. The New York Timesreview
summed up this relationship as, “an erotic attraction which is des-
tined from the start to be frustrated.”16 Jake could not escape the
war due to the injury that left him permanently disabled. The frus-
tration caused by this, and pointed out in theTimesreview, is per-
fectly summed up in the closing of the book as the two characters
sit together in the back of a taxi, physically close to one another.
Lady Brett sighed about how, “we could have had such a damned
good time together,” and Jake only responded, “Yes…isn’t it pretty
to think so.”17 Jake, like many others wounded in the war, could
only grasp at the notion of a full life. Furthermore, Hemingway
Great Lakes Journal of Undergraduate History 9
symbolized the doomed bull in the arena as a tie-in to Jake’s lack
of life. As Verna Kale commented in his biography of Hemingway,
this story greatly reflected Hemingway’s own trip to Spain and
his experience with bullfighting, and the revelation to the author
that, “the bull was, before it even entered the ring, destined to die.
What mattered was the way it died.”18 Hemingway, in the novel,
described the bullfight as, “something that was going on with a
definite end, and less of a spectacle with unexplained horrors.”19
He outlined a shift in the thought of death, that in the post-war
world people started to view the war less for its horrors, and more
as a series of calculated movements by matadors that while seem-
ing to put themselves in danger were just leading the bull to its
own end. Survivors of the war were left unable to fully experi-
ence the present due to the scars of the past, and more so started to
view their escape from a pre-planned demise more critically. Due
to these more realized barriers to the world they sought to escape
the present.
Another aspect of The Sun Also Risesemerged in the attempt to
retreat from the present to a state of detachment. This manifested
in the post-war world in the sentiments of the generation of sur-
vivors. Hemingway echoed these instances of self-removal expe-
rienced by veterans in his novel. Vernon summarized in his article
“The Rites of War and Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises” that
American veterans after the war at times gathered together in large
conventions and engaged in general debauchery away from regular
family and community life.20 Jake and his friends left Paris for the
festivals of Spain, though the trip itself seemed to stir little artic-
ulated joy as the question of money and the strained relationship
between Jake and Lady Brett overshadowed the planning of it.21
The escapism of the trip mattered more than the trip itself, just as
the escape of veterans from their everyday life led to some sem-
blance of care-freeness. They sought to step out of their civilian
life and into a space not their own. Hemingway himself expressed
this desire in a letter in 1922 to Gertrude Stein in which he wrote,
“Paris is rainy and cold…why don’t you come back and cheer up
10 Samuel Williams
this town?”22 A prevailing attitude of discontent fell over the post-
war world, and Hemingway tapped into that for his novel.
Further drawing on the war, specifically from his personal experi-
ence in the war, Hemingway again tackled the issue of what sol-
diers became after they left the war in his novel A Farewell to
Arms. The story modelled after Hemingway’s own love affair with
an American nurse, Agnes von Kurowsky, that left him heartbro-
ken though she, “was forthright but not cruel,” when she ended
their relationship.23 This desire Agnes had to spare Hemingway
laced itself in the narrative that he wrote as a 1929 New York
Timesreview commented, “We do not attempt to say how much
Mr. Hemingway may have been affected by his narrative; but it is
certain he has no desire to see his readers weep.”24 This style used
by Hemingway differed greatly from Remarque though both A
Farewell to Armsand All Quiet on the Western Frontare set in the
closing years of the war. Greatly in part because Hemingway emu-
lated the soldier’s struggle to leave the war behind, and Remarque
told the tale of soldiers. This struggle most notably referred to as
“shell-shock,” and defined by Jay Winters as, “a term for medi-
ation, but one with a quicksilver and shifting character. It stood
between soldiers who saw combat and physicians behind the lines
who rarely did…between veterans and families often unable to
comprehend the nature of the injuries that men bore with them
in later years.”25 This unseen affliction kept soldiers from being
able to completely return home after the war. Hemingway, just like
in The Sun Also Rises, drove this idea across in the ending of A
Farewell to Arms. The narrator, Frederic Henry, sat in a delivery
room with his wife’s body and described it as, “saying good-bye to
a statue.”26 The sharp disconnects with others, namely loved ones,
as Winter described, plagued those that returned from the war. The
idea of Frederic equating his wife’s body with a cold non-living
object implied the struggle experienced to view the dead as ever
having been alive in the first place. This struggle, amplified to a
greater degree by the extension of it, going past nameless bodies in
no-man’s land to close loved ones. While Remarque captured the
graphic moments of the war that left scars on the survivors, Hem-
Great Lakes Journal of Undergraduate History 11
ingway told of how the events of the war and personal involvement
in it shaped the ability of those survivors who walked away from
the war.
The desire to communicate the realities of the war motivated both
Remarque and Hemingway. Though they took two different styles
to achieve that goal. Remarque wrote of the horrors of war as they
were experienced first-hand, and Hemingway portrayed the lasting
effects felt by those who survived. However, not all writers who
came out of the war sought to capture reality or the horrors of it.
J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis allowed their experiences in World
War I influence their work without the war consuming it.
Narnia, the fictional world created by C.S. Lewis, embodied
reflections of Lewis’s wartime experience both the sight of battle
and the life of a soldier. This imagined land created a place for
Lewis to express his war trauma in a landscape outside of reality.
In several moments of Lewis’s book titled The Lion, the Witch
and the Wardrobe, scenes of combat reflected what Lewis experi-
enced in the trenches. As Melton commented in his observations
on Lewis, he only brought his descriptions of violence to the
needed detail for that story and that “he uses reality to keep lit-
erature in check. World War I taught Lewis that wars are not to
be encouraged.”27 On this point Lewis kept these influences to
details of his writing and not as large subjects or descriptors. For
example, in the final battle of the book, the description is contained
on a single page. The account of Edmund’s wounds from the bat-
tle presented the most detail of the reality of war. Lewis wrote, “he
was covered with blood, his mouth was open, and his face a nasty
green colour.”28 As Melton again observed, “he would not have
had to venture too deeply into his memory to dredge up a genuine
picture upon which to base his description of Edmund.”29 This
use of detail gave Narnia a tactile connection to reality. Through
these well-crafted moments Lewis communicated the realities of
war that he witnessed first-hand.
Hand in hand with expressing the horrors during the war, Lewis
12 Samuel Williams
also showed, through Narnia, the more day to day reality soldiers
experienced. Lewis attempted to spare his father the conditions of
the trenches by focusing on the dug outs more than the guns.30 In a
letter to his father describing his time in the trenches Lewis wrote,
“the dug outs are very much more comfortable than one imagines
at home…I had quite a pleasant time, and was only once in a sit-
uation of unusual danger, owing to a shell falling near the latrines
while I was using them.”31 Other war authors, such as the English
poet Wilfred Owen, did the same. When Owen wrote to his mother
from a dug out, “there is no danger down here, or if any, it will be
well over before you read these lines. I hope you are as warm as I
am; as serene in your room as I am here.”32 Both Owen and Lewis
focused on the safety of the dugouts and give little mind to the
dangers of the front. This mentality of protective earth appeared in
Prince Caspian, the second of Lewis’s novels, in the description of
Aslan’s How. The How, a fortification of earth, shared some char-
acteristic with the English trenches such as the comfort it gave to
those using it, Lewis also described it as a place more welcom-
ing and pleasant than the trenches.33 Even though Lewis drew on
reality in the creation of Narnia he did not seek to recreate real-
ity in the fantasy. As he transformed reality into fiction, he gave
it a silver lining. This reflected his renewed acceptance of religion
in contrast to the growing scepticism against faith that dominated
post-war thought.34 These reflections of his life as a soldier woven
into his fiction allowed him to show this hopeful acceptance of the
future and that the war did not forever destroy humanity.
While Lewis gave subtle reference to this hope for the survival
of personal humanity after the war, J.R.R. Tolkien in The Lord
of the Ringstrilogy wrote about the importance of the resiliency
of humanity in a time of conflict. Middle-Earth, like Narnia, held
humans and other mythical peoples. One of these peoples, the
Hobbits, similar to humans excluding their short height and abnor-
mally large and hairy feet, represented the joyful aspects of Mid-
dle-Earth. In the Prologue of the first book of Tolkien’s trilogy
The Fellowship of the Ring, he stated that Hobbits “were a merry
folk…with mouths apt to laughter, and to eating and drinking.
Great Lakes Journal of Undergraduate History 13
And laugh they did.”35 Tolkien easily described the Hobbits as the
most carefree citizens of Middle-Earth. Despite this nature they
held no immunity to the conflicts of the world, just as the young
men of England did not escape the perils of Flanders. One moment
in the final book of the trilogy, The Return of King, captured this
vulnerability of the Hobbits. Pippin, who volunteered to aid his
friends in the book’s main conflict between good and evil, felt
the weight of his commitment setting in after swearing himself
to the service of the human lord Denethor. After being outfitted
with the, “livery and gear of the Tower,” Pippin, “felt uncomfort-
able. And the gloom began to weigh on his spirits.”36 This echoed
Tolkien’s own donning of a uniform. When he left for France with
the British Expeditionary Force, “junior officers were being killed
off, a dozen a minute,” and thus a similar shadow hung over him
as it did Pippin.37 While Tolkien easily could have surrendered to
this despair in his writing, he instead showed the healing that came
after the conflict.
Tolkien set himself apart from other war authors by showing there
was a possibility of a light at the end of the tunnel which returned
veterans to home and family. Soldiers that left France in 1919 were
broken, Tolkien among them. Not all conquered the disillusion-
ment caused by the war, Hemingway was an example. Tolkien
showed that humanity did not lose the world in the fallout of the
war. The One Ring, the focal point of the conflict and its destruc-
tion that ultimately ended that conflict, acted as a physical embod-
iment of the mystical nature of Middle-Earth. After its undoing by
the main character Frodo all “enchantment,” as Rosegrant called
it, both good and bad, faded from the world. Change came with
the end of the conflict, not just expelling the bad, also slowly los-
ing the good that existed before the war in Middle-Earth started.38
The characters commented on this change, as the members of
the Fellowship returned home Gandalf, a wizard that often pro-
vided wisdom to the others, said, “the New Age begins…and in
this age it may well prove that the kingdoms of Men shall outlast
you, Fangorn my friend.” Fangorn, or Treebeard, later added, “the
world is changing: I feel it in the water…I do not think we shall
14 Samuel Williams
meet again.”39 Gandalf and Treebeard both made up part of the
enchantment of the world and they know they will fade from it.
Tolkien used the fading of these good things to show that humans,
or Men, no longer needed that enchantment in the world. Just as
soldiers returning from France who lost their innocence were now
in a new world that they needed to learn to thrive in.
Tolkien and Lewis both understood and even at times gave into
the despair of their generation, but eventually they also found
relief from it. The reality they brought to their works, as explained
by Joseph Loconte, manifested in the internal struggle every per-
son faced; knowing that change removed both good and evil, and
only through that change could Narnia be reached or the King
to Return.40 To the men that returned from war nothing could
reclaim the past, but this allowed them to give the future to the best
of those that rose to sit on the throne.
The works of Erich Maria Remarque, Ernest Hemingway, C.S.
Lewis, and J.R.R. Tolkien all reflected, and in some way commu-
nicated, the experiences of soldiers serving during World War I. In
addition to these mentioned authors, other artists of the Lost Gen-
eration such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein further cap-
tured the post-war era in Europe and the mental fallout of the war.
However, Fitzgerald and Stein both lacked the experience of war
much like Stephen Crane and the war authors before the twentieth
century. The new generation of war authors attempted a return to
humanity and to find a sense of meaning following the chaos of
the trenches. For Remarque and Hemingway their doubts and scars
never fully vanished after the war. The desire to reclaim what they
lost in the war haunted them and carried into their writings. Con-
versely, Lewis and Tolkien broke free of the nihilism of the rest
of the Lost Generation and found hope in the face of the drastic
changes caused by the war. The hope that through these changes a
better generation could rise to fill the shells left by those who lost
themselves on the battlefields of France.
Great Lakes Journal of Undergraduate History 15
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Great Lakes Journal of Undergraduate History 17
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Explicator,(2005): 99-100.
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1 The Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica, “Lost Generation,”
Encyclopedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/topic/
Lost-Generation (accessed November 15, 2017).
2 J.R.R. Tolkien, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien,ed. Humphrey
Carpenter and Christopher Tolkien (Boston: George Allen &
Unwin LTD, 1981), 10.
3 J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers, (New York: Houghton Mifflin
Harcourt Publishing Company, 1954), 404.
18 Samuel Williams
4 Tolkien, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien,9-10.
5 Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front(New
York: Random House Publishing Group, 1929), i.
6 Thomas Schneider, Erich Maria Remarque Ein militanter Pazi-
fist(Cologne: Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1994), 44-5.
7 Remarque, All Quite on the Western Front,149.
8 Schneider, Erich Maria Remarque Ein militanter Pazifist,46.
9 Louis Kronenberger, “War’s Horror as a German Private Saw
it,” New York Times,(June 02, 1929), [database on-line]; avail-
able from ProQuest Historic Newspapers: The New York Times.
10 “BARS BOOK FROM SOLDIERS,” New York Times,
(August 18, 1929), [database on-line]; available from ProQuest
Historic Newspapers: The New York Times.
11 Thomas Ware, “Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front,”
The Explicator,(2005): 99, [database on-line]; available from Tay-
lor & Francis Online.
12 Thomas Schneider, “The Truth about the War Finally,” Jour-
nalism Studies,(September 12, 2015): 493, [database on-line];
available from Taylor & Francis Online.
13 Schneider, Pazifist,44.
14 Schneider, “The Truth about the War Finally,” 493.
15 Ibid., 496.
16 MARITAL TRAGEDY,” New York Times,(October 31, 1926,)
[database on-line]; available from ProQuest Historic Newspapers:
The New York Times.
17 Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises(New York: Charles
Scribner’s Sons, 1926), 250.
18 Verna Kale, Ernest Hemingway(London: Reaktion Books
LTD, 2016), 55.
19 Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises,171-2.
20 Alex Vernon, “The Rites of War and Hemingway’s The Sun
Also Rises.” The Hemingway Review35, 1 (2015): 15, [database
on-line]; available from Project MUSE.
21 Hemingway, Sun,87-90.
22 Ernest Hemingway, The Letters of Ernest Hemingway,ed. San-
dra Spanier and Robert W. Trogdon, Vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2011), 363.
Great Lakes Journal of Undergraduate History 19
23 Kale, Ernest Hemingway,26-7.
24 Percy Hutchison, “Love and War in the Pages of Mr. Heming-
way,” New York Times,(September 29, 1929), [database on-line];
available from ProQuest Historic Newspapers: The New York
Times.
25 Jay Winter “Shell-shock and the Cultural History of the Great
War,” Journal of Contemporary History35, 1 (January 1, 2000): 7,
[database on-line]; available from Sage Journals.
26 Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms,(New York: Charles
Scribner’s Sons, 1929), 284.
27 Brain Melton, “The Great War and Narnia: C.S. Lewis as Sol-
dier and Creator,” Mythlore: A Journal of J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S.
Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature30,1-2 (Fall/
Winter 2011): 133, [database on-line]; available from ProQuest
Literature Online.
28 C.S. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch
and the Wardrobe,(New York: HarperCollins, 1955), 192.
29 Melton, “The Great War and Narnia: C.S. Lewis as Soldier and
Creator,” 135.
30 Joseph Loconte, A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War
,(Nashville: Nelson Books, 2015), 91-2.
31C.S. Lewis, The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis,ed. Walter
Hooper, Vol. 1 (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), 351-2.
32 Wilfred Owen, Wilfred Owen Selected Letters,ed. John Bell
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 362.
33 Melton, “Narnia,” 139-40.
34 Loconte, A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War,126-9.
35J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring,(New York:
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 1954), Hobbits
are treated as a proper noun in the book and are capitalized to
reflect that in this paper.
36 J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King,(New York: Houghton
Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 1954), 789.
37 Loconte, Hobbit, 56.
38John Rosegrant, “The interplay between loss and enchantment
in the works of J. R. R. Tolkien,” Psychoanalytic Psychology33, 4
(2016): 612, [database on-line]; available from American Psycho-
20 Samuel Williams
logical Association: PsycNET.
39 Tolkien, The Return of the King,957, 959.
40 Loconte, Hobbit, 193-6.