“The Backwash of War” at 100

Some of the most famous factual and fictional accounts of the Great War are by those who fought in it, suffered its horrors, and lived to tell their tales. By coincidence or design, many classic works appeared in a clump in 1929, a decade after the Treaty of Versailles: Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That, Richard Aldington’s Death of a Hero, Frederic Manning’s The Middle Parts of Fortune and, possibly the best of them all, Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. The same year saw the publication of two very different books by two American novelists who drew on war experience of another nature: A Farewell to Arms by a former ambulance driver on the Italian front, and The Forbidden Zone by Mary...