Customer Reviews

Toward the Flame: A Memoir of World War I

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Hervey Allen's memoir is certainly one of the finest personal narratives of World War One, and perhaps the best American memoir of that war. In my opinion, it is a neglected classic. The narrative covers his unit's march from the area around Chateau Thierry in July 1918 to the Fismes/Fismette area in August. The book begins with Allen's unit on an almost bucolic road march through unspoiled French countryside, and ends with its virtual decimation in Fismette. As the title suggests, the closer Allen and his comrades get to Fismette, the more intense the action, until they are literally facing the fire of a German flamenwerfer attack. The story ends abruptly; in a preface to the second edition, Allen compares the ending to a filmstrip burning out suddenly.

Allen, a novelist and poet, was a keen observer; he gives the reader a vivid picture of what it was like to be an AEF soldier in France. Particularly compelling are his descriptions of the shattered homes, farms, and buildings that his unit occupies as it moves forward, and what they tell him about the original French owners, and the Germans who, in some cases, have left the premises just minutes before.

Hervey Allen is at his finest in this carefully crafted memoir of his time as a soldier in France. While he is best known as author of the sweeping historical fiction Anthony Adverse, which was a best seller in the 1930s(and later a pretty mediocre movie), he proves in Towards the Flame that he is also able to communicate great depth with an economy of words. This book illuminates that far away time in which young men went off the to fight the Last Great War for reasons that now seem so trivial and also gives a wonderful sense of the French countryside from the perespective of a young soldier. I believe that this book is a hidden treasure of American literature that deserves to be rediscovered.

My Grandfather was with an Artillery Battery. A lot of what he described was the same as the memoirs in this book. He had 2 vivid memories one was the constant noise of the Artillery firing 24-7, and the other was 11-11-11 1918. His description was the knew the Armistace was scheduled to take effect but they were told the firing would probably taper off and stop but instead it was like somebody flipped a switch. At the exact time suddenly there was dead silence and it was over.
EB Sledge wrote With The Old Breed about the Marine Infantryman in WWII and I think this is one of a few books which does the same for WWI.

"Toward the Flame" by Hervey Allen is a groundbreaking work in the field of combat memoirs. Allen is perhaps one of the first men to have made an attempt to relay the awful reality of modern warfare to the public. Allen first published his book in 1926 when the conflict was still relatively fresh in the country's psyche, as well as his own. He stated his purpose for writing in the very first pages of the book and I felt that it set the tone for the reader and established his motives for retelling his experience.

Many books and articles that were written during World War I or shortly after did not come close to expressing the thoughts and memories of many WW I veterans. For various reasons, the public did not have a clear picture of what the American Expeditionary Force had been through during the fateful campaigns of 1918. I am familiar with certain titles that were popular as the war ended such as "The Glory of the Trenches" and "Private Peat", which depicted the war in romanticized terms. These certainly bordered on propaganda and gave very little hint of the suffering and horror that was standard place in the trenches.

In Allen's introduction he states his reasons for writing are almost in response to the generally accepted tales of war. He wanted to tell people the real story, free of any type of propaganda that was so prevalent and destructive during the WW I era. He also was suffering from Post traumatic stress and nightmares, which he readily admits contributed to his desire to put the chaotic memories into words and perhaps expel some of the horrors in a literary catharsis. I have found that when the author admits he is writing in large part to straighten the events out in his own mind (thus putting the horrors into the past), the book has a candid and haunting aspect that leaves the reader with a poignant story of war's frustration and misery. Allen's memoir is just such a book. I do believe it to be one of, if not the finest personal narratives of World War I from an American perspective. That said, it is not without a few minor omissions or structural problems, but these are quite few and do not detract from the raw power of Allen's story.

He begins and ends the book very abruptly; these were minor problems for me, but it could have been a deliberate literary device to give the story a vivid dream like quality as the author's powerful imagery hits the reader straightaway. Allen states that he is a lieutenant in the 28th Infantry Division, a unit made of Pennsylvania National Guard regiments. He is a member of the 111th Infantry regiment, but this is never stated by the author. He omits nearly all historically relevant details or analysis that was not available to him while he was fighting. This is a very interesting choice as it prevents the reader from tying in the story with the larger picture of the war, but gives the book an "on the ground" feeling that is only created in the best memoirs.

The first two thirds of the book is typical of the Army's "hurry up and wait" policy as Allen's unit engages in forced marches only to be held in reserve for days at a time, the only exception being a brief stint in "Death Valley" on the Marne River where the troops get their first dose of shell shock. One of the great strengths of the book was the buildup in suspense as Allen nears the front and the carnage comes closer and closer. It really creates such a climactic ending, the likes of which I've never quite read as he relays the tragedy of the battle for Fismes and Fismette on the Vesle River. Even though the combat segment is relatively short, it ranks among the best day by day retellings of war from a personal standpoint. An amazingly crafted climactic tale of the AEF in 1918.

This memoir was very vivid in its descriptions of a front-line soldier's life and routine during the first world war. Allen was a lieutenant in the 28th Division. I have previously read and enjoyed some of the author's fiction so the quality of the writing was no surprise. I appreciated the fact that the author did not seem to have an axe to grind and stuck to a narrative of his own experiences. Recommended reading.

The strength of Hervey Allen's "Toward the Flame" as a war memoir lies in its being a first-person narrative, with all the seeming immediacy and honesty that firsthand experience affords. We remember George Santayana's deliberately hyperbolic warning against the more academic third-person alternative: "History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there." Hervey Allen was there.

Allen allows a "you are there" window into the daily life of WWI combat (Second Battle of the Marne) during six summer weeks in 1918. Missing is the familiar focus on stalemated trench warfare that characterized other battles. For most of the memoir, Allen is actually on the move through once-picturesque hilly regions of France, but usually in the more peaceful wake of front-line units. The end of the memoir finds him in the intense "Flame" of Fismette fighting.

Allen's matter-of-fact tone owes something to the blunting effects of memory (the book was published in 1926) but perhaps also to a healthy skepticism about fighting a war largely within European nations and their colonies. Christendom was attacking itself, with the YMCA standing-in for the ineptness of the church itself, "selling gum drops and cakes when civilization hung in the balance." Allen contemptuously notes that "As a matter of fact, there was little else it could do, and that in itself was a great comment." It is to Allen's credit that he doesn't allow later research and speculation about the larger picture to infiltrate his direct experience account.

There is no mention, for example, of WWI's other (and some would argue more significant) battlefield: the fight against militaristic Islam represented by the Ottoman Turks. After all, the war started in the Balkans. The lasting triumph of WWI was, for some, not the defeat of Germany and its allies, but the Crusader-like retaking of the Holy Lands. Who will forget the photograph of General Allenby victoriously entering Jerusalem?

Then, too, Hervey Allen's biographical fascination elsewhere with Edgar Allan Poe is partly owing to Poe's having enlisted in the US Army as a private, rising to Sergeant Major of Artillery, and later attending West Point. Poe's preoccupation with phantasmagoria resonated well with the horrific images of Allen's combat experiences late in WWI. Throughout "Toward the Flame," the reader can feel the pull-and-tug between the accustomed innocence of comfortable America back home and the lurking wartime realities all but purged from peripheral consciousness.

Poe's successful formula continues to work in media today. We see folks, youth particularly, flirting with the scary and violent--but indirectly, through no-risk admitted "fiction" such as horror movies, violent computer games, and monster-type toys. It seems healthy to see children fighting to keep from being smothered by too many well-meaning but sugar-coated animations and holiday fantasies, as well as Disney-style escapes into a peaceful-kingdom falseness, none of which correspond with "the way God made the world." As Allen might have worried, will such sheltered youth wilt prematurely in the flame of future combat?

Passing many German graves in his march toward the front allows Allen to reflect on larger issues otherwise denied in the overweening literalness of combat itself. He notes an epitaph on one such grave (markers in WWI and WWII were crosses, not just tablets as we find today in national cemeteries): "He was a good Christian and fell in France fighting for the Fatherland, `Heir ruht in Gott.'"

Looking further, Allen cannot help but speculate on what seems to be the waning mission of European culture: "Verily, these seemed to be the same Goths and Vandals who left their graves even in Egypt; unchanged since the days of Rome, and still fighting her civilization, the woods-people against the Latins. Only the illuminating literary curiosity of a Tacitus was lacking to make the inward state of man visible by the delineation of the images of outer things."

I wanted to know more of what the WWI "doughboy" experienced so, without reservation, I purchased this book, the story of Hervey Allen's few weeks in Europe during the Summer of 1918. The author admits, as does the person who wrote the forward, that the book first took shape as a lengthly letter written during Lt. Allen's time spent in a hospital recuperating from his wounds. As I read from sentence to sentence, and paragraph to paragraph, it was clearly evident that his sense of urgency to tell his story, unblemished by the vagaries time, was critical. And, to some, that is what makes this a wonderful read. I, however, found myself wishing that a sympathetic, yet focused, editor could have spent some time with Mr. Allen to help him polish his narrative to make the storyline flow a little smoother. I found his storytelling often to be jumpy, occasionally redundant, and sometimes contradictory. Because of this, the personal drama was lost on me as I lost my way.

On a side note, I've read many veterans' memoirs and find it interesting to notice the style of prose evolve from war to war. Maybe Mr. Allen's prose was indicative of a time that does not resonate with this reader's sensibilities. So, take my review with the grain of salt that is openly offered. Regardless of my opinions of this book I salute you, Lt. Allen, for all you have done and sacrificed for the citizens of the world.