![]() ![]() He described the everyday texture of life at the front, from freezing cold, rats, lice and terrible food, to horrific mutilations and murders. In it, he set out his stall, emphasising tactical errors and blunders, drawing the reader's attention to the hordes of terrified, disgusted deserters. And so I tried to cut away parts of it - tell them what a trench smelt like and what dead GIs smelt like and so forth."įor his friend Edmund Keeley, a retired Princeton English professor, Fussell's classic literary study, The Great War and Modern Memory (1975), is without question his most important work. "American readers needed someone to tell them what war was really like," he says, "because by the 1970s the romanticising of the second world war had already begun. ![]() The horrors inflicted by and on ground troops, Fussell believes, are almost never acknowledged. ![]() If darkness had mercifully hidden them from us, dawn disclosed them with staring open eyes and greenish white faces." "Until that moment," he writes in his memoir Doing Battle (1996), "the only dead people I'd seen had been Mother's parents." But now, in the forest where he had been ordered to rest after a botched attack, there were "dozens of German boys in greenish grey uniforms, killed a day or two before by the company we were replacing. Drafted into the American infantry 18 months before, he had been in France just a few weeks and this was his first night in the line. On November 11 1944, Paul Fussell woke up surrounded by corpses. ![]()
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