The Patriot's Progress

by Henry Williamson

Book by Williamson, Henry

Genres: Fiction

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1930

About the author

Henry William Williamson was an English soldier, naturalist, farmer and ruralist writer known for his natural history and social history novels, as well as for his fascist sympathies. He won the Hawthornden Prize for literature in 1928 with his book Tarka the Otter.

Henry Williamson is best known for a tetralogy of four novels which consists of The Beautiful Years (1921), Dandelion Days (1922), The Dream of Fair Women (1924) and The Pathway (1928). These novels are collectively known as The Flax of Dream and they follow the life of Willie Maddison from boyhood to adulthood in a rapidly changing world.

Reviews

[Judith Johnson]

I understand that Henry Williamson was not too impressed by All Quiet on the Western Front, and I can see that he set out to tell it like it really was - futile, bloody awful, completely lacking in any kind of glamour. As Harry Patch once said: "War is murder, nothing else". And I understand too that Williamson wanted to get as near the unadorned truth as he could. I'd be interested to know how it was received by men that fought the war. As someone born in the 1950s, and a civilian I of course cannot judge the veracity (so have cleared my rating for this book), but I have been far more affected by other fictional accounts, like Richard Aldington's Death of a Hero, Vera Brittain's autobiographical work, the Great War Poets and, by a more contemporary writer, Pat Barker in her Regeneration Trilogy. Interested readers may find this interview of the author, available on the BBC Great War Interviews web page, instructive:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01tcyg5

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very unexpected memoir/novel of WW I — totally different from the many I have read. Five “phases” each are one long paragraph — not conventional in any way. “Stream of consciousness” comes to mind, but some of it is more “stream of impressions” — hard to describe, other than to say it’s all immensely powerful. Talk about “fog of war” — this is “black night of war.”

"Very unexpected" because when I ordered it I thought it was a straight memoir. Not quite!

Call it 4.5 stars. I'll give it 5 stars for impact and 4 stars for "enjoyability," whatever that is.

I did like it better than Henri Barbusse's "Under Fire" semi-autobiographical novel, which is said to be the first novel to come out of WW I (published while to war was still in progress).

[Anthony Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Henry Williamson, popularly famous for ‘Tarka the Otter’, published ‘The Patriot’s Progress’ in 1930. It is, one supposes, an account based closely on his own experiences on the Western Front in WW1. He objectifies his own experience, however, by retelling it as a 3rd person narrative of the wartime experiences of John Bullock, ‘a youth beloved by his parents, [who] was a clerk in the City of London’.

Bullock is the Everyman volunteer army private. His life in civvy street is safe but dull, and like Asquith’s ‘Volunteer’ he is swept up by the prospect of the excitement of a war ‘that would be over by Christmas’ and, one imagines, by images of magnificent glory, a world of warfare in which “The gleaming eagles of the legions came, / And horsemen, charging under phantom skies, / [That] Went thundering past beneath the 0riflamme.”

Of course, it doesn’t work out quite like that, and though like Williamson he survives it all, John Bullock, a combination of John Bull and the stolid rural yeoman stock of Old England, becomes one of those who, but for the bitter good fortune of a wound, would have died like cattle.

There is nothing unusual in the pattern of events that Williamson covers, from enlistment to training to deployment to frontline duty to rest and recreation to gas to bombardment and finally to full-on battle, catching a Blighty one and being invalided back to England.

What distinguishes the book is its narrative style, in particular when it comes to battle. It doesn’t take long for Williamson to abandon paragraphing and this helps construct an effect of being swept up in a narrative describing events that are almost entirely beyond John Bullock’s control. The sentences vary from conventional to note-like observational jottings as if Bullock is glimpsing things that impact his memory. Occasionally there are moments of experimentation:

‘Then his heart instead of finishing its beat and pausing to beat again swelled out its beat into an ear-bursting agony and great lurid light that leapt out of his broken-apart body with a spinning shriek
and the earth was in his eyes and up his nostrils and going away smaller and smaller
into blackness
and tiny far away
Rough and smooth. Rough was wide and large and tilting with sickness. He struggled and struggled to clutch smooth, and it slid away.’

Or:

‘A rifle was held out. He gripped the butt, and hauled himself against the suck of the shell-hole. I’ve l-lost me rifle, sir, he told the officer, hoping that he would be sent back. “Take the next wounded man’s rifle.” The officer gave John Bullock a gulp of his water-bottle which made him choke. Rum. “Stuff to give ‘em, sir.” “For Christ’s sake get a move on, it’s two o’clock already and we’ll miss the blasted barrage.” “Right you are, sir.” Lead on forever, left foot, right foot, blow wind, fire-spouting mud, wade on forever. He shouted to a couple of dead drivers by their smashed limber, lit up in the smoky re blare of an 8-inch bastard. Pull out the left foot, sharp ankle pain, flop, now the right leg, up she comes. Zzzzzzzzzzuzz –CRASH: Down, and up again. “Hullo, chum, what’s up, copped it?” Nobby Clark was lying just off the track. “I’m done, Nosey. Go on boy, good luck.” John Bullock stood by him, trying to shield him from the lash of the glinting rain. Another brutal whine dropped nearer. Splinters zipped over. “Where’r you hit, Nobby?” “In back,” gasped Nobby. “I’m done. Good luck, boy.” Nobby rolled his head. His legs were twisted under him. His head ceased to roll. Christ, poor old Nobby -.’

The prose may lack the crafted emotive force achieved by Wilfred Owen in poetry, but it has a force of its own. Consider the irregular grammar of this:

‘John Bullock’s leg, hanging by a stump of septic flesh, having been severed by a stretcher-bearer’s jack-knife; the stump having been spattered with iodine and dressed; anti-tetanus serum having been injected into the flaccid mottled thigh, a tourniquet of puttee and shell-splinter turned; he was covered with a muddy blanket and the stretcher was placed with others behind the pill-box.’

One of those books that, one imagines, had to be written, and while clearly not as literary a classic as ‘In Parenthesis’, it is certainly more accessible. I managed to find a first edition in very good condition with regular and frequent dramatic black and white woodcuts by William Kermode illustrating it. Well worth hunting down.

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

A real classic of its genre: from 1930...with very graphic lino-cuts (remember them?!) by ex-pat Tassy...Tasmanian!...William Kermode...who somehow managed to capture the grim realities of the Great War in simple black-&-white...though it all happened in colour!
Henry Williamson went on to pen some of the most popular nature stories...including "Tarka the Otter" & ''A Ring of Bright Water"...before being recently ostracised by woke guardianistas for his awkward views on political issues from before they were out of their nappies!...(so many pale, male & stale writers suffer similar cancellation!).
This is very raw stuff, painful to read...but I was already lying down in a darkened room...so I survived without losing a leg...or my wits! It's sad that modern versions of 'history' involve such careful editing as Williamson lived it, warts, scars, amputations & all!

[Maëva Valette · Rating 4 out of 5]

Focuses on a soldier’s experience of war

[Andy Hart · Rating 5 out of 5]

The early 'phases' of Williamson's Great War masterpiece will not sit comfortably with modern readers who have been raised to view the War as fruitless and unnecessary. Its jingoism & naivety reflect exactly that of the hundreds of thousands who marched to France and Flanders.

Whatever the problems readers may have with confronting the reality of 1914-15, the horrors of 1917 are utterly shocking. The advance to the front and Everysoldier's wounding are probably the most harrowing and human accounts of battle I have ever read.

[Pete · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent WW1 story. Reread.