An English Officer’s Disillusionment at the Somme and Ypres: Great War Memoirs, Short Reviews
A. Hamilton Gibbs, 1919 (Wikimedia Commons)
A Review of The Grey Wave, by A. Hamilton Gibbs (1920)
A commonality among the memoirs of Disillusionment—patriotism and hope transformed to cynicism and despair in the crucible of war—is that they were primarily written by well-educated, intelligent, sensitive literary men. These were the types—especially Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, and Edmund Blunden—highlighted and to some degree stereotyped in Paul Fussell’s iconic The Great War and Modern Memory (1975).
Arthur Hamilton Gibbs (1888-1964) is no exception; and indeed, he was among the first to make his mark in the genre that came to dominate war writing in Great Britain and, to a lesser degree, the United States. Younger brother of novelist and playwright Cosmo Hamilton (who adopted his mother’s maiden name for his nom de plume) and noted war correspondent Sir Philip Gibbs, A. Hamilton Gibbs was living in the United States, preparing for his own literary career, when World War I began in 1914.
With less patriotism than a grudging sense of duty, Gibbs returned to Great Britain to enlist. An offbeat, tattooed amateur pugilist—a wannabe Jack London?—Gibbs prided himself on his physical toughness, but the English class system was embedded deeply within his psyche. Naively enlisting as a common trooper in the 9th Lancers, Gibbs quickly felt out of his element among the uncouth—and as he felt, foul-mouthed and filthy—riff-raff who were his peers among the other ranks. Gibbs’s desperate efforts to seek out and befriend the one or two educated (albeit down on their luck) enlistees around him, and then to secure a commission, are almost comical, but reveal much about how the social structures of his day impacted the B.E.F. in 1914-1915. Gibbs saw very little frontline service during this period.
Serbian artillery retreating through Macedonia, 1916 (Wikimedia Commons)
Losing Faith in the Brass Hats
Ironically, Gibbs’s enlisted service among the Lancers contributed to his intensifying resentment of authority as the war progressed. In 1915 he managed to secure a commission in the Royal Field Artillery, and was dispatched with his battery first to Egypt and then to Greece, accompanying an abortive Anglo-French push into southern Serbia. This disastrous campaign was intended to rescue beleaguered Serbia, only to fall apart as that country collapsed under the combined weight of an Austrian-German-Bulgarian invasion in the winter of 1915-1916.
Gibbs’s battery participated in some of this campaign’s fighting, but nothing to the extent he would later experience on the Western Front; and in fact, he was evacuated for illness before the Allied retreat began. Still, this dreary Balkan episode deeply impressed Gibbs with the futility of war and, even more, the alleged ineptitude of the British Army’s senior staff. The Grey Wave, clearly heavily drawn from Gibbs’s diaries and reflecting his relatively cheerful optimism in 1914-1915, becomes relentlessly bitter and pessimistic by the beginning of 1916.
A wrecked British 18-pounder battery, 1918 (Wikimedia Commons)
Embittered on the Western Front
Gibbs’s service on the Western Front was distinguished. He earned promotion from subaltern to first lieutenant, to captain, and finally to major, and a Military Cross—distinctions that he sought and valued highly. A dedicated officer, he worked hard for and was popular among his men, got along well with his fellow officers, and loyally served officers he respected up to the rank of colonel.
Anyone above that rank, however, invariably earned Gibbs’s enmity. His anger at the perceived mismanagement and injustice of the war was palpable, and several times his elder brother Philip needed to intervene to calm him down. A. Hamilton Gibbs was reading disillusioned war poets such as Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen at the front, and it’s worth speculating how much his own expressed disillusionment represented an aspiration, as a budding author, to join their literary ranks.
Gibbs’s account of the British retreat following the German offensive of March 21, 1918, is exceptionally powerful, and includes some of the most gripping passages in any British memoir of that war (for a parallel account by another artillery officer who experienced the retreat alongside Gibbs and met him at the front, see A Time to Leave the Ploughshares by William Carr).
Gibbs returned to the United States immediately after the war’s conclusion; The Grey Wave is the British edition of Gun Fodder: A Diary of Four Years of War which he published in the USA in 1919. He eventually became an American citizen and lived there until his death. As a novelist, Gibbs never rose above mediocrity; but his memoir, as among the first literary expressions of Disillusionment, is important and has been unfairly overlooked. My Goodreads rating: four out of five stars.