Volume 25, Number 4 · March 23, 1978
Hello to All That
By John Clive
Julian Grenfell: His Life and the Times of His Death 1888-1915
by Nicholas Mosley
Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 275 pp., $12.95
The Cousins: The Friendships, Opinions and Activities of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt and George Wyndham
by Max Egremont
Collins (London), 320 pp., £6.50
The figures with whom both these books are concerned, though all three Englishmen with aristocratic family backgrounds, active in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods, are in some ways very different: Julian Grenfell was a talented and attractive youth of great promise who was cut off in 1915, aged twenty-seven, by the First World War. He and his younger brother Billy, who was killed a few weeks later, came to symbolize for a good many of their contemporaries the tragic waste of that war. Julian himself had welcomed the war: 'It is all the most wonderful fun,' he wrote shortly after reaching the front; 'better fun than one could ever imagine. I hope it goes on a nice long time; but pigsticking will be the only tolerable pursuit after this or one will die of sheer ennui.'
Review, 3903 words
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