There is an endless and legitimate fascination with what the First World War meant for English history and society: whether or not it is a great dividing point and to what extent the English world changed because of the war. Such cataclysmic events provide dominant rhythms for what historians do; there is the eternal and important game historians play of first asserting that a break such as that caused by the First World War, not to mention its devastating price in terms of lives and destruction, changed the landscape almost beyond recognition. Then there is the counterargument that the transformation was far less than one might have thought, that the trends and tendencies ascribed to the war owe more, in fact, to what happened before it broke out. In the process of this alternation of interpretations our understanding of the past is advanced.

Undoubtedly in the study of the effect of the First World War in England a dominant text still remains Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory (New York, 1975), published thirty-five years earlier than the book being considered here. Its vitality is demonstrated by the fact that it is still argued about and assigned in classes. Fussell favored the emphasis upon the crucial importance of the war in changing English sensibility, a sea change in language and perception, an access to a truer reality, the world of perception catching up with the statement, perhaps more of a prediction, found in Virginia Woolf’s famous remark, made in 1924: “On or about December 1910 human character changed.” This collection of essays, however, would seem to be largely on the other side of the debate, not by much chronologically but significantly so in that it concentrates on 1914, on the months of that year before England entered the war. Its theme is that the “modernism” that Fussell argues came about primarily as a result of the First World War was already present in England or, more particularly, in the art world of London.

This is then largely a work of art history but not in the usual art history format with lots of illustrations—in fact, there are woefully few—but, rather, a somewhat uneven collection of essays by various hands. Virtually all valuably point out the vitality of the London art scene just before the outbreak of the war. It is striking how much of a role comparative outsiders played. A dominant figure in this collection is Wyndham Lewis, born in Canada, the leader of the Vorticists, who were painting strikingly abstract works. Lewis was a larger than life figure, a magnificent painter, a powerful novelist, a deeply unattractive polemicist, and eventually the holder of near-Fascist opinions. Bloomsbury and Roger Fry’s design Omega Workshop was not sufficiently avant-garde for him. He flailed about, most notably in his splendid publication BLAST, one of its two issues published shortly before the war broke out and the second in June 1915. It is the subject of an essay by David Wragg. There was the “modern” recognition of the power of the machine to be found in the influence of the Italian Futurists and their talented English adherent, the artist C. R. W. Nevinson. Most notably, there is the famous phallic statue “Rock Drill” of 1913 by the London-based American sculptor, Joseph Epstein, the subject of an excellent essay by the distinguished art historian, Andrew Causey. Its reconstructed version is the book’s one burst of color as the jacket illustration. It would be hard to think of anything more “modern.” Perhaps the best essay in the collection is Sarah MacDougall on the Whitechapel Boys, most notably Mark Gertler, David Bomberg, and the painter, better known as a First World War poet, Isaac Rosenberg. He wrote what Fussell regards the greatest single poem of the war: “Break of Day in the Trenches.” As Jews, they too were outsider figures, and they were also modernists moving toward abstraction. This was true, even though they studied at the Slade, the leading art school attached to University College, London, there taught by the conservative Henry Tonks, who told them not to look at the art of the Post-Impressionists, such as Roger Fry’s exhibitions of 1910 and 1912. Tonks plays a major role in Alan Munton’s piece on what he sees as the misrepresentation of the Slade scene in Pat Barker’s novel, Life Class (London, 2007). One would have thought that a novel might not be obligated to be historically accurate, although it causes problems when it is not. Others figure in the story found in the essays in this collection: Yeats in a piece rather shaky in its historical aspects by Louise Blakeney Williams and Walter Sickert discussed by Jonathan Shirland. Jonathan Black vividly depicts the friendship between those two powerful artists, Edward Wadsworth and the London-based Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, whose most famous work was his hieratic sculpted head of Ezra Pound, another crucial outsider figure on the London scene who plays a central role in several of the essays. A powerful and convincing case is made that the war was not necessary for the abstract forces of modernism to be a rising part of the culture. Violence was suggested in many of the works discussed here: through the war history caught up with art.

The editor chooses to frame this useful collection in a rather Fussell-like way, dedicating the book to his great-uncle who was killed in the war. He prints as an appendix his great-uncle’s letter from the front to his mother and two other letters, one from the nurse in whose arms his great-uncle died and another from a fellow soldier, wounded next to him on the front. Before the war, these avant-garde artists powerfully and effectively predicted the violence to come as well as the course that art was to take after the war. Though most of what is discussed here takes place just before August 1914, the war itself greatly deepened its significance.