Boys' Books and the Great War
Michael Paris looks at the romanticised image of war in boys’ popular fiction prior to 1914, and at the sustaining appeal of the genre in spite of the realities of that event.
In September 1914, nineteen-year-old Roland Leighton wrote to his close friend Vera Brittain,
I feel ... I am meant to take some active part in this war. It is to me a very fascinating thing – something, if often horrible, yet very ennobling and very beautiful, something whose elemental reality raises it above the reach of cold theorising. You will call me a militarist. You may be right.
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