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The Secret Battle
''The Secret Battle'' is a novel by A. P. Herbert, first published in 1919. The book draws upon Herbert's experiences as a junior infantry officer in the First World War, and has been praised for its accurate and truthful portrayal of the mental effects of the war on the participants. It was one of the earliest novels to contain a detailed description of Gallipoli,〔Pound, p. 67, notes that ''Tell England'', published two years later, "contained Gallipoli scenes but it was not a war novel"〕 or to challenge the Army's executions of soldiers for desertion.〔"Herbert was the first novelist to take a condemned coward for his hero." Hynes, p.305〕 It is noticeable as being sharply different from Herbert's later work—there is no note of humour or lightness in the novel, simply a stark and simple narrative.
==Background==
Herbert went up to New College, Oxford in 1910, to study law. He went down in 1914, having had several pieces of his light verse published, in ''Punch'' and elsewhere, and with the apparent intent of dabbling further in writing. In the summer of 1914 he was working at a mission in Bethnal Green; on the outbreak of war, like most of his contemporaries, he promptly joined the military. Unlike most University-educated men he did not become an officer – perhaps in response to the working-class men at the mission, who assumed that the "Oxford blokes would go off and take commissions () so be all right".〔Pound, p. 40〕 He joined the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, rather than the army – his brother Sidney, to whom he was close, was a naval officer, and he felt this might make it more likely to run into him.
The RNVR was flooded with recruits who had neither sea-training or sea-experience, and once the fleet had mobilised fully the Navy had no real use for them. In response to a foreseen need for naval landing parties to defend Belgian ports, these men were organised into the Royal Naval Division, and equipped as infantry. Herbert was drafted into this unit, commissioned in early 1915, and sent to Gallipoli in May. He saw action at Gallipoli, was invalided home, then served with Admiralty intelligence before rejoining the division in France in 1916. It served in the last phases of the Battle of the Somme, and was virtually destroyed fighting in the capture of Beaucourt-sur-l'Ancre – of the 435 officers and men of his battalion who went into the attack, Herbert was one of only twenty to be fit for service the next day. He was later wounded, in early 1917, and returned home, where he began writing ''The Secret Battle''. He finished the novel in "a few weeks",〔Pound, p. 55〕 but put it aside and made no moves to publish it until January 1919. It may have been slightly redrafted in the intervening months – he makes a passing comparison of the court-martial to his recollections of the royal stables in Spain, a place he visited shortly after the Armistice.
抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』
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