All Else Is Folly. Peregrine Acland
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of Canadian verse.
10 W.D. Lighthall. “Canadian Poets of the Great War,” in From the Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada – Third Series, Ottawa: Royal Society of Canada, 1918, Appendix A: LI.
11 Pearson’s Magazine: 327.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid.
15 Projecting into enemy territory, the Ypres salient was the site of numerous battles, the most famous being the Second Battle of Ypres (April 21–May 25, 1915), which saw the destruction of much of Ypres and Germany’s first mass use of poison gas on the Western Front.
16 Ibid, 328.
17 Ibid.
18 At the time of the first deployment, the Battle of the Somme had been raging for more than a month. The largest engagement of the war, it ended on November 18, 1916, having claimed over one million casualties.
19 Pearson’s Magazine: 328.
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid.
22 PA, letter to Endicott Peabody, May 2, 1924, Groton School Archives.
23 PA, letter to Endicott Peabody, December 20, 1925, Groton School Archives.
24 PA, letter to Endicott Peabody, March 16, 1921, Groton School Archives. Ian Hay is the pseudonym of John Hay Beith, author of The First Hundred Thousand (1916). A lighthearted account of his wartime experiences serving with the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, it proved to be one of the most popular books published during the conflict.
a note on the text
This new edition of All Else is Folly uses the text from the final 1929 McClelland & Stewart edition. Inconsistencies in the spelling of specific words have been edited to favour the Canadian. Two versions of the poem “The Reveille of Romance” have been added to this edition.
ALL ELSE IS FOLLY
To M.L.A.
Even if there were not a thousand other reasons for doing so, I would dedicate this book to you because your criticisms have been my chief help in writing it.
P.A.
“It is more passion and ever more that we need if we are to undo the work of Hate, if we are to add to the gaiety and splendour of life, to the sum of human achievement, to the aspiration of human ecstasy.”
— Havelock Ellis
“You I advise not to work but to fight. You I advise not to peace but to victory. Let your work be a fight. Let your peace be a victory.…
“Man shall be trained for war, and woman for the recreation of the warrior; all else is folly.”
— Friederich Nietzsche: Thus Spake Zarathustra
I do hope that, quite apart from the esthetico-literary considerations that are my usual tic and that as a rule prevent the British reader from paying any attention to books that I urge on his attention so that I practically never, whatever may be the case with the United States, write any prefaces for the English editions of books.… I do hope then that a very large public may be found for Major Acland’s book on both sides of the Atlantic.
For it is the convincing, mournful and unrelieved account of a simple soul’s sufferings in the late war.
And I believe that those sufferings have never been sufficiently brought home to the public as a whole and that is why the late war has not aroused half the horror of war as a whole that it should have aroused.… For the defect of all novel-writing is that, as a rule, the novelist — heaven help him! — must needs select unusual, hypersensitized souls to endure any vicissitudes that he is pleased to make them endure and that makes him lose half the game with the normal reader. I remember very well — for I am not pleading not guilty! — thinking to myself when about half-way through a novel about the late war: “Well, my central character is altogether such a queer, unusual fellow that I do not see how anyone is going much to sympathize with him in his misfortunes.…” Thoughts to that effect…. And pretty nearly as much can be said of the books of most of my Anglo-Saxon or Latin colleagues, whilst, on the whole, writers from the Central or Slavic Empires emphasize the note by dwelling on the sufferings of mournful but unusual peasants. The result is that the normal man says: “These are not normal people!” and continues to comfort himself either by imagining that the late struggle was for those engaged in it a perpetual picnic varied with sexual jamborees or by ignoring the matter altogether.
That is a misfortune. But it is a misfortune that Major Acland’s book may do a great deal to mitigate. For his central character is about as normal in temperament and circumstances as it is possible to be. He is neither high nor low in station; neither hypersensitized nor callous; neither Adonis nor Caliban; neither illiterate nor of the intelligentsia; neither a brute nor a poet, though like so many of us he writes an occasional very mediocre sonnet which fails to cause the lady of his devotion to fall for him. And he is no coward and no hero — though he endures without much squealing sufferings out of which he, like the rest of us, would very gladly have got — wangled, used to be the technical word!… “If one could only,” one used to say innumerable times, “wrangle a staff job.” Or a Home Job. Or a week-end’s leave in Paris.… Or even a Blighty!
So Major Acland’s Falcon would eventually very gladly — but like all of us, how vainly! — have applied for a Staff Job; have been sent home to Canada to train details — with young woman for the use of officer, one, complete.… Then when he is worn and wearied out he is put into the most hellish scrap of all. And gets his Blighty.…
But with his bashed in face and mangled limbs his young woman who also is wearied out turns him down and back he goes to Canada — and presumably carries on.
Nevertheless, at the skirl of the pipes: “War-lust again surged through him.” As it does for us all. And that really is the lesson of the book — the lesson that our publics and lawmakers would do well to ponder. “Yet now,” Major Acland concludes, “with the skirling of the pipes in his ears, he would have signed away his liberty, his life, for another war. It wouldn’t have mattered much what the war was about.… Not when this vast hall rocked with the tread of two thousand feet and his hot blood leaped to the pipes.…”
I have, myself, by coincidence, felt much the same in Montreal when Major Acland’s kilted regiment went by on the street. For the matter of that I felt much the same on the yesterday of this writing when the 165th regiment of United States Infantry went past the Public Library on Fifth Avenue with the equivalent for the King’s Colours and the other colours flying and the band playing for St. Patrick’s day in the morning.… Of course not quite the same feeling.…
Towards the end Major Acland’s book works up to a very great — a very fine — poignancy of feeling. I imagine that, as a relatively senior officer but a quite junior writer, much as we did during the war, he picked up knowledge of how to handle things as he went along. But I don’t of course know. It is, I mean, difficult to say whether the relatively jejune effect of the rendering of English Country house life and women is caused just by timidity of handling or whether it is a masterly compte rendu of how a young Colonial (Pardon the word, Major, but there is no other adjective.… You can’t write Dominional) footslogging, second loot with bare and hairy knees would feel on introduction to a rather vanished Smart Set.… In any case the effect is the same and the information is very valuable.
Major Acland’s is, I imagine, the first really authentic work of imaginative writing dealing with the war to come out of one of the great British Dominions and if I were any sort of publicist I should make a great deal out of that. But I am not, so I don’t. Nevertheless, it seems to me that the war of the future, if there is to be one, will pivot round the great British Dominions and, whether to our own country or to individuals desirous to be responsible for turning lately allied nations into those enemy to our own, ALL ELSE IS FOLLY should present a great deal of food for thought — and for misgiving. For it is a work that is a singularly reliable subjectivization of that matter.
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