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    All Else Is Folly: A Tale of War and Passion
    All Else Is Folly: A Tale of War and Passion
    All Else Is Folly: A Tale of War and Passion
    Ebook294 pages4 hours

    All Else Is Folly: A Tale of War and Passion

    By Peregrine Acland, Brian Busby, James R. Calhoun and Ford Madox Ford

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    One of Canada’s most painful and breathtaking pictures of a soldier’s life during the First World War.

    Peregrine Acland’s novel All Else Is Folly is an irreplaceable depiction of the Canadian experience in the First World War. More than just a devastating portrayal of the terrors and hardships of trench warfare, the novel is also a profound meditation on the nature of man, one that draws on both the Nietzschean notion of man as warrior and Havelock Ellis’s idea of man as lover. Subtitled "a tale of war and passion," the novel was something of a bestseller in its time and drew significant critical praise. Canadian Prime Minister Sir Robert Borden remarked: "No more vivid picture has been painted of what war meant to the average soldier."



    Originally published in 1929, Acland’s war story had transatlantic success, with editions published under the Constable imprint in England, and by Coward-McCann and Grosset & Dunlap in the United States. The Canadian edition published by McClelland & Stewart enjoyed three printings. This new edition marks a return to print after more than eight decades.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDundurn
    Release dateJun 21, 2014
    ISBN9781459704251
    All Else Is Folly: A Tale of War and Passion
    Author

    Peregrine Acland

    Peregrine Acland (1891–1963) joined the Canadian Army in 1914 at the outbreak of the First World War and quickly rose to the rank of an officer. He took part in the great battles of the Somme, which he describes vividly in All Else Is Folly.

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      Book preview

      All Else Is Folly - Peregrine Acland

      Michael Gnarowski — Series Editor

      The Dundurn Group presents the Voyageur Classics series, building on the tradition of exploration and rediscovery and bringing forward time-tested writing about the Canadian experience in all its varieties.

      This series of original or translated works in the fields of literature, history, politics, and biography has been gathered to enrich and illuminate our understanding of a multi-faceted Canada. Through straightforward, knowledgeable, and reader-friendly introductions, the Voyageur Classics series provides context and accessibility while breathing new life into these timeless Canadian masterpieces.

      The Voyageur Classics series was designed with the widest possible readership in mind and sees a place for itself with the interested reader as well as in the classroom. Physically attractive and reset in a contemporary format, these books aim at an enlivened and updated sense of Canada’s written heritage.

      ABOUT THE INTRODUCTION’S AUTHORS

      Brian Busby is a literary historian, independent scholar, and writer. He is the author of Character Parts (2003) and A Gentleman of Pleasure (2011), a biography of the poet John Glassco. Busby is also the editor of In Flanders Fields and Other Poems of the First World War (2004), The Poetry of the Civil War (2006), and War Poems (2010).

      James Calhoun served briefly as a reserve private with the Seaforth Highlanders of Canada. A book-collector and researcher with a particular interest in Canadian literature of the First World War, he lives in Port Coquitlam, British Columbia.

      CONTENTS

      Introduction by Brian Busby and James Calhoun

      A Note on the Text

      All Else is Folly

      A Note by Way of Preface by Ford Madox Ford

      Author’s Note

      Part One

      Part Two

      Part Three

      Appendix: The Reveille of Romance

      Introduction

      First published during the summer of 1929, All Else is Folly joined a lengthening cortege of Great War novels that had been written by veterans of the conflict. The line was led by Under Fire (1916), a gritty and grim work for which Henri Barbusse was awarded the Prix Goncourt, and included such titles as John Dos Passos’s Three Soldiers (1921),

      The cover of the Constable edition, the first to be published.

      e e cummings’s The Enormous Room (1922), and Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Švejk (1923). The most popular novel of the war, All Quiet on theWestern Front by Erich Maria Remarque, had preceded the publication of All Else is Folly by months; Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms would follow by mere weeks.

      In the company of these canonical works and the many lesser titles of what came to be known as the war book boom, All Else is Folly stood out as something unique. Though published by the British house Constable, its author, Peregrine Acland, was a Canadian. While the Dominion’s veterans had already produced three Great War novels — The Major (1917) and The Sky Pilot in No Man’s Land (1919) by Cameron Highlanders’ Chaplain Charles Gordon (Ralph Connor), and The Fighting Starkleys (1922) by Theodore Goodridge Roberts, briefly aide-de-camp to Arthur Currie — they were the works of older men who had not seen prolonged front-line deployments comparable in either the intensity or duration to those of a first Canadian Division company commander.

      Acland’s war record set him apart from his literary comrades. Awarded a Military Cross at Observatory Ridge (Ypres) and later distinguishing himself at the Battle of the Somme, his war experiences were as dramatic and harrowing as anything found in the fictional accounts of the more widely known novelists of the Great War.

      Compared to Connor, one of Canada’s bestselling authors, and Roberts, brother of Sir Charles G.D., Acland was an unknown. The author of a small number of overlooked short stories and poems scattered about The Canadian Magazine, Maclean’s, Pearson’s, the Globe, and the Evening Record of Windsor, Ontario, he was very much a nonentity in the world of letters. Yet Acland’s novel managed to garner the support of some of the day’s most respected names in literature; those early English readers and reviewers could not have ignored the praise conferred upon the novel by Ford Madox Ford’s A Note by Way of Preface. Then at the height of his talent and influence, the novelist, poet, and critic was not in the habit of penning such things — indeed, he notes as much — stating that his motivation lies in the hope that a very large public may be found for Major Acland’s book on both sides of the Atlantic.

      The Globe (Toronto), December 14, 1929.

      When the American Coward-McCann and Canadian McClelland & Stewart editions of All Else is Folly followed the British edition a few weeks after its publication, the novel’s reputation was bolstered by further endorsements from prominent public figures. The philosopher and pacifist Bertrand Russell, the editor and publisher Frank Harris, and John B. Watson, the father of behaviourism, all lauded the novel. Their remarks were featured prominently on the North American dust jackets. Further words of praise from Robert Borden, Canada’s wartime prime minister, were featured in advertisements: No more vivid picture has been painted of what war meant to the average soldier.

      All Else is Folly was reviewed widely, receiving acclaim in newspapers ranging from the Times of London to the New York Times to Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald. In Canada, the influential William Arthur Deacon praised All Else is Folly as one of the cleverest, most straightforward war revelations in fiction form.1 In the pages of the Globe, reviewer Roger Irwin held the novel above A Farewell to Arms, writing that the former had won a place at the top of the war fiction produced in 1929 on this continent.2

      For a few months, at least, it might have seemed that Ford’s wish for All Else is Folly was coming to pass. And yet, despite all these accolades, neither Constable nor Coward-McCann chose to reprint. McClelland & Stewart’s Canadian edition enjoyed three printings — quite uncommon for the day — but was then allowed to slip out of print. The last bookstores ever saw of All Else is Folly came in the form of a rather inelegant edition, most likely issued in 1930, from discount publisher Grosset & Dunlop. All Else is Folly appeared and then disappeared over a six month period between the summer of 1929 to the spring of 1930 — its author never published another piece of fiction or poetry.

      * * *

      Peregrine Palmer Acland did not come from a family of military men or novelists, though his family did have connections to the worlds of war and letters. His mother Elizabeth (née Adair) was the daughter of a Crimean War veteran. His father, Frederick Albert (F.A.) Acland, had worked for a number of English newspapers before he decided to leave England and settle in Canada. In 1883, weeks after his arrival in the Dominion, he secured a position at Toronto’s Globe, then moved on to other papers south of the border. At the time of Peregrine’s son’s birth — May 15, 1891, in Toronto — he was back at the Globe as news editor. He left for good in 1907, moving the family to Ottawa to take a job as secretary in the Department of Labour, under William Lyon Mackenzie King. In one respect it was a reversal in roles, the editor having hired King as a Globe cub reporter two decades earlier. The shift in power suited both men, with F.A. Acland moving on to become Deputy Minister of Labour and, later, the King’s Printer.

      By his own account, Peregrine Acland was a bookish child. He earned early recognition for his writing in May 1904, within days of his fourteenth birthday, when he took first prize in a nationwide essay competition commemorating the centenary of the Battle of Trafalgar. I was a disgustingly pasty-faced little bookworm, quite unable to keep my nose out of books of adventure, and equally unable to hold my own in the real life of childish sports, he would later write.3 According to Acland, it was his good fortune at age fifteen to be the guest of a school friend whose father owned an Alberta cattle ranch. Being forcibly dragged away from books for a time (though I used to go on round-up with a copy of Poe’s poems in my pockets), I gradually came to learn that literature is less interesting than life.4

      In April 1907, not yet sixteen, Acland saw the publication of his first short story, Larraby’s Lope, in The Canadian Magazine. Telling of a cow-puncher’s stratagem, pitted against sheriff and deputies, and the outcome, the tale was clearly inspired by his time in Alberta. Indeed, the west was to become a near constant presence in his prose and verse.

      Acland would have met his unnamed school chum while attending Upper Canada College. The autumn after graduation, he began the first of what would be five directionless years at University College, University of Toronto, either reading assiduously on courses [he] was not taking, or else not reading at all.5 The deputy minister’s son began a literary journal at the university titled Arbor, dabbled in verse, some of which was published, and earned a bit of money through occasional work at the Globe and the Ottawa Free Press. Graduation, which was unavoidable, came in May of 1913, with Acland receiving honours in Modern History.

      The previous month had seen one of his poems appear in The Canadian Magazine:

      Spring in the Foothills6

      Ride! Ride!

      For the Winter snows have run

      From their foe, the April sun,

      And the roses rise in pride on the grassy mountain side,

      (Then ride!)

      Where the echo of my shout

      Comes a-rolling round about,

      As if winding on his horn had young Spring himself replied.

      Ride! Ride!

      For the timid calves are bawling,

      And the antelopes are calling,

      And each buck to each doe has cried that Winter at last has died.

      (Then ride!)

      When the scented winds blow strong,

      And the old Earth-love calls long,

      Swiftly leap into your saddle and westward, westward ride!

      Peregrine Palmer Acland. This photograph was likely taken in Toronto prior to the September 1914 departure of the 1st Canadian Division. (Photo courtesy of the 48th Highlanders Museum, Toronto)

      As if heeding his own advice, Acland soon set off for British Columbia to assume the editor’s position at the Prince Rupert Daily News. The tenure was short, though he did leave his mark: the paper became more attractive, news coverage increased, and there was a new focus on things literary. As the third month drew to a close, Acland resigned and trekked across British Columbia until he met the then-unfinished Grand Trunk Railway line, where he caught the first in a series of trains that would take him to his parents’ Ottawa home. Once back in the capital he embarked on a civil service career as a clerk in the Department of Finance.

      Nine months later came the Great War.

      Acland’s service record is one of extraordinary activity and advancement. He enlisted as a private in the Queen’s Own Rifles in Ottawa on September 19, 1914, and within three days was in Val Cartier, Quebec. Two weeks later, newly commissioned as a lieutenant in Toronto’s 48th Highlanders, the young officer was bound for Plymouth, England, aboard the SS Megantic as part of the largest convoy to then cross the Atlantic, carrying the 30,617 men of the 1st Canadian Contingent.

      Acland wrote of the beginning of his Atlantic crossing in With the Highlanders En Route to England. Published in the October 6, 1914, edition of The Globe, while the ship was at sea, it is very much a document of another age, and a striking example of the Canadian military’s early amateurism; the article reveals operational details concerning not only the date of departure, but also which ship contained the divisional ammunition column, as well as the field and clearing hospitals — a tidy bit of information for an ambitious U-boat captain. Such a disclosure today would likely lead to court-marshal.

      While With the Highlanders En Route to England and Acland’s personal diary of the crossing hold great value to military historians, the most significant writing he produced aboard the SS Megantic came in the form of a fifty-two-line poem:

      The Reveille of Romance

      Regret no more the age of arms,

      Nor sigh Romance is dead,

      Out of life’s dull and dreary maze

      Romance has raised her head.

      Now at her golden clarion call

      The sword salutes the sun;

      The bayonet glitters from its sheath

      To deck the deadly gun;

      The tramp of horse is heard afar

      And down the autumn wind

      The shrapnel shrieks of sudden doom

      To which brave eyes are blind.

      The Reveille of Romance was printed as an eight-page chapbook, likely by Acland’s family, for private distribution. The poet John Masefield sent Acland an encouraging note on receiving a copy, hoping he would find it profitable to write more.7 The Canadian poet and writer E.W. Thomson, himself a veteran of both the American Civil War and the Fenian Raids, wrote to congratulate Acland’s father on his son’s achievement. Alfred Noyes8 also wrote approvingly, and recalled a poetry reading Acland attended at the home of Duncan Campbell Scott.

      The first they would have seen of the poem came in the February 27, 1915, edition of the Globe, four months after Acland had disembarked from the Megantic. It would then be reprinted in the Canadian Military Gazette on June 27, 1915, with the remarkable poem generating such interest that the publication was obliged to provide some brief biographic details of the young soldier-poet in a subsequent issue.

      Reading the poem today within the context of the great anti-war poems that came after, one is tempted to dismiss it as emblematic of the high-spirited, patriotic verse that appeared in newspapers and periodicals the world over, particularly in the early years of the war. Yet, in giving the presidential address to the Royal Society of Canada in 1918, Canadian Poets of the Great War anthologist W.D. Lighthall9 includes Peregrine Acland’s poem in a discussion alongside the work of John McCrae and Bernard Freeman Trotter. The Reveille of Romance he said, showed the spirit of high resolve and the imaginative outlook which actuated those who sprang to arms at the first call.10

      At the time Acland’s poem was being read by the public, the lieutenant had already endured a rainy autumn training in the mud of Salisbury Plain, a miserable experience that was relieved by occasional trips to London on weekend furlough. He would later recall one memorable visit to George Bernard Shaw’s home in Adelphi Terrace. Acland, who had been more strongly influenced by the Third Act of ‘Man and Superman’ than by anything else in literature except the Sermon on the Mount,11 was not disappointed:

      As I gave him a little Irish blarney about being able to die happy now that I had seen him, he soon dropped his mask and treated me quite humanely. His pose, icy and with a shade of the sneer about it, damages him, though he assumes it as a protection. It is as incongruous as the comic mask on the face of tragedy. I have seen no eyes which can show greater depth of feeling than do his on occasion, and for all his flippancy, I have met no one who realizes more intensely the essential horror of war and who yet so vigorously appreciates the necessity of fighting our way out of it.12

      The beginning of 1915 brought disappointment when Acland was sent to Weymouth to supervise training with the 3rd Wiltshires, the depot and training battalion for the Moonrakers, as they were nicknamed, rather than being sent to France with the rest of the 15th Battalion (48th Highlanders). As a result, he was still in Weymouth when word came in April of the German gas attack at Ypres. From this none of the junior officers of the Fifteenth Battalion (48th Highlanders) came out undamaged, he wrote in the war’s dying days, and very few came out at all, on our side of No Man’s Land. Nineteen officers out of twenty-one and 670 men out 1,000 represented the loss of that unit alone.13

      Acland rejoined his regiment in France at month’s end, and in mid-May saw his first action in the Battle of Festubert. He would describe the three days of combat as an awful muddle, while recognizing that his was an army in the making:

      We were hard pressed, and our commanders had to do the best they knew how with the material at their disposal. I didn’t take this calmly philosophic view at first. It was only with more soldiering and more reading about other wars, that I learned that this waste is incidental to all wars, and that the good soldier has to be prepared to die cheerfully not only for his country, but for his general’s blunders.14

      In the end, the battle claimed over sixteen thousand British, Canadian, and Indian casualties under the command of Douglas Haig, then a lieutenant general on his way to becoming a field marshal. The 48th Highlanders were sent to Givenchy after the fighting, then in July on to trenches in the area of Ploegsteert and Wulverghem, opposite the Messines Ridge, just kilometres south of Ypres. There Acland’s division remained for eight months occupied by shelling during the day and patrols by night. In March 1916 they were dispatched for six months to the Ypres salient.15

      The Ypres Salient in April 1915, at the time of the Second Battle of Ypres.

      Acland was now a captain and company commander. Responsibility weighed heavily; in one counter-attack more than half his men became casualties. Over the night of June 2, 1916, the 48th Highlanders were rushed into the line to plug a gap the Germans had opened. Early on the morning of the third, the Canadians counterattacked in front of Mont Sorrel, and, beneath an intense barrage, Acland was wounded when the force of an exploding shell knocked him semi-conscious into a shell-hole, and onto a bayonet carried by one of his men. He was fortunate; several more senior captains were killed or seriously wounded early in the engagement. Acland stepped up to take command of the line, continuing the attack by directing four companies along with attached machine gun and bombing details. Facing interlacing machine gun fire with artillery support, the men of the 48th under Acland’s direction took tremendous casualties, but the attack was ordered to proceed. In Acland’s own words, his company contributed to sacrifice battalions, sent in with next to no artillery support (there was at the moment none that could be given us) to stop a gap and so to prevent further German inroads.16 The further German inroads Acland mentions would have meant the fall of the city of Ypres.

      Whether public or private, Acland’s writing about his service is tinged with self-criticism and reproach:

      I never so wanted to run away in all my life, and only stopped myself by reflecting that certain shame and necessary self-destruction lay behind and that, while it would be better to blow out one’s brains than to yield to cowardice, it was more sensible to stay in the lines and carry on. I was so dazed with lack of sleep, over-fatigue and the … horrendous din of the shelling that I soon felt myself to be of little use as an officer, and all I can say is that I stuck it out.17

      Acland counted himself lucky and considered himself unworthy of the Military Cross awarded for his part in the action. Others interpreted his actions differently: the Canadian Military Gazette of August 21, 1916, announced the award for conspicuous bravery during an attack. He led his company, formed under very heavy fire, with great dash, and, though wounded, remained at his post and dug himself in.

      In late August Acland was promoted to major, and subsequently set out on what would be two separate deployments at the Somme.18 It was during the second engagement, on September 26, 1916, just northwest of Courcelette, that Acland’s time at the front came to an abrupt end. At approximately 1:30 in the afternoon his company, having overrun a German communication line, were advancing in the direction of the infamous Regina Trench when Acland was hit by German machine gun fire. Shot in the left chest between the seventh and eighth ribs and in the left breast two inches above his left nipple, it is miraculous he wasn’t killed instantly. Instead, Acland fell into a shell-hole, where he lay in pain, barely able to breathe. A stretcher-bearer appeared, quickly dressed his wound, and thinking his wounds were fatal, left him with morphine and water and proceeded on with the attacking line, as per battalion orders.

      It was an agony to lose the rough hand of the stretcher-bearer, an agony which made me understand Nelson’s ‘Kiss me, Hardy.’ It was not Hardy that the dying sailor yearned to embrace, but the spirit of man and all human friendliness.19

      In his account, Acland

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