Mr Britling Sees It Through: H.G. Wells

[poliphilo]

A fictional chronicle of the first two years of the Great War- set mainly in England, but containing surprisingly graphic accounts of a zeppelin attack and the ghastliness (and boredom) of trench warfare. There's a belief abroad that the British public lived in ignorance of conditions at the front until the "war poets" gave it them in the neck; it isn't true.  There's nothing in Owen that isn't also there in Wells- the horror, the anger, the pity- and Wells got there first- by a margin of a couple of years.