Well, I'm in shock and trauma having reached the end of Wanted, An English Girl. Please, someone, read it - I'm desperate for discussion. I'd heard that during WW1 a common form of propaganda was stories of Germans bayoneting babies in occupied territory. Lo and behold, one turned up! What started as a ripping Ruritanian read turned into a horrific and gory tale of German atrocities, rounded off with a very dulce et decorum est pro patria morie ending. The title itself, 'Wanted, An English Girl' seems at first to be taken from the text of an advert for an English schoolgirl to go to the duchy of 'Insterberg' (very obviously Luxembourg) as companion to a German girl living there. But it turns out to have a double meaning, as 'English' turns into shorthand for 'courageous, selfless and in short a thoroughly good egg'.
I had a sobering moment. When the bayoneted baby appeared I thought, 'OK, this has gone much too far, and descended into farce. How on earth could people at the time have been so stupid as to be duped by this blatant propaganda?' Then I remembered what the Nazis actually had done, some 25+ years later. 'Nuff said.
So to tangentially bring it back to the Chalet School, the differences between this book, set in WW1, and EBD's books, set in WW2, are very stark. First, EBD is at pains to differentiate German from Nazi. Dorothea Moore, on the other hand, shows the Germans in every bad light - from the very start where our heroine bases her opinions of Germans on a 'piggish' German girl at school, right through to the horrors of war. The women are stupid and slow, or conniving. The men at best are drunken louts and womanisers, and at worst are vicious, murderous, vindictive rapists. There isn't a single German character portrayed positively - or even shown to have any redeeming features at all. Second, it's much more graphic than the CS books. Even in Exile we don't get the kinds of descriptions of atrocities that come thick and fast in Wanted - we get hints of bad things, but at much more of a distance. Third, there's a kind of war-weariness about the CS. I wouldn't call it pacifism or even anti-militarism by any means, but an acknowledgement that war is bad, and even though it's a necessary evil to defeat a greater evil, the aim is to live in peace. Whereas Wanted almost glories in the opportunities for Our Heroine to be heroic.
So is this a difference between two different eras, with attitudes to war changing as a result of the losses of WW1 and the social changes of the inter-war period? Or is it a difference of emphasis between two authors? I haven't read much other children's fiction written during either of the world wars, so it's difficult to know. Any other comparisons? It occurs to me that some of Noel Streatfeild's books were written during the war (Party Frock or whatever it's called, where there's a pageant) so maybe I should go and read them. Anything else? Oh goodie, a reason for reading early 20th-century kidlit.