AustLit

'Disillusionment as a style of war fiction, with its characteristic debunking of old- fashioned glorious-war notions, owes its prominence more to the post-war, depression-oppressed mood of the 1930s than to the war's factual history. Soldier authors such as Sassoon, Graves and Aldington followed Remarque's popular All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) with their own reminiscences, part auto-biography, part imagination, and wholly literary. With an emphasis on the terrible conditions and the devastating experiences of sensitive individual protagonists, the disenchanted novels of the Great War canon expose war's futility and horror. The disenchantment perspective is generally summarised as the culpable sacrifice of idealistic young men by war-mongering politicians and profiteers. Its tropes are the Western Front trench, mud, shellshock, summary executions and the ruin of a generation. Although recent historical and literary analyses have demonstrated errors, exaggerations and misunderstandings in these clichés, popular memory still prefers disillusion. So indeed does current literary fiction set in the period.' (p. 2)