23 Ordinary People's Oral History of World War I: What Is "the Truth of War" Built On? | Interviews

"Though their fates differed, their roles differed, and they belonged to different nations, all these people can be united by one fact: what the war took from them — youth, illusions, hope, humanity, or life."

The cover of The Beauty and the Sorrow says: "What we call history is precisely these small moments as felt by ordinary people."

The book's author is Peter Englund — a historian, a writer, and once a war correspondent. He has lived through wars in the Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere.

This is a book about the personal history of World War I. The Chinese edition of The Beauty and the Sorrow tells what the war was like for 23 ordinary people — 23 people from different classes, countries and sides, all swept into the First World War.

The book covers five years, 1914 to 1918, one chapter per year. Every section heading reads like a diary entry: "Thursday, August 2, 1917: Angus Buchanan takes part in the assault on Tandamuti Ridge," or "The same day, Harvey Cushing writes in his diary." The whole book is built like a matrix, and each cell holds what some of the 23 people went through on one day of the war.

The book originally had only 22 people. For the Chinese edition, Englund added Ernst von Levetzow, a German navy lieutenant aboard the light cruiser SMS Emden. When that German warship left Qingdao it carried three Chinese washerwomen and a cat; it was finally sunk by the Australian destroyer HMAS Sydney.

For each country's edition, Englund drops some characters and picks up others with a local connection. The book's matrix structure is what makes that possible. He says he went through roughly 80 to 100 sources to find these added stories, since the book keeps being translated into new languages.

Englund loves detail. The Chinese washerwomen and the cat are real details, and details like these carry unusual weight. He quotes the French writer Stendhal to explain why they matter to him: "All of a person's experience and happiness reside in details." Even the details of a story need further details to hold them up. War is not only one battle after another; it is also ordinary daily life.

Englund says the book works on two levels. On the surface is his narrative, laid out in chronological order; the second level is the private letters and diaries threaded through it. When World War I began, most people believed in the war, but they gradually grew lost, then doubtful, and finally stopped believing in it at all. That shift never surfaces in the narrative. It shows up in the letters and diaries on the second level.

The book opens with the dedication "In memory of Carl Englund" — an Australian soldier wounded in an engagement on September 10, 1918, who died three days later. Carl Englund is a relative of Peter Englund's. Peter had no idea this relative existed until someone told him after a lecture; he then went through various war records and did find this Carl Englund. But that is not the main reason he wrote the book. Carl was buried without a grave, and for Englund the book counts as a kind of burial — the same ending many of war's nameless heroes get.

The book's closing "Epilogue" quotes a passage from Hitler's 1925 Mein Kampf. In an August 18 conversation with Englund, the writer Liu Zhenyun called this the book's 24th character: "Hitler's appearance is what made me see that Englund is a very good writer. Because the best writers care about the structure of their work — about how you arrange the details, the plot and the characters."

World War I brought about Europe's decline; after it, Europe was no longer the center of the world. Englund says: "Whenever people read history books and historical stories, there's always a feeling of: I've finally seen the ending, this is the end. A lot of people like watching a war start, including the people who throw themselves into it, but nobody gets to see the end. When my readers get near the end of this book they may be thinking the same thing: this book is finally over. But then they see Hitler, and they realize it isn't over. The First World War solved so few problems and created so many. So this story hasn't ended; there's a Second World War behind it, even more terrible than this one."

Q: QDaily

Peter Englund: Author of The Beauty and the Sorrow. Interview translation: Wan Zhi

Q: You write about the fates of people who lived through war, and you have lived through war yourself. What is your attitude toward war?

Peter Englund: Treating war as a spectacle and treating it as an experience are two different things.

You can watch a spectacle on television, from a great distance — that is spectacle. You watch it, and there is a force pulling you in, the way you would watch a terrible storm from far off. Seen from a distance it can be very interesting. It is an enormously powerful man-made force; people can generate power simply by creating spectacle. As an experience it is something else entirely.

The difference is the difference between watching a storm from far away and standing inside one.

Across history you can see people drawn in by that force — World War I destroyed Europe's place at the center of the world. But when the war began it was very popular, almost everyone cheered, and war had its own allure. Yet the people I describe always end up disappointing you. Because it drains every person and everything, because it is a force without a soul.

It is an enormous force without a soul. That is my attitude toward war.

Q: Why did you become a war correspondent? In what ways did it shape your life?

Did you go to the front as a journalist because it was a way to become a better historian?

Did those battlefield experiences help your nonfiction writing? Did they give you a truer perspective?

Peter Englund: I am a formally trained soldier, but I am also a historian.

I was offered the chance to be a war correspondent in the Balkan wars. With that chance in front of me, I had no reason to turn down the opportunity to see things with my own eyes.

As a historian you always arrive at historical events too late. Going to a place where something is actually happening is a rare opportunity. Historians live with a certain frustration: you are never on the scene, you are always a step behind. Seeing those wars on the ground really did make me a better historian. The experience helped me understand much better how people behave and react under extreme conditions.

One important thing living through war taught me has to do with information — with understanding why people make the decisions they make. When you are inside history, your information is limited. As a historian arriving 100 or 200 years late, I usually have a much fuller picture. People inside history — and this is not only true of war — usually have far less, and they are guided by whatever narrow range of information they have. So you come to understand how people react in extreme situations. You can't ask why these historical figures thought as they did; the point is that they were given very little information and their minds were under terrible pressure. That helps you understand much better why people make very stupid decisions — not because they are stupid, but because they lack information and are under extraordinary pressure. It made me humbler in how I relate to historical figures. You come to understand why they reacted and acted as they did.

Q: About the title The Beauty and the Sorrow — how should we understand the "beauty" in it?

Peter Englund: There is an American surgeon in the book named Harvey Cushing. When I started writing about him I didn't know that much about him. He was a hugely important figure in modern neurology, a famous brain surgeon. He went to Europe because he was fascinated by how the brain affects a person. As a surgeon he had operated on people constantly, his hands were always covered in blood, and he knew exactly what war costs. But when he visited France in 1917, what he saw there still shocked him. Even though he understood the cost of war, when this brain surgeon saw the scene in front of him he said: now I know, this is what a person is made of.

Beauty stands for everything that draws people into war. There has never been a shortage of people willing to go and fight.

Beauty stands for everything that makes people want a war, that stirs them up for a war, that makes them want to fight in it themselves. It stands for the pull of all those things, everything that makes people want war and want to join it. That is what "beauty" stands for.

The fact is that war is often very attractive at the start, and by the time it ends it is never popular.

A simple fact: war is easy to start and hard to end.

(Q: Is that "beauty," in quotation marks, ironic?)

It is ironic. In many editions of the book, including the first Swedish one, the cover itself is ironic. The title is The Beauty and the Sorrow, and the cover image is a corpse gnawed by rats. The irony is very obvious in the Swedish edition. In English it is simply The Beauty and the Sorrow, with no "of the battle" attached. Beauty and sorrow — there is an irony inside the pairing. Many editions dropped the word "war" altogether; "the beauty and the sorrow" makes a better title on its own.

Q: How did the 23 people in The Beauty and the Sorrow become your subjects?

Did you have a method for the book first and then choose material to fit it, or did this way of writing emerge as you gathered material?

Peter Englund: Before I wrote this book I already knew there were a great many letters and memoirs from World War I. I taught university history courses on the war, so I knew these written materials existed long beforehand. In Europe there are books that came out of World War I and have since become classics. Even if you have no interest in history, they have such living literary quality that you can read them as literature — Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, for instance. There are at least ten classic books about World War I that people already read as literary classics.

So World War I really was a "literary" war. World War II did not produce nearly as many literary classics, though there are books like The Diary of Anne Frank.

I wanted to write a book connected to this, but I did not want to write a conventional one, because so many conventionally written books had already become classics. I wanted a book that told history in a new way — a history that unfolds only from the bottom up, rather than a grand narrative. I wondered: what would happen if I wrote it out of the individual experiences of more than 20 people? So I wrote what individuals saw and lived through, in order to convey a picture of the war.

The hardest part of this book was the method — how to structure it. Structuring it was a technical problem. The structure weaves characters and time together, like building a matrix: you lay out the days from the start of the war to its end, then place the characters inside and fill in the cells one by one.

That matrix, the idea about structure, came first.

The other hard part was choosing which characters to place in the matrix, because there was so much material and I had to decide who to put in which cell. When I chose characters I wanted a range of people: not only soldiers, officers and men, but also women and children; not only the British, but people from different parts of the world.

The matrix generated its own narrative, one week to a cell. At the start it was easy to add characters; then it got harder and harder. I did not want the same person in every chapter — they needed some distance between appearances. Toward the end, finding an empty cell became harder and harder.

But sometimes the choice of date was accidental. So I did not always pick the best day, the most dramatic day. Sometimes I wanted to place a person on a certain date and nothing happened to that person during that stretch of time. That did not matter, because one of the things this book is trying to say is that war is not all dramatic events. Much of the time it is dull and nothing happens. A book about war should not have too much action in it, because war itself does not involve that much fighting. Some people in this book never heard a single shot, and their experience is relevant too — it is also part of the experience of war.

Q: You've said World War I was a "literary" war. Is that a description you arrived at from knowing many other wars? What made this war one that survives mainly in writing?

Peter Englund: Yes, I say it was a "literary" war. What let me see it was the knowledge I have as a historian combined with an eye for literature. During World War I, literature was part of people's lives; literature may never have had such powerful influence again. Reading about war and writing about war were, in World War I, the most important way of spreading the experience of war.

After that came new media, and with them new ways to spread and share experience. By World War II we had radio and moving images. Adopting new media changed how people took part in war and how war spread, and I think that meant far less experience was written down. During the Iraq War I noticed that every American soldier had a small camera and kept taking photographs, and very few people wrote anything down. That was an "image" war; their memories were made of images. World War I was made of text — back then there was only text.

Of course people still write about war today; even the Iraq War produced a good number of fine literary texts. But after World War I, writing gradually lost its central place and images gradually became more and more important. We remember World War I through written material. When we think of World War II, images already sit at the center of the memory.

Q: The book repeatedly mentions a rule of war — "one is one, two is two," an attitude of not harming the innocent. A note in the book says 90% of World War I prisoners of war went home alive, unlike in World War II. Why could people keep to the rules of war so strictly in World War I, and not afterward?

Peter Englund: I think the main reason is that the war of 1914 was more civilized than the war of 1939. The Second World War in 1939 was itself caused by the First, but the war of 1914 was, in more respects, a more civilized war.

World War I was not an ideological war or a racial war; World War II was both. World War I was a conflict between different nations. In it, people did not see their opponents as animals to be crushed, as inferior life to be wiped out. In a war that was not ideological, the enemy was not an animal to be exterminated but an opponent worth respecting.

At the university in Uppsala, Sweden, there is a war memorial with a long list of names of students and graduates who died in the war. Among them are three or four names of men who set out in 1914 to fight for Germany. They were Germans, but they are still commemorated for having fought in the war. They were respected opponents.

Q: The book includes Robert Musil and Franz Kafka, both called modernist novelists, both with a sense of the absurd in their work. You've said, "Their greatness lies in their ability to turn a reality that is so often absurd into great literature." What kind of effect do you think World War I had on them?

Peter Englund: Musil and Kafka were both transformed by living through the war.

I think Musil was transformed more in his sense of absurdity — he painted that absurdity into his own era, above all in his book The Man Without Qualities. Kafka already held an absurdist attitude toward existence before the war, but during the war his sense of the absurd suddenly became the absurdity of the age. As the age turned absurd, Kafka's absurdity and the age matched each other. So the change the war worked in Musil and the change it worked in Kafka were different.

The age and Kafka fell more and more into step. Kafka had that sense of absurdity from the first day of the war. As the war grew more and more absurd, Kafka began expressing something with the same force it had always had. Without the war, the greatness of Kafka's work would not be understood as it is.

If you will allow me a guess: without living through the war, Musil's The Man Without Qualities probably could not have been written. At the very start of the war, Musil was one of the people cheering it on. Kafka would have written his work no matter what. That, I think, is the difference between the two writers.

Q: On telling grand history through individual stories — whose technique or way of thinking did you learn from?

Peter Englund: I am a historian, and a great deal of my research material consists of individual stories.

Second, individual material exists inside history whether or not anyone ever brings it up. My work as a journalist increased my interest in individual stories.

Third, I am curious about people. When I see someone on the street, on a bus, on a plane, I easily find myself wondering what kind of person they are, what their life is like, what they aspire to, what they are hoping for. I am interested in people.

There is a saying in Europe: "If you save one life, you save a universe."

I find the individual human being deeply interesting, and this is an experimental book that uses only individual material.

The problem with that is obvious: it is very easy to lose the larger picture. One reason I could write this book at all is that many books describing the background of the era already exist. You need books written from the bottom up, and you also need books with a grand narrative, written from the top down. You need both. With only the grand narrative you get a macro view but lose the humanity in it. If you write only from the individual level, readers may well fail to grasp the whole.

It is like sitting in a hotel looking out at the city: you can see the tall buildings, but you rarely see people moving. When you take the elevator down, leave the air-conditioned room and step out into the warm street, you see living people and concrete lives under the shade of the trees. But standing on the street, you can no longer see the tall buildings. Shanghai is in fact a combination of the two: Shanghai has tall buildings, and it also has buses and people on the street. As a historian you are always up in the tall building, watching the city move fast below. But neither part can be left out.

Q: Why isn't this way of telling a story more common?

Peter Englund: Because it is not a traditional narrative.

The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle was the first to define story, or tragedy. What is a story? A story has a beginning, a middle and an end.

I think it is uncommon because without a narrative arc you don't know whether the pieces will connect in the end. So writing this book was an experiment. It took me at least six months just to establish that the method could work, that it could become a book. It is also a question of a critical point: how many stories do you need before they combine into something of greater value, something more? With only 50 individual stories, they will not turn into anything bigger. Where is the critical point — how many stories does it take to make a book: 30, 70, 100 or 200? That, I think, is why it is uncommon. It is an experimental method, not a traditional story but a combination of narratives, and it is hard to judge in advance whether such a method works.

My intention at the start was simply to build a fairly complete picture of the war out of one individual story after another. I held on to that impulse and did not give up, and eventually I got here. When you tell a story you have to connect the pieces, and that is where this book is experimental. I had a great many stories and I had to string them together. At the beginning it may have been a scattering of loose pearls; strung together at the end, it became a pearl necklace.

Q: In the early 1970s you took part in anti-Vietnam War group activities and in the youth wing of Sweden's Social Democratic Party. But you never joined a political group again after that. What changed? Did it affect how you later studied history and wrote?

Peter Englund: For me, those experiences made me realize I have no interest in politics.

I found it hard to stand behind any one party and support it. That is a problem inherent to parties: they all demand total loyalty. But as a writer I cannot be absolutely loyal to anything except the truth. The effect on me was that I look at people and events more fairly, as an intellectual rather than in political terms. I want to understand what is happening in the world, and to understand people. It was a natural choice, not an important one.

But I still believe in social justice.

Q: Poltava has not been translated into Chinese. Can you tell us what kind of book it is?

Peter Englund: It was my first book, written more than 30 years ago. It is a more traditional history book. It has one main narrative, about a battle between Sweden and Russia. Sweden lost, Russia won. That battle determined Russia's later rise; without it, Russia would not have become a great power. Sweden and Russia fought many wars against each other, and this was the longest and bloodiest, lasting 21 years.

The book is about that war, a turning point in history. It is more of a traditional history book, but it still contains many individual figures. While writing it I collected all the personal material that could still be found about a battle fought 300 years ago, so this book too has multiple characters in it.

Broadly speaking, it is a traditional history book written by a young man.

Q: I hear your next book will be a work of history on a 20th-century subject, in a somewhat unusual form. Are you deliberately looking for innovation in how you write?

Peter Englund: Exploring and experimenting with narrative is very interesting to me. I believe in experimenting with form.

Cover image from Wikipedia