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Obsessed with World War One
We asked prolific author John Wilson why books about war are so important. He would know.
For his honeymoon, the Wilsons spent much of their time visiting war memorials in Europe.
Much of John Wilson's time in the last year has been spent living in the wartime past. He has been preparing his World War One book for republication, And in the Morning (Heritage House), researching a series of WWI novels, Tales of War (Doubleday) and reading original soldiers' diaries at the Canadian War Museum for an upcoming non-fiction book (Tundra), as well as writing a blog to mark the anniversary of World War One.
Here is what he told us:
--
The other day I was having a phone conversation with a publisher concerning an upcoming non-fiction book on WWI. We were talking about possible publication dates to tie in with significant anniversaries and eventually came to a conclusion. "Okay,"; I said, "the spring of 1917 should work well.";
There was a silence on the other end of the line. This wasn't the only time that I recently got dates wrong by 100 years. I don't have some strange form of historical Alzheimers. The problem is my obsession with history, and WWI in particular.
I was born only 33 years after the end of the Great War. While I was growing up in Scotland, the mutilated survivors of that war, many only in their fifties and sixties, were a very visible part of the cultural landscape, but I paid little attention to them. My heroes growing up were from a more recent war: Spitfire pilots in the Battle of Britain, Commandoes storming enemy beaches, escaped POWs, and spies eluding Gestapo torturers in occupied Europe.
It was only when I began reading war memorials that I realized there was something different about this older war.
Every little village in the west of Scotland has its war memorial. They were erected in the 1920s and 30s and range from a bronze soldier to a plain column. The plinth at the base usually has "Lest We Forget 1914-1918"; carved on the front and this is followed by a list of names, often 30 or more, commemorating the young men from the surrounding area who went to war and never returned. On the back there is sometimes a similar, more recent carving memorializing the dead from the war my heroes fought in-but it usually only has two or three names carved on it.
Even to my teenage mind, there was something very different about this first war. I began reading about it and gradually realized the huge cultural impact that war had. In some cases, the names on the fronts of the memorials represented 1 in 5 or 6 of the young men from that area. For these villages, and for Europe in general, these losses and the manner in which they occurred, were an almost unimaginable catastrophe. Everything changed because of what was recorded on those memorials. Before 1914 was history, a ghostly world of memory hardly more real than the Renaissance, after it was recognizable as the world I, and you, live in.
On my honeymoon, my wife realized what she had signed up for when I took her on a cycling tour of the Somme battlefields and pointed out encouragingly which wood the soldiers of 1916 had marched from and where the machine-guns that slaughtered them had been placed. Since then I have dragged my family up mountains to examine Cathar castles in France, trudged up Cemetery Ridge at Gettysburg, and stood on countless hilltops imagining battles, both vast and small, ebbing and flowing around me. But, because of those village memorials from my childhood, I always return to the Somme, Ypres, Vimy Ridge, Arras, Amiens, Verdun.
I want to travel in time, to visit the lost world of 1914 and experience the events that destroyed it and created my world of today. That's what I spend my life trying to do. Every story I write is more than just a book for other people to read, it is an attempt to recapture the past in my mind, to travel in time, and for the reader, I hope, an invitation to join me on my journey.
I have travelled to the First World War four times so far and I have more trips planned. Each time I go to somewhere different and somewhere other people rarely go.
My first journey was And in the Morning, published by KidsCan Press in 2003 and reissued in 2014 by Heritage House. In many ways, it is my personal favourite. The cover of the original edition featured the face of my wife's great uncle, an eighteen-year-old boy who died at the battle of Loos on September 25, 1915. And in the Morning is also a diary, based on many actual diaries researched in the Imperial War Museum in London, but ultimately my diary, or at least the one I might have written as a teenager between 1914 and 1916.
My second fictional journey was Shot at Dawn (Scholastic's I am Canada Series, 2011) and it deals in more depth with issues touched on in And in the Morning, mainly Post Traumatic Stress Disorder or Shell Shock as it was called back then. It is also a diary of sorts, the memories of a young soldier, Allan McBride, in 1918 as he waits in a shed the night before he is due to be executed for cowardice.
Then, in Wings of War (book 1 in Doubleday's Tales of War Series), I visited the flyers in WWI, not Billy Bishop and the Red Baron, but the early fliers of 1915 and 1916. These were some of the boys who learned to fly in homemade aircraft on prairie farms in 1913 and 1914, and who, when they went to war, had to struggle with the uncertain technology as much as the enemy.
Book 2 in the Tales of War Series, Dark Terror, will be published in 2015 and tells the story of a young Newfoundland miner digging tunnels deep beneath the enemy trenches. Book 3 has no name yet and the journey is not yet complete, but it will tell of a young Belgian nurse recruited into spying for the Allies.
Not all my trips back are fiction, Desperate Glory: The Story of WWI (Dundurn, 2008) is non-fiction. With the extensive use of historic photographs, sidebars and short explanatory texts segments, it does exactly what the title promises, tells the story of the war.
My newest project is different, because for the first time it is not primarily my journey. Tentatively titled, An Artist's War: The Illustrated WWI Diary of Russell Hughes Rabjohn (Tundra) it is the book that I told my publisher should come out in 1917. Rabjohn was a draughtsman and drew what he experienced between 1916 and 1919. He also kept five volumes of written diary and it is my job to combine these elements to tell his story, not mine.
I have come to understand and learned to live with my obsession. No, that's not true, I love my obsession, I embrace it and I am eternally grateful that I have lived long enough to see the 100th anniversary of my favourite piece of history. Over the next four years I can wallow in my obsession, give it free rein and not appear too out of place. Welcome to 1914.
--
Born in Edinburgh in 1951, John Wilson, grew up on the Isle of Skye and in Paisley, near Glasgow. He now lives on Vancouver Island where he has written 39 books for both young adults and adults.
And In the Morning: 978-1-772030-14-3
Wings of War: 978-0-385-67830-8
Visit John Wilson at: the-war-to-end-wars.blogspot.ca
For his honeymoon, the Wilsons spent much of their time visiting war memorials in Europe.
Much of John Wilson's time in the last year has been spent living in the wartime past. He has been preparing his World War One book for republication, And in the Morning (Heritage House), researching a series of WWI novels, Tales of War (Doubleday) and reading original soldiers' diaries at the Canadian War Museum for an upcoming non-fiction book (Tundra), as well as writing a blog to mark the anniversary of World War One.
Here is what he told us:
--
The other day I was having a phone conversation with a publisher concerning an upcoming non-fiction book on WWI. We were talking about possible publication dates to tie in with significant anniversaries and eventually came to a conclusion. "Okay,"; I said, "the spring of 1917 should work well.";
There was a silence on the other end of the line. This wasn't the only time that I recently got dates wrong by 100 years. I don't have some strange form of historical Alzheimers. The problem is my obsession with history, and WWI in particular.
I was born only 33 years after the end of the Great War. While I was growing up in Scotland, the mutilated survivors of that war, many only in their fifties and sixties, were a very visible part of the cultural landscape, but I paid little attention to them. My heroes growing up were from a more recent war: Spitfire pilots in the Battle of Britain, Commandoes storming enemy beaches, escaped POWs, and spies eluding Gestapo torturers in occupied Europe.
It was only when I began reading war memorials that I realized there was something different about this older war.
Every little village in the west of Scotland has its war memorial. They were erected in the 1920s and 30s and range from a bronze soldier to a plain column. The plinth at the base usually has "Lest We Forget 1914-1918"; carved on the front and this is followed by a list of names, often 30 or more, commemorating the young men from the surrounding area who went to war and never returned. On the back there is sometimes a similar, more recent carving memorializing the dead from the war my heroes fought in-but it usually only has two or three names carved on it.
Even to my teenage mind, there was something very different about this first war. I began reading about it and gradually realized the huge cultural impact that war had. In some cases, the names on the fronts of the memorials represented 1 in 5 or 6 of the young men from that area. For these villages, and for Europe in general, these losses and the manner in which they occurred, were an almost unimaginable catastrophe. Everything changed because of what was recorded on those memorials. Before 1914 was history, a ghostly world of memory hardly more real than the Renaissance, after it was recognizable as the world I, and you, live in.
On my honeymoon, my wife realized what she had signed up for when I took her on a cycling tour of the Somme battlefields and pointed out encouragingly which wood the soldiers of 1916 had marched from and where the machine-guns that slaughtered them had been placed. Since then I have dragged my family up mountains to examine Cathar castles in France, trudged up Cemetery Ridge at Gettysburg, and stood on countless hilltops imagining battles, both vast and small, ebbing and flowing around me. But, because of those village memorials from my childhood, I always return to the Somme, Ypres, Vimy Ridge, Arras, Amiens, Verdun.
I want to travel in time, to visit the lost world of 1914 and experience the events that destroyed it and created my world of today. That's what I spend my life trying to do. Every story I write is more than just a book for other people to read, it is an attempt to recapture the past in my mind, to travel in time, and for the reader, I hope, an invitation to join me on my journey.
I have travelled to the First World War four times so far and I have more trips planned. Each time I go to somewhere different and somewhere other people rarely go.
My first journey was And in the Morning, published by KidsCan Press in 2003 and reissued in 2014 by Heritage House. In many ways, it is my personal favourite. The cover of the original edition featured the face of my wife's great uncle, an eighteen-year-old boy who died at the battle of Loos on September 25, 1915. And in the Morning is also a diary, based on many actual diaries researched in the Imperial War Museum in London, but ultimately my diary, or at least the one I might have written as a teenager between 1914 and 1916.
My second fictional journey was Shot at Dawn (Scholastic's I am Canada Series, 2011) and it deals in more depth with issues touched on in And in the Morning, mainly Post Traumatic Stress Disorder or Shell Shock as it was called back then. It is also a diary of sorts, the memories of a young soldier, Allan McBride, in 1918 as he waits in a shed the night before he is due to be executed for cowardice.
Then, in Wings of War (book 1 in Doubleday's Tales of War Series), I visited the flyers in WWI, not Billy Bishop and the Red Baron, but the early fliers of 1915 and 1916. These were some of the boys who learned to fly in homemade aircraft on prairie farms in 1913 and 1914, and who, when they went to war, had to struggle with the uncertain technology as much as the enemy.
Book 2 in the Tales of War Series, Dark Terror, will be published in 2015 and tells the story of a young Newfoundland miner digging tunnels deep beneath the enemy trenches. Book 3 has no name yet and the journey is not yet complete, but it will tell of a young Belgian nurse recruited into spying for the Allies.
Not all my trips back are fiction, Desperate Glory: The Story of WWI (Dundurn, 2008) is non-fiction. With the extensive use of historic photographs, sidebars and short explanatory texts segments, it does exactly what the title promises, tells the story of the war.
My newest project is different, because for the first time it is not primarily my journey. Tentatively titled, An Artist's War: The Illustrated WWI Diary of Russell Hughes Rabjohn (Tundra) it is the book that I told my publisher should come out in 1917. Rabjohn was a draughtsman and drew what he experienced between 1916 and 1919. He also kept five volumes of written diary and it is my job to combine these elements to tell his story, not mine.
I have come to understand and learned to live with my obsession. No, that's not true, I love my obsession, I embrace it and I am eternally grateful that I have lived long enough to see the 100th anniversary of my favourite piece of history. Over the next four years I can wallow in my obsession, give it free rein and not appear too out of place. Welcome to 1914.
--
Born in Edinburgh in 1951, John Wilson, grew up on the Isle of Skye and in Paisley, near Glasgow. He now lives on Vancouver Island where he has written 39 books for both young adults and adults.
And In the Morning: 978-1-772030-14-3
Wings of War: 978-0-385-67830-8
Visit John Wilson at: the-war-to-end-wars.blogspot.ca
Submitted on November 7, 2014 in By David.
