by Hilary Hauck
Fiction set in World War Two is far more abundant than World War One. It’s to the point where a search for WWI stories on Amazon triggers a message asking if I meant WWII.
It makes sense. WWII offers endless opportunity for espionage, dazzling airborne battles, indelible scenes like the Normandy landings and the atrocities of concentration camps, not to mention a clear line between good and evil.
By contrast, the first thing that comes to mind for WWI are the trenches. Four solid years of bug-infested, disease-ridden, muddy ditches. A drawn out and brutal conflict.
Even the notable conflict firsts for WWI, such as the use of planes—mounted, no less, with the first machine guns—fail to ignite the pace, setting up, instead, a crude and clunky mood.
Before I stumbled upon the real-life inspiration for my debut historical novel, From Ashes to Song, I had been working on a story set in WWII. It seemed like a natural choice. Growing up in London in the Seventies, WWII was familiar. We studied it at school, it was the setting for movies and TV shows, entire museums were dedicated to it.
The impact on my family, too, was palpable. A photo of my mother’s cousin, Squadron Leader ‘Gus’, an RAF fighter pilot shot down in the war, hung in pride of place on my great aunt’s wall.
On my dad’s side, my grandmother, ‘Nan’, was the only survivor of a bomb that hit her family home during the Battle of Britain. She lost her entire family—her parents, her sister, and her first child, a daughter named Aileen. Nan, too, was badly wounded, losing a leg and most of the function in one of her arms.
Despite her physical limitations, Nan taught me to bake, to speak French, and to use a home computer—in the Eighties no less, when barely anyone owned a home computer. She was also the inspiration for the novel I was trying to write in the late Noughts, but I wasn’t getting far. In fact, the war era that had seemed so palpable in my formative years now seemed far off, I had inched closer to WWI.
This was because I had recently moved to rural Pennsylvania after living near Milan, Italy, during my twenties. It was not the America I’d seen in movies. Here, amid the WWI era buildings, an air of the town’s coal mining heyday still prevailed. And it wasn’t only the architecture. Everyone, it seemed, had a story to tell of their parents or grandparents who were, like me, ‘off the boat’.
In a way, I’d stumbled upon living history. It wasn’t long before I heard a story that gripped me and would not let go. It was Pietro’s story, told to me by his daughter, Irene Smylnycky. So I had a compelling story and I was surrounded by the memory of the people who’d built the area on a foundation of hope. It felt like it was meant to be.
Luckily for me, Irene welcomed the idea of me writing her family’s story as fiction, and so I set aside my Nan’s story and went back in time. Instead of beginning in 1940 with the Luftwaffe roaring over London, my story now began in 1911 in the peaceful hills of north-west Italy. Pietro is trying his hand at composing for the first time, the grapevines stretching either side of him like lines of music. His world will be in flames shortly—not because of bombs, but on the orders of the Ministry to destroy the vineyard in an attempt to curb the spread of Phylloxera, a disease that will devastate all but a handful of vines around the world.
As Pietro starts anew in America, the landscape turns from green hills to black coal country. He finds work in the mine where his musician’s hands blister, the coal dust stifles his clarinetist’s breathe. It’s grim, cold, dirty.
Though I intentionally kept the war in the background because it must have felt a world away, the setting is similar to the bleak and brutal feel of WWI.
Against the dismal and trying backdrop, without the fury and immediacy of WWII, the characters personal stories could shine. They had a greater opportunity to orchestrate their own paths, or in Pietro’s case, his own symphony.
The pervasive nature of conflict in WWII lends itself to a much narrower stage of opportunity for characters to pilot their own paths. What’s more, those same seductive battles, landings, and atrocities are inescapable. Readers know the horrors that unfolded, so even when a story is one of hope, there can’t help but also be an air of grief.
And while nothing could compare to the horrors of the concentration camps and atrocities perpetrated against Jews, the WWI era is a chance to explore prejudice and discrimination. Even though on a very different scale with a much less devastating outcome, prejudice was much closer to home—in the mines, bars, even the churches—and perhaps because of that, more relatable.
What was once a thriving town with a deep sense of hope for the future is today a quiet town with a deep sense of pride in its origins. Ethnic backgrounds are a point of pride, not division. From this vantage point of 2021, an era of mass migration, that is a lesson worth revisiting.
Both World Wars are no doubt important, lest we forget. They offer ample opportunity to explore the stuff stories are made of—resilience, human strengths and failings, intolerance, what people are capable of in tenuous circumstances. I read WWII stories voraciously but would certainly like to see more stories crafted from the goldmine of 1910s stories still told at the family dinner table, before generations forget entirely how they came to be here. Instead of a re-direct, I’d welcome an ample choice of options when I search for WWI fiction—stories of immigrants, of sacrifice, change, and hope.
Hilary Hauck is the author of From Ashes to Song, her debut novel. A writer and translator, her work has appeared in the Mindful Writers Retreat Series anthologies, the Ekphrastic Review, Balloons Lit. Journal, and the Telepoem Booth. She moved to Italy from her native UK as a young adult, where she mastered the language, learned how to cook food she can no longer eat, and won a karate championship. After meeting her husband, Hilary came to the US and drew inspiration from Pennsylvania coal history, which soon became the setting for her debut novel. Hilary is Chair of the Festival of Books in the Alleghenies, past president of Pennwriters, and a graduate of RULE. She lives on a small patch of woods in rural Pennsylvania with her husband, one of their three adult children, a cat with a passion for laundry, and an oversized German Shepherd called Hobbes—of the Calvin variety.
