The man Jeeves

Ninety years ago this weekend the battle of the Somme had settled into its ghastly inexorability. The excruciating debacle of its opening offensive on 1 July — 19,240 killed, 35,493 wounded, 2,152 missing, the British army’s highest casualty rate in a single day’s fighting — was already logged as a grievous scar on future generations as well as history. The guns continued until muffled by the snows of November when the scoreboard of losses read: Germany 650,000, Britain 418,000, France 194,000. Back home in Blighty, shining idealism long replaced by a bitter and cynical despair meant that only a pursuit of mundane ‘normality’ kept spirits up and home fires burning. That midsummer of 1916 saw published in London a new story by a prolific 35-year-old comic writer P.G. Wodehouse, titled The Man with Two Left Feet. It featured not only popular silly ass Bertie Wooster but, for the first time, a sage and tranquilly mollifying manservant, a treasure of a gentleman’s gent whose character at once so tickled readers that within a year the unflappable fellow had assumed top billing when Wodehouse called his sequel simply My Man Jeeves.