Cry Havoc

Anglican clergyman W. Redvers Dent drew on his own experiences on the Western Front as a soldier with the Canadian Expeditionary Force in writing Cry Havoc during the late 1920s. The novel depicts a young man named Lionel Thor surviving an incomparable sequence of tragedies and misadventures. As he does, we witness the growth of Thor’s mind and his evolving grasp of theology and philosophy in a novel whose depiction of the war is unsparing. Cry Havoc was first published in much different form in 1930 under the title Show Me Death, following extensive editorial revisions that diminished Dent’s artistic achievement and resulted in the novel’s falling into undeserved obscurity. Now editor Bruce Meyer, working with a copy of the original manuscript held for generations by the Dent family, has recovered and restored the author’s singular voice, for the first time making Cry Havoc available as Dent wrote it. As Meyer notes in his introduction, "Few novels about World War I rival Cry Havoc…. In the end, what emerges is not merely a parable of the pity of war, but a vision of redemption that overcomes the madness and hatred that the war engendered." In addition to the first-ever publication of the novel in its original form, this Rock’s Mills Press edition includes a comprehensive introduction by Bruce Meyer, discussing Dent’s life and work and placing the novel in the context of other Great War writings, as well as a glossary of important and sometimes obscure terms used in the novel.