blueinkedfrost

Alfred Noyes does Great War patriotism. This book was published in 1918, and therefore likely written before the war ended. The stories definitely read as dated, but one gets a sense on reading them that it's hard to blame the writer for his sense of outrage against the Germans, and against the sinking of the Lusitania and kiling over a hundred civilians in particular. In turn, true-born Americans and British people are highly praised.

Nowadays we know that a lot of reported German atrocities in World War I were exaggerated or invented, although war crimes were committed. (For example - Leipzig war crimes trials.) We analyse various causes of the war and are taught in schools to consider it a tragic result of a complex series of dominoes knocked over when Gavrilo Princip shot the Archduke. We criticise England's then-existing empire as well as the Kaiser's expansionist dreams.

This form of patriotic bravado in fiction bears contrast with the wartime literature that's most regarded today: Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Erich Maria Remarque. Today, we see works with first-hand experience of the horrors of warfare - for soldiers on both sides - as more worthy than these jingoistic tales about pure heroes and vile villains.

(On the other side, it's also been commented that exaggerated stories in World War I contributed to true stories about the Nazis being disbelieved until far too late.)

Volumes like this were one means of how ordinary people in these times survived the war and granted themselves courage and hope, so perhaps they're important for that reason.

I should read more of Noyes' work, because his position and the entire body of his writing are more complex than represented by these particular stories. He's a talented poet.

An interesting sidenote: there are some minor Japanese characters portrayed positively in these stories. I've also noticed that in American girls' boarding-school novels written in the late 1800s-early 1900s, there's a trope of a token Japanese girl sent on exchange to the school who's sweet-natured but not very good at speaking English (which is inevitably used for minstrel-like comedy). America and Japan had a history of friendship at that time, and it comes out in fiction like this. Later, American author Gene Stratton-Porter will write about Japanese Fifth Column sinister grown men passing themselves off as teenagers to subvert society and ruin the country.