The Undefeated
By . New York: D. Appleton and Company. 1919. 12mo, vi+340 pp. $1.60.
WITH none of the noise and fanfare of the popular war novel, the author of The Undefeated shows the war as a calm and inexorable spirit that brings out the half-smothered bestness in people. To re-create life for them is the romantic mission and accomplishment of the war spirit, which also so mercilessly destroys. It is this irony of war which interests Mr. Snaith.
Demands for bestness were made upon Blackhampton, the exact centre, geographically speaking, of England; upon Josiah Munt, self-made, prosperous Britisher, a man full of blowing enthusiasms and prejudices, of terrific energy, of unabating intensity in work and feeling; upon William Hollis, dreamer, financial and domestic fizzle of sixteen years’ standing, the straggling end of an old family of fighters and poets, rejected son-in-law of Josiah, and worthless investment in the eyes of his wife, Melia; upon Melia herself, rejected daughter, childless wife, drudge and malcontent. So on in Blackhampton, so on all over England. The call came: Josiah Munt concentrated his huge forces and, as Mayor of Blackhampton, became the ‘incarnation of the “carry-on” and “get-things-done"' spirit; Bill Hollis enlisted, threw his dreams into the melting-pot of actualities along with poets, artists, and other ‘failures’; and Melia ‘carried on’ the green-grocery at home.
Thus the war became a melting-pot of worthlessness, and a crucible of personal realization. Josiah Munts all over the country saw the war making assets of qualities which their practical minds had formerly regarded as useless; old prejudices slipped from them, new standards were conceived by them. The Mayor of Blackhampton became thoroughly softened, humanized, and gruffly kind as friend and father. William Hollis rediscovered the romance of life through the realities of war, let free the long-imprisoned artist in himself by the side of his trench-mate, the great Stanning, R.A., lived with Melia a few brief months of life glowing with beauty for both, and then went back to the others for the last giving of himself.
This ironic admixture of romance with realism gives the book the restraint and balance which raise it above the treacly optimism of the ordinary war novel. And Mr. Snaith gives real characters and events, permeated by his own insight and feeling. H. T. F.