In a 1982 essay called 'My War' Paul Fussell described how - at the age of 20 - he became a full-time ironist: one who, by means of his experience in combat, had learned to perceive 'some great gulf, half-comic and half-tragic, between what one expects and what one finds'. And in his book The Great War and Modern Memory, the soldier poets and memoirists who featured most prominently were those who had found themselves stranded in that same 'great gulf', learning firsthand how wrong they had been in their imaginings of what awaited them in France.

LRB 28 September 1989 | PDF Download