"The picture of war set forth in books like All Quiet on the Western Front is substantially true."

A professor of English who had fought with the U. S. Army in the Second World War published long afterward his memoir of the battle of Monte Cassino. A colleague, congratulating him upon it, remarked, "You got it all in," meaning, as he explained, that all the elements of the genre, the "war book," were there. Which surprised the author, for until that moment he had not considered that such a genre existed. "But it did," he said, "and I had."

Eric Blair, who renamed himself George Orwell, was a mite more self-aware; but the presentation of his memories, ostensibly simple and frank, is shaded with ambiguities. He was eleven when the First World War began, and the first publication of Eric Blair, in the Henley and South Oxfordshire Standard, was a challenging patriotic poem: