Interpreting Gristwood

Unless one is as into Great War literature as much as myself, I doubt that they have ever heard so much as the name A. D. Gristwood. Yet, he was, in my opinion, an even better war-story author than Remarque and Hemingway. All of these gentlemen were Great War writers, and yet, I think that Gristwood trumps the other two greatly. Like Hemingway and Remarque, Gristwood’s tales are believed to stem from his own experiences in the Great War. Gristwood was in the British military, wounded twice over the course of his service,

He is quite unsung, however, because he faced a problem that many other authors have faced: where to seek publication? Finally, sometime after the Great War had ended, Gristwood landed his first book, “The Somme” (and later, “The Coward”) in the hands of H. G. Wells, a popular author and publisher at the time. It is likely the case that the only reason why these two books ever even made it to the shelves of a public bookstore was because Wells forwarded it. And I agree with Well’s claim about the works: the dead do not write books, and so the only stories that a civilian can read to understand war are the ones written by the survivors. But Gristwood’s books, he continued, came close to a book by the dead.

Indeed, Gristwood does not focus on dialogue, imagery, or even character development, so much as he stresses the internal fear, anxiety, and dread felt by his main characters. The emotion his poor soldier’s suffered, and the challenges they faced, and the actions which they took to evade and survive them…These are not stories of bravery, they are stories of realistic and logical fear and cowardice.

In fact, Gristwood’s own life seems morbidly poetic in its own right. It is largely believed that Gristwood had self-inflicted a wound to evade combat the second time he was wounded, and that is presumed to be the inspiration behind “The Coward.” In fact, Gristwood’s work holds the best quote I have ever read in literature: “Fortune favours the coward.” For truly, it would seem that the main character in “The Coward” only survived because of his cowardly action, an action that was prompted by pure fear and utter terror of death. And, in life, the coward, though not often the winner, tends to come out of any given dilemma the least scarred.

Although, perhaps Gristwood was wrong, however, because, in 1933, at the age of thirty nine, he committed suicide. He had been diagnosed sometime earlier with post traumatic stress disorder (then termed “shell shock”). A few years prior to his untimely demise, his books had been taken out of print after a few unsuccessful years. The only way I was even able to read his two short books was because they were reprinted within the last two decades by a Great War library, and I happened to be in loose acquaintance with the designer of the new cover. Gristwood’s tales do not make war seem romantic for even an instant: they show how truly awful the practice is, and how far its victims will go to evade it.