Disenchantment

<p><b>Disenchantment </b>was one of the first books written after the First World War to express a sense of liberal disillusionment with the way the war had been conducted. It had a considerable impact when it was first published in 1924, though it was overshadowed later by the angrier and more directly descriptive memoirs of Sassoon and Graves.<br><br>Montague offers a unique perspective on the war in France. He joined up as a white-haired 47-year-old volunteer, as part of a unit of the Royal Fusiliers manned mainly by older sportsmen (he had been a keen mountaineer before the war). He was also a very senior journalist, a leader writer for the <i>Manchester Guardian</i>. After being wounded in action in early 1916, he became an intelligence officer, dealing with journalists and visiting writers and censoring their reports. <br><br>His book is highly allusive, replete with references to classical literature, and recalls a pre-war kind of essayistic <i>belles-lettres</i> (the book first appeared as a series of essays in the <i>Guardian</i>). These techniques are placed at the service of a rueful meditation on the cynicism, corruption and mendacity of the organization of the British war effort, especially the official propaganda about the aims of the war. <br><br>Montague was writing at a time of desperate social unrest, industrial militancy and rising intolerance. ''Civilization itself'', he wrote, ''the at any rate habitable dwelling which was to be shored up by the war, wears a strange new air of precariousness''.</p>