ABSTRACT
H.M. Tomlinson was a patriot but also a pacifist, a man who reported on the war from the Western Front and in 1917 became the literary editor of The Nation. In 1930 his war novel, All our Yesterdays, was reprinted three times within a month of
Hew Strachan
its publication. The book has not entered the canon of First World War literature. Tomlinson’s prose is wordy and contrived. His characters, in Cyril Falls’s apt criticism, ‘do not live except while under the narrator’s eyes and through his eyes’.1
And yet, in his critical guide to war books, Falls called All our Yesterdays ‘a very fine book’, and according it two stars in a classification system that ranked it alongside A.P. Herbert’s The Secret Battle and, somewhat less excusably, Ford Madox Ford’s magnificent ‘Tietjens tetralogy’, Parade’s End.
