Philip Gibbs: Now It Can Be Told

(page by Walt Allan)

Philip Gibbs prodigious output reporting from the front lines during World War I is out of print and little known. A brief biography from First World War.com is available with links to his early writings. There is also a Wikipedia page about Gibbs and an excellent blog entry by Steerforth. Steerforth calls himself a Gentleman Bookseller and begins the blog: "You may already be familiar with the name of Philip Gibbs, but until I started working with secondhand books, I had never heard of him... It is hard to convey how famous Philip Gibbs was. In some ways he was the David Frost of his day, whose reputation as a journalist was equaled by few."

My knowledge of Gibbs came from references to him by Paul Fussell in his award winning book, The Great War and Modern Memory (previewed here). Paul Fussell, a celebrated literary and cultural critic who served as a second lieutenant in the 7th Army's major offensive in Alsace during World War II, was an interesting witness in Ken Burns' PBS series, The War (see a brief bio of Paul Fussell here). Here is Fussell's first mention of Gibbs in The Great War and Modern Memory:

Despite the reference to Gibbs as "...a much smaller writer" (not much of a criticism given he was comparing him to Henry James) the language and insights in the above quote suggest an interesting author with first hand knowledge. And Gibbs book is full of this essential irony so that it stands as a source for understanding Fussell's conclusion to his opening chapter of The Great War and Modern Memory:

"I am saying that there seems to be one dominating form of modern understanding; that it is essentially ironic; and that it originates largely in the application of mind and memory to the events of the Great War."

Poetic Irony: The ironic tone is best exemplified in the poems from the war that are discussed by Fussell. This page contains some text and YouTube readings - one by Edmund Blunden himself.

Philip Gibb's - Now It Can Be Told - the Librivox audiobook

Fussell's quotes from Philip Gibbs come from his book, Now It Can Be Told published after the war (1920) and not subject to the censorship that Gibbs felt limited his reports during the war and published in multiple books. These books (Soul of the War - 1915; Battles of the Somme - 1917; Germans on the Somme - 1917; From Baupaume to Passchendaele: On the Western Front, 1917 - 1918, Open Warfare: The Way to Victory - 1919; Struggle in Flanders, On the Western Front, 1917 - 1919) are compilations of his articles written for the Daily Chronicle, Daily Telegraph and "a number of Provincial, American and Colonial papers" as a war correspondent.

Now It Can Be Told is described by Gibbs in his Preface as follows:

In this book I have written about some aspects of the war which, I

believe, the world must know and remember, not only as a memorial of

men's courage in tragic years, but as a warning of what will happen

again--surely--if a heritage of evil and of folly is not cut out of the

hearts of peoples. Here it is the reality of modern warfare not only as

it appears to British soldiers, of whom I can tell, but to soldiers on

all the fronts where conditions were the same...

The purpose of this book is to get deeper into the truth of this war and

of all war--not by a more detailed narrative of events, but rather as

the truth was revealed to the minds of men, in many aspects, out

of their experience; and by a plain statement of realities, however

painful, to add something to the world's knowledge out of which men of

good-will may try to shape some new system of relationship between one

people and another, some new code of international morality, preventing

or at least postponing another massacre of youth like that five years'

sacrifice of boys of which I was a witness.

The text of Now It Can Be Told is in the public domain and available at Project Gutenberg (http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3317). The audiobook version is available at Librivox.org - an open, largely volunteer organization whose goal is: "to make all books in the public domain available, for free, in audio format on the internet." More about Librivox.org can be found on their About page. The audiobook, which I read with my "execrable French" (as Gibbs would no doubt say) and the hope that Now It Can Be Told can again be available to all who are interested, is also available here:

Walt Allan can be reached via email at wcallans2s@gmail.com