Quote: What fresh hell can this be? (antedating Dorothy Parker - probably 1970)

[Mark Mandel]

Kipling indeed. Googling on /"into a stale hell"/ gave two equivalent hits,
for *The Irish Guards in the Great War, Vol. 2* , to be found at
http://www.di2.nu/files/kipling/IrishGuardsv2.html; search for "stale hell".
It's in the chapter "Rancourt to Bourlon Wood", section "THE GERMAN
WITHDRAWAL". (Full-paragraph quote below.)

OT: This particularly caught my attention because in addition to this
history of the Irish Guards, Kipling, not surprisingly, wrote a poem about
them, "The Irish Guards" (
http://www.di2.nu/files/kipling/kipling-verse.html#220), which I first
encountered in a setting by the singer-songwriter Michael Longcor. The first
stanza goes:

WE’RE not so old in the Army List,
    But we’re not so young at our trade,
For we had the honour at Fontenoy
    Of meeting the Guards’ Brigade.
’Twas Lally, Dillon, Bulkeley, Clare,
    And Lee that led us then,
And after a hundred and seventy years
    We’re fighting for France again!
*        Old Days! The wild geese are flighting,
            Head to the storm as they faced it before!
        For where there are Irish there’s bound to be fighting,
            And when there’s no fighting, it’s Ireland no more!
                                                            Ireland no more!
*

("[The term "*Wild Geese*" is used in Irish history to refer to Irish
soldiers who left to serve in continental European armies in the 16th, 17th
and 18th centuries, or even, poetically, Irish soldiers in British armies as
late as the First World War." -- Wikipedia, Flight of the Wild Geese,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_of_the_Wild_Geese)

This last was not our situation. The Fourteenth Corps had no divisions in
> immediate reserve; the sector the Guards Division was working on had been
> greatly thinned out, and their artillery was relatively small. With
> tremendous losses in the past and the certainty of more to come, things had
> to be done as cheaply as possible. “Hence our mode of advance.” *It led
> them into a stale hell which had once been soil of France but was now beyond
> grace, hope, or redemption.* Most of the larger trees in St. Pierre Vaast
> were cut down, and the smaller ones split by shell or tooth-brushed by
> machine-gun fire. The ground was bog, studded with a few island-like
> formations of fire-trench, unrevetted, unboarded, with little dug-outs ten
> or twelve feet deep, all wet and filthy. There were no regular latrines.
> Numberless steel helmets and heaps of stick-bombs lay about under foot. The
> garrisons must have been deadly uncomfortable, and there was good evidence
> that the enemy had economised men beyond anything that we dared. The ground
> had been cut to bits by our fire, and in one place yawned what had been a
> battery position wiped out, unseeing and unseen, weeks ago, as the dead
> teams round it testified. Very few booby-traps were left behind. The
> Battalion lost only five men in all through this cause.
>

m a m

On Tue, Jul 20, 2010 at 7:31 AM, Garson O'Toole
<adsgarsonotoole at gmail.com>wrote:

> Garson O'Toole wrote
> > The challenge is to antedate the 1988 date for the following Dorothy
> > Parker quotation: What fresh hell is this?
>
> In a previous message I gave a 1970 citation for the variant "What
> fresh hell can this be?" This cite has now been verified on paper.
>
> Cite: 1970, You Might as Well Live: The Life and Times of Dorothy
> Parker by John Keats, Page 124, Simon and Schuster, New York. (Google
> Books snippet view; Verified on paper)
>
> "When it came time to leave the apartment to
> get a taxi, you could see this look of resolution come on her
> face," he said. "Her chin would go up and her shoulders would
> go back; she would almost be fighting back fear and tears, as
> if to say to the world, 'Do your worst; I'll make it home all right.'
> If the doorbell rang in her apartment, she would say, 'What
> fresh hell can this be?'-and it wasn't funny; she meant it.
>
>
> http://books.google.com/books?id=7t0EAQAAIAAJ&q=%22fresh+hell%22#search_anchor
>
> Jonathan Lighter wrote:
> > One thing about hell though - it never gets stale.
>
> But someone, maybe Kipling, once wrote: "It led them into a stale hell
> which had once been soil of France but was now beyond grace, hope or
> redemption."
>
> i.e., similar to undergraduate housing.
>
> Garson
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
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>

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