On War and Writing by Samuel Hynes is hardly about war at all. There is little about combat here, or the actual business of fighting and killing — what Shakespeare wryly called ‘the fire-eyed maid of smoky war/ All hot and bleeding’. Hynes is an august scholar of English literature and particularly the literature of 20th-century warfare. But he also served as a bomber pilot in the Pacific during the second world war, and has written an engaging, plain-spoken memoir of his service called Flights of Passage, published in 1988. His two vocations, he explains in the introduction to his new book, are ‘professor’ and ‘pilot’, and here the professor not the pilot is at the controls.
This is a collection of essays and reviews, including a short account of his experiences working as an adviser for a TV series about the second world war, and some criticism of the war poetry of Thomas Hardy, W.B. Yeats and others. It is possible to trace a single line of thinking through these varied contents. There are two connected parts to this.
The first is that men dream of fighting the wars before the one they find themselves in. There is a little nostalgia in the hearts of soldiers, and all who look upon them, and this longing for an ideal past most clearly dominates our understanding of the second world war. ‘When you think of the scale of our war, and the absolute moral clarity we saw in it,’ writes Hynes, ‘it was inevitable that the next generation should imagine it as an epic struggle like the Trojan War.’ In America they still think of it as ‘the good war’, while few in Britain are immune to the lure of a Winston Churchill biopic; and Hynes suggests that there is something sentimental in even the preparation for modern war.
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