The Anzac Legend didn't Mention Mud
Keywords:
Leonard Mann, war literature, mud, Western Front, abjectionAbstract
John Schumann's song 'I was only Nineteen' contains the line 'The Anzac Legend didn't mention Mud,' which might be reasonably read as the dirt music of Australian literary responses to the Great War of 1914-1918. This article argues that Leonard Mann's 1932 novel Flesh in Armour is both an exception and indicative novel of Australian wartime experiences on the Western Front. Contaminated mud features as a persistent metaphor of abjection. Yet the sacralised beach and rocky outcrops of Gallipoli and the desert sands of the Middle East had the effect of obscuring the filth and tragedy of war in the trenches and across no-man's land. The article compares E P F Lynch's Somme Mud and Frederic Manning's The Middle Parts of Fortune with Flesh in Armour and speculates on influences emanating from Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front.References
Age. ‘Native of Sydney’. 18 March 1930 9.
Holbrook, Carolyn. Anzac: the Unauthorised Biography. Sydney, New South, 2014.
All About Books 13 April 1933
Anderson, Scott. Lawrence in Arabia. New York: Penguin/Random House, 2013.
Andrews, Eric. Anzac Illusion: Anglo-Australian Relations During World War One. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Anzacs in France: 1916 exhibition, Australian War Memorial
Barnard, Majorie. ‘Introduction’. Leonard Mann, Flesh in Armour. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1973.
Bishop, Allan & Bostridge, Mark. Eds, Letters from a Lost Generation: First World War Letters of Vera Brittain. London: Virago, 1988.
Dark, Eleanor. Prelude to Christopher. Sydney: Halstead, 2013.
Ewers, John K, ‘Australia at War.’ Daily News 19 November 1932 12.
Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974.
Gerster, Robin. Big Noting: the Heroic Theme in Australian War Writing. Melbourne: Melbourne University Publishing, 1987.
Heseltine, Harry. ‘Australian Fiction Since 1920.’ In The Literature of Australia, edited by Geoffrey Dutton (Ringwood: Penguin 1964, revised edition 1976).
Hochschild, Adam. To End All Wars. London: Pan Macmillan, 2012.
Knowles, Vernon, “War Novels”, All About Books 20 August 1929.
Liddle, Peter. Passchendaele in Perspective: the Third Battle of Ypres. London: Leo Copper 1997.
Lynch, E. P. F. Somme Mud. Sydney: Random House, 2006.
Macintyre, Stuart. ‘What if Australia’s Baptism of Fire had Occurred at the Cocos Islands’ in Stuart Macintyre and Sean Scalmer Eds. What if: Australian History as it Might have Been. Melbourne: Melbourne University Publishing, 2006.
Mann, Leonard. Flesh in Armour. Sydney: Angus & Robertson 1973.
Manning, Frederic. The Middle Parts of Fortune. Melbourne: Text, 2000.
Navy, Burial at Sea, http://www.navy.gov.au/customs-and-traditions/burial-sea
Nile, Richard. ‘Desert Worlds’. Southerly 79:1 2019 84-105
Rivers, W H R, ‘Repression of War Experience’. Lancet. 2 February 1918. https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/w-h-r-rivers-on-the-treatment-of-shell-shock-from-the-lancet
Silken, Jon. Out of Battle: the Poetry of the Great War. London: Routledge, 1987
Spittel, Christina. ‘A Portable Monument? Leonard Mann’s Flesh in Armour and Australia’s Memory of the First World War.’ Book History. Vol 4 2011 187-220.
Stephens, David and Burçin Ҫakir Myth and history: The persistent "Atatürk words", In Stephens David and Broinowski Eds. The Honest History Book. Sydney: New South, 2017.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
The copyright for articles in this journal is retained by the author(s), with first publication rights granted to the journal. By virtue of their appearance in this open access journal, articles are free to use with proper attribution in educational and other non-commercial sectors.Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.1 Australia
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.1 Australia License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.1/au/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 543 Howard Street, 5th Floor, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.