last night horsemouth read lillian hellman's introduction to anton chekov's letters but then started in earnest on ronald blythe's akenfield his account of a suffolk village, this was later made into a film staring local people - kind of like moi, pierre reverte...except without the murders, horsemouth has the press release from 1975 about it he found safely tucked away in the book.
the first story properly told in akenfield is of leonard thompson, a farm labourer, despite his brother dying in the boer war he joins the army in march 1914 just to get off the land and is delighted when war breaks out in august. he puts on weight in basic training because he is being fed properly for the first time and not worked to death, 'it literally happened. it is not a figure of speech' . at harwich 'we were bursting with happiness. we were all damn glad to have got off the farms' . at the dardanelles on the beach they find a marquee tent, inside that are the rotting bodies of the dead. they take and lose and retake hill 13 to the turks, by the end of it only 3 men of the 60 in his unit at harwich have survived. after gallipoli he was sent to france, he survives the somme but is taken prisoner after arras, in clogs in winter they dig the keil railway, many prisoners die. on november 5th 1918 some mutinous german sailors arrive and free them advising them to go and pick potatoes in the fields. he eventually makes it back to the village. some things have change for the better - there are unions and a wages board, but in the summer of 21 there is a drought, the corn act has been repealled because the government doesn't want to pay the subsidy, it descends into years of poverty and persecution before the union can be re-established again in the thirties.
horsemouth thinks this is a necessary corrective to a pastoral idyll that is portrayed as preceding the first world war as if everything was ok until then.
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