The joy of the Great War memoir

Harley Granville-Barker, actor, director, playwright, manager and critic, was a pasha of the Edwardian London stage. As a director, his Midsummer Night’s Dream of 1914 was a theatrical landmark. His own plays were provocative and controversial. The Secret Life, for example, was an analysis of the torpor of the British ruling classes. Waste, involving a married woman’s lethal abortion, was suppressed by the Lord Chamberlain. In 1916, aged 38, at the peak of his celebrity, the great Harley Granville-Barker volunteered for a walk-on part on the Western Front as a Red Cross auxiliary.

Last week I came across an account of his opening night in the trenches, as related to a military doctor, Dr Harold Dearden, and repeated in that man’s riveting Great War diaries, published in 1928 under the title Medicine and Duty.

As London’s leading luvvie entered the darkened front-line trench (reports Dr Dearden’s informant) he was so frightened that as he progressed along it his knuckles beat a tattoo against the wooden sides. Such palpable fear was noticed by the soldiers in residence and Granville-Barker was ‘ragged mercilessly’ for it. Some wag then suggested that the best way for a new chap like him to overcome his fear was to loose off a machine gun at the German trench opposite ‘to get your eye in’. After ‘much persuasion’ the author of the seminal Prefaces to Shakespeare (still used in schools in my day) elected instead to fire a service revolver across no-man’s-land, a single revolver shot being less likely to draw immediate retaliation from the Alley Man. Instead of a revolver, however, a small pistol used to send up incandescent, slowly descending Verey lights was placed in his trembling hand and in the darkness he was hoisted up on to the trench parapet and told to let the thing off.