Now All Roads Lead to France: The Last Years of Edward Thomas (Matthew Hollis)

This book does not belong to the genre that I normally read, in fact I didn't even know who Edward Thomas was. I bought this book for two reasons: it was in the discount bin in the bookstore, heavily discounted, secondly the artillery pieces on the cover of book misled me somewhat into thinking that this book would be skewed towards WWI action. It was left on my bookshelf for more than a year since I bought it and I only picked it up to read because this is the centennial year of the start of WWI.

 Let me first get my complaints out of the way.

For a book centred on Edward Thomas, he only got the first passing mention on page 14 and it was not only until Page 16 when the story started to centre on him; this is not a book written straight to the point. Worse, a book so-titled made no mention of WWI until pg 142, almost halfway through, after which it meandered through other issues before reaching the last quarter when Thomas finally enlisted in the army. This book could have taken a number of other titles, "Edward Thomas and his Friend Robert Frost" would be a much less romantic but nevertheless more accurate one.

But there is much to like about this book. First of all, the writing. The first dozen pages started with the opening of the Poetry Bookshop in London and detoured to a description of the poetry scene in London through the different reigns. But what writing! One is left to wonder if Mr Hollis' knowledge of the poetry genre meant an active interest in poets and poetry, and the lyrical tone has found its way into his prose. (I found later that Hollis is indeed a poet himself.) Take this graphical depiction of the poets' quirks in the public reading of their works for example:

Yeats recited to a sell-out audience, Wilfrid Gibson performed in a droning monotone; W. H. Davies suffered nerves (cured when he was encouraged to think of the whisky afterwards), Sturge Moore forgot his lines; Ford Madox Hueffer read hurriedly, Rupert Brooked inaudibly, and Ralph Hodgson, who could not tolerate so much as a mention of his own work, simply refused to read at all, while simply no one could silence the actorly John Drinkwater.

There are many more examples of beautiful, lyrical writing that is unfamiliar to me. But reading this book through the usual lenses with which I used to read my other books, I got a little impatient wondering when all roads were going to lead to France. A big part of the book was on Thomas's unhappy family life, a not-so-successful career, his friendship with Frost, and then his struggle whether or not to enlist and to become a poet. In the end, France occupied but some 20 pages of the book, but lest I forget, this book is not about France, but all roads leading to France. And all that happened to him, as carefully developed by the author were roads leading to France, and tortuous as they were to Thomas, they were beautiful to the reader.

I would like to briefly talk about Frost's poem, The Road Not Taken. Personally, I hated this poem, unfairly, of course, as I hardly knew anything about it. But those last two lines, "I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference." are quoted to death by anyone who wanted to show that they had the courage to take a 'less traveled path' that it irritates me no end. I once came across a newspaper article where the journalist quoted this to show that she had taken the "path less traveled" by being a - journalist.

However, after one had been educated by the author on the context under which this poem was written, Frost's own mischievous caution to his audience, Thomas's strong reaction to it, and most of all the author's own perceptive questions about the poem (pg 234), one can't help but fall in love with it. Perhaps feeling a little snobbery too (now that I know it better than that journalist). But the rejoinder that came on page 261 in the form of Thomas's Road was equally powerful, especially when the author broke up the poem, starting with "Now all roads lead to France". Yes, now all roads lead to France, in Thomas's own words, he would be going to France.

In the epilogue, the author went back to describing those who in Thomas's circle and what happened to them during and after the war, much like how he described them at the beginning of the book in the Poetry Bookshop. Before that, he touched ever so softly on Thomas's own death when it came, never over-playing it, and one is left to feel sad, yet happy that "[h]e fell without a mark on his body."

A poet who joined the army to fight a war, these are two ideas that I can never associate together. Yet in Thomas's case, and indeed those around him, this almost seemed like the only right thing to do. How did they, and in particular, Thomas come to this? It took another poet to tell us the story of this poet.

(Find this book at Goodreads)

Chiang Kai-Shek: China's Generalissimo and the Nation He Lost (Jonathon Fenby)

At one time in China's recent history, Chiang Kai-shek came close to unifying and ruling it. This book by Jonthan Fenby talks about the man and provides some insights into why he failed. By taking the readers through the different stages in his life and exploring how he overcame the challenges and treacheries along the way, the author managed to weave an interesting and rather gripping account of Chiang's life in this book.

This book was structured chronologically as with most biographies, but it was also divided into major sections covering Chiang's childhood, the period when he consolidated his power, followed by the time when he ruled from Nanking, to fighting the Japanese proper after Xi-an, and concluding with how Chiang fought and lost the civil war. What I particularly liked was the weights given to the different sections, putting less attention on Chiang's childhood which I am not quite interested in, but a lot more on the most important parts in his life, and then almost nothing on Chiang's life in Taiwan after 1949. In doing so, the author helped readers to focus only on the consequential parts of Chiang's life and avoided diluting his work with less important or interesting details.

A book on an essentially military person, one can expect the book to talk about many military operations, and because of this, maps are important. In this, the author has done a decent job, providing maps of the major campaigns such as the Northern Expedition and the war with Japan, but one can always ask for more.

My complaint is the lack of a glossary. I do not know if the author knows the Chinese language, somehow I suspect that he didn't because he seemed to have quoted from many translated sources instead of providing his own translation and interpretation of the original Chinese words and the lack of a glossary makes this a big problem.  Take for example what is lian zuo fa? Not having the explanation provided, I was hoping that I could at least see the Chinese characters in the glossary, as I would when reading books on China or Japan. But the absence of the glossary means that words and phrases like this become meaningless to most readers. I also feel that the failure to provide the proper context when quoting from Chiang's diaries made some of the things he wrote sounded stupid. For instance, take this sentence quoted from Chiang's diary: "At a time of national humiliation we should lie in faggots and taste gall." "Lying in faggots and taste gall" sounded almost ridiculous at a time of national humiliation, but if one were to know that Chiang actually wrote "卧薪尝胆", he would realise that Chiang was using a Chinese idiom, formulated by someone caught in a somewhat situation in the past. Things like this make me feel that the author was just quoting blindly from a secondary source, without knowing what actually was written.

There were also parts in the narrative of the story that I felt the author did not fill with enough details to let his readers appreciate the actual drama. For example when talking about Wang Jin-wei's formation of a puppet regime in collaboration with the Japanese, the author brought this important event up almost casually despite having talked about Wang on numerous occasions due to his obvious affiliations to Chiang. Mitter (2013) provided a much better description of the intrigue and dilemma Wang faced in taking that fateful step.

Notwithstanding these, the author was successful in directing me to consider some important people and issues surrounding Chiang. Firstly Sun Yat-sen and Zhang Xueliang. Contemporary Chinese history has portrayed these two men very positively; Sun, in particular, is hailed 国父, the father of the nation. Alas, he is but human and has his faults. We were told not only of his lack of political acumen and ability to manage, there were hints throughout that he was even a womaniser (all of which Chiang bettered). Similarly Zhang Xueliang is considered by many as a patriotic figure who risked his life to get Chiang to agree to fight the Japanese rather than the Communists. But one has to remember that Zhang was from Manchuria and has his fortunes tied up there so the possibility of him trying to use the Nationalist army to evict the Japanese from Manchukuo cannot be discounted.

And then there was Soong Meiling, who seemed to mesmerise every man that came into contact with her. I think she was obviously smart, and being educated in the US stood her out from all the Chinese women and most men in China. But almost all descriptions of her was of her beauty, and on occasions with cursory links to the word 'sex'. Current Chinese sentiments of her are not positive, in China for obvious reasons. But even in Taiwan, I do not get the sense of people seeing much in her. In this book, the author's treatment of her was guarded, he acknowledge her contributions and efforts in helping Chiang to rally the Chinese to resist the Japanese and then the Communists. At the same time, he also cited instances of her belligerent behaviours. However not once did he praise or criticise her in his own accords. Praise and criticism always came from other sources he quoted.

In addition to these, the author also talked about Chiang's relationship with the US. It is difficult to fault the US in their handling of their relationship with Chiang. My impression from the book is that the Americans who were on the ground (in China) clearly knew the state of the country, its army, and its leadership. But caught in their own wars in Europe and the Pacific, it was hard to see through the curtain of mist pulled down by Chiang and his relatives (Soong Meiling and T. V. Soong). Eventually they did know who they were dealing with, if for no other reason than Chiang's seemingly insatiable appetite for cash.

The other subject that the author in my opinion rightly put enough emphasis on is that of the warlords. One is able to learn a great deal about them in this book. Not only were descriptions of them scattered throughout the book, depending on when they appeared in Chiang's life, the author also dedicated a chapter to them, it was an educational one.

In so far as Chiang, the subject, was concerned, what the author successfully did was to provide enough information on him to persuade the readers to consider (or re-consider) the person. A lowly peasant-class man by birth, Chiang must be quite something to overcome his unprivileged birth and significant lack of education (at least compared to Soong Meiling) to rise to the position of the person who almost ruled an almost united China. Along the way he had to overcome political enemies, the ever untrustworthy warloards, and even unfaithful relatives. Yet he would lose almost everything to the Communists and his nemesis, Mao Zedong. Many today still think of him as a traitor for not standing up to the Japanese earlier, but he appeared to have a case for going after the Communists first, which was validated by his own defeat in their hands.

Today Taiwan is still in an awkward position in international relations, even though as an entity on its own it is almost self-sufficient, and has a very enterprising, cultured, creative, educated and likeable people. How much of it is due to Chiang? Can one hold Taiwan as an example of what China would be had he succeeded? These are questions readers, especially Chinese readers would think about. But the other question all readers would surely ask themselves is why did Chiang fail? I do not think I can provide an answer, but suspect that this line quoted from the book (pg 349) encompassing a mix of incompetency, delusion, and deceit goes some way into giving a hint.

'Inflation,inflation! There is no inflation in China! If people want to pay twenty five dollars for a fountain pen, that’s their business, it’s not inflation. They’re crazy, that’s all. They shouldn’t pay it.’ H.H. Kung, Finance Minister

 (Find this book at Goodreads)