All posts tagged Hitler

Putin’s Wars: from Chechnya to Ukraine by Mark Galeotti (2022)

This is a very military history. Seeing as it also covers the decade before Vladimir Putin came to power, and that it is very focused on the minutiae of the Russian Army, Navy and Air Force, as well as details of the various reforms and reorganisations they have undergone during the Putin years, the book could more accurately have been titled ‘A History of The Russian Army, Navy and Air Force, 1990 to 2022’.

Military units

Here’s an example of what I mean by military minutiae. This is Galeotti’s description of the Russian army’s invasion of Chechnya:

From the north Major General Konstantin Pulikovsky led a mechanised force drawn from the 81st and 276th Motor Rifle regiments and a battalion of the 131st Independent Motor Rifle Brigade. From the west Major General Valery Petruk led elements of the 19th Motor Rifle Division supported by two regiments and two battalions of paratroopers along the railway tracks to seize the central station and then advance on the presidential palace. From the east, the 129th Motor Rifle Regiment and a battalion each of the 98th and 104th Airborne Divisions under Lieutenant Colonel Nikolai Staskov would make a similar thrust along the railway line to Lenin Square in the heart of the city and from there take the bridges across the Sunzha river. From the north-east, Rokhlin himself would lead elements of the 255th and 33rd Motor Rifle Regiments and the 66th Reconnaissance Battalion of the 20th Motor Rifle Division to take the Central Hospital complex, while units of the 76th and 106th Airborne Division would secure the Lenin and Sheripov oil processing factories and chemical works to prevent the rebels from destroying these crucial economic assets. (p.61)

The accounts of all the wars feature lots of paragraphs like this, precise accounts of which units under which commanders went where and how they fared in the fighting.

There’s also a lot of analysis of organisational and administrative reforms from between the wars, as Galeotti gives detailed accounts of the attempts of successive Russian defence ministers, most notably Anatoly Serdyukov and then Sergei Shogai, to reform the Russian army against opposition and inertia from the military high command.

Hence the chapter titled ‘New Look Army’ (pages 142 to 152), which gives us detail of how the Defence Minister and head of the general staff implemented the 2010 plan for a new-look Russian army, half the size of its predecessor but better equipped and better trained, with better retention of conscripts, fewer but better quality senior officers.

Galeotti explains, with maps, the reorganisation of the army into half a dozen military districts, gives a detailed breakdown of what a new-look motorised rifle brigade consisted of (3,800 officers and men) plus a list of all its components (including 1 nuclear, biological and chemical company) and so on. And a similar level of description of the new-look air force and navy, followed by an organogram showing the chain of military command starting with the president and working down.

And then the last 90 or so pages of the original edition of this book (before he added a new chapter about the Ukraine War), pages 229 to 310, present a very detailed review of the current state of all Russia’s fighting forces, army, navy and air forces, along with special forces, paratroopers and black berets, nuclear weapons and so on, as of the time of writing (April 2022).

In this long final section the book turns into a version of ‘Janes Fighting Ships’ only about all aspects of the Russian fighting machine, giving mind-numbing details of the speed, size, range, design and latest versions of a wide range of military kit, from machine guns (the AK12 to replace the ageing AK74) to its sole aircraft carrier (the Admiral Kuznetsov), along with equally excessive detail of each service’s organisational structure, divisions, brigades and so on and so on. Take the opening of the Spetsnaz section:

The Spetsnaz comprise seven regular brigades of various sizes, in total constituting perhaps 19 battalion-size units called Independent Special Designation Detachments (OOSN) each with around 500 personnel. The relatively small 22nd Brigade has just two OOSN, the 173rd and 411th, for example, while the large 14th Brigade… (p.292)

And so very much on, for page after page after page of excruciating detail.

I was looking for a book about the geopolitics of Putin’s Wars and that’s certainly here, attached to his fairly brisk accounts of each conflict, and when he summarises it, Galeotti is very good. But his accounts of the political background to each conflict, and even the wars themselves, take second place to his forensic analysis of Russian fighting forces and how they have changed and evolved since 1990.

Military biographies

As for the key political and military players, as the book trundled on I realised Galeotti was devoting quite a lot of time to them. All the key players in the 30-year period of the Russian army which he covers are given potted biographies. Putin is the most obvious one, along with sometime prime minister Dmitry Medvedev, but all the defence ministers, the key generals in each of the wars, and the leaders of the respective nationalist or independence uprisings, all are given a half-page potted biography (for example, the extended profile of key defence minister Sergei Shogai on pages 155 to 159).

Slowly this builds up into a sort of indirect social history, because all of them grew up in the ’60s, ’70s or ’80s, their life stories include snapshots of their lives and careers during the late Cold War, the Afghan War, the chaos of the Yeltsin years and so on. It isn’t a collective biography but, taken together, the many individual biographies begin to sketch out a network of real lives, and so start to give a feel for the institutional life of the last years of the Soviet Union.

The 1990s

For Russia the 1990s were a decade of chaos at home and humiliating conflicts abroad. The army almost fell apart amid the chaos following the end of the Soviet Union and economic collapse: stories of soldiers reduced to begging in the streets and even dying of malnutrition. In February 1991 the Warsaw Pact, which had been the West’s bogeyman since its inception in 1955, was formally disbanded.

Prime example of the chaos was how nationalist President Boris Yeltsin inherited a Duma packed with communists who blocked his every move, the standoff escalating to a crisis in October 1994 when pro-communist crowds seized TV channels and the Duma building, which prompted Yeltsin, on 4 October 1993, to send in the army who shelled their own parliament building, starting a fire which ended up gutting it. Like some chaotic Third World country.

Putin was manoeuvred into power by the KGB and other forces who wanted social and political stability after a decade of chaos under Yeltsin. As you’d expect, there are pages detailing Putin’s non-descript career, how he came over as loyal, reliable and dependable to a series of powerful men, until shadowy forces in the KGB and military helped broker the deal whereby Putin was nominated by Yeltsin to be his successor as president, on condition that he passed an act of immunity freeing Yeltsin from prosecution for his umpteen acts of corruption. Putin was made president in December 1999 and his first act was to pass this immunity law for drunk Boris.

All this Russian drunkenness, chaos and corruption is amusing to read about but the point that matters is that Putin came to power determined to restore Russia’s status as a superpower. He and his sponsors wanted to Make Russia Great Again (p.169).

‘Near abroad’

Putin wants to restore the territory lost to Russia when all the other Soviet states declared independence. Galeotti quotes a Russian defence minister in 1995 talking about ‘Near abroad’, meaning the countries and territories adjacent to Russia which it dominated for over a century through its Tsarist empire, and then bossed around through the Soviet era. It’s a well enough known phrase for Wikipedia to have an article on it, defining Russia’s ‘near abroad’ as ‘the post-Soviet states (other than Russia itself) which became independent after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.’

This concept overlaps with the nationalist notion of a Greater Russia which transcends modern borders to include all the old Tsarist territories. Both of them justify Russia interfering in, invading and taking control of their neighbours.

Reuniting the Russian people

During the Soviet Union entire populations were moved around the different republics with little concern for the consequences. It didn’t matter in the borderless USSR but it became very important when all the former Soviet Republics became independent states. At a stroke no fewer than 20 million Russians found themselves stuck in ‘foreign’ countries. To put it another way, all the countries bordering Russia contain Russian minorities, sometimes quite sizeable minorities.

The most obvious examples are the large Russian-speaking communities in the Crimea and in Eastern Ukraine which gave Putin the excuse for invading both of them in 2014 but there are also vocal Russian minorities in, for example, all three Balkan states. At any moment Putin might stir them into protests and then use these protests as a pretext for invading, pretty much as Hitler invaded the Sudetenland in 1938, to reunite its protesting Germans with the Fatherland. Which is why the leaders of the Baltic states are so worried.

So Putin 1) believes Russia has total command over its sphere of influence which can be defined as 2) Greater Russia, Russia at its greatest extent under the empire and also, maybe, the Soviet Union, and 3) wants to liberate these Russian communities now in foreign countries and reunite them with the Holy Motherland.

Russian irredentism

Yet another way of describing the same thing is the term Russian irredentism:

Russian irredentism refers to territorial claims made by the Russian Federation to regions that were historically part of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, which Russian nationalists regard as part of the ‘Russian world’. It seeks to create a Greater Russia by politically incorporating ethnic Russians and Russian speakers living in territories bordering Russia. This ideology has been significantly defined by the regime of Vladimir Putin, who has governed the country since 1999. It is linked to Russian neo-imperialism.

Insofar as all the old republics of the Soviet Union are now independent nation states, the Putin Doctrine represents a permanent threat to peace in Europe.

Comparison with Hitler

In many ways it’s like the situation of the German people after World War One. When the victorious Allies imposed the punitive Treaty of Versailles on defeated Germany they redrew the map of Europe so that no fewer than seven million Germans found themselves stuck in countries outside Germany. This was partly what Hitler was about with his popular promise to reunite all ethnic Germans in an expanded Fatherland. This, for example – its large German population – was why Hitler demanded the area known as the Sudetenland back from the state of Czechoslovakia, a nation which was only created by the Treaty of Versailles and which Hitler refused to recognise as a real country.

Putin is very close to Hitler’s way of thinking. He, Medvedev, foreign secretary Sergei Lavrov, members of his political party (United Russia), commentators and intellectuals, have all been lined up to claim that Ukraine simply isn’t a country, it has no claim to be a nation state. It was, is and always will be part of Greater Russia.

In his 2021 essay ‘On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians’, Putin referred to Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians as ‘one people’ making up a triune Russian nation. He maintained that large parts of Ukraine are historical Russian lands and claimed there is ‘no historical basis’ for the ‘idea of Ukrainian people as a nation separate from the Russians’.

It would be one thing if this was just the view of a particular clique or party but in fact these nationalist, neo-imperial views are very popular across Russia. That’s the real worry. That even if Putin and his entire clique were vaporised it wouldn’t change the fundamental neo-imperial irredentist mindset of the entire Russian ruling class and a large part of its population. Russia is committed to being a source of instability and conflict in Eastern Europe for the foreseeable future…

Russian paranoia

To which we must add Russian paranoia. The whole premise of the Russian forces in all services, of Russian military doctrine, of the vast amount spent on arms and men, is that everyone wants to attack and destroy Russia. All Russian officials toe the Putin line that Russia is permanently under serious threat. Former head of the FSB, Nikolai Patrusheve, is on the record as saying the United States ‘would very much like Russia not to exist as a country’ (quoted p.312). As Galeotti puts it:

We can never underestimate the paranoias and resentments of Putin and his circle… (p.307)

Paranoia is defined on Wikipedia as:

an instinct or thought process that is believed to be heavily influenced by anxiety, suspicion, or fear, often to the point of delusion and irrationality. Paranoid thinking typically includes persecutory beliefs, or beliefs of conspiracy concerning a perceived threat towards oneself i.e. ‘Everyone is out to get me’.

If it’s a mental illness or psychiatric condition then the entire Russian military-political establishment is mentally ill.

Weakness of the Russian army

However, when he came to power Putin faced a simple challenge which was the army left to the Russian Federation after the collapse of the USSR was in very poor shape and this book is very largely about the efforts of his successive defence ministers, and hand-picked senior military staff, to reform and improve it.

Early on Galeotti mentions all kinds of reasons for the Russian army’s weakness. Obvious ones were chaos, mismanagement and universal corruption. The tradition of building a mass army of over a million using reluctant conscripts. The way the conscripts were signed up in two waves, in the spring and autumn, ensured lack of overlap and consistency. Galeotti also says the Russian army has a long-standing problem because it lacks the rank of non-commissioned officer that the British army has, the rank of men who’ve risen from private, command the trust of and speak the language of the ordinary soldiers, can convert officers’ orders into do-able actions.

Another problem was the Russian army has a centuries-old tradition of hazing, dedovshchina or ‘grandfathering’. Like everything Russian this is the legitimisation of brutal bullying designed to turn raw recruits into ‘men’. But, as well as regularly actually killing them, it of course does nothing of the sort, turns no-one into ‘men, it just brutalises them, preparing them to rape, pillage and torture whatever foreign population is unlucky enough to be occupied by them.

Then there was the vast problem of out-of-date equipment. Galeotti has passages throughout the book detailing the shortcomings of all kinds of Russian military kit, from tanks to body armour. The lack of reliable radios and communications led to friendly fire incidents in all the wars he describes. Half the Russian planes and helicopters shot down in the short Georgian war (7 to 12 August 2008) were shot down by their own side.

Hence the central thread which the book comes back to again and again, which was the efforts of successive defence ministers to reform the army, navy and air force at all levels, in all ways. Maybe the book should have been titled ‘The Reform of the Russian Army 1990 to 2022′.

Bad advice

I was amused that Yeltsin was encouraged to embark on the First Chechen War (11 December 1994 to 31 August 1996) by his advisers and Minister of Defence, who assured him they would take Grozny and pacify the country in a matter of weeks, that it would be a ‘bloodless blitzkrieg’ (p.56). The Russian attack began in November 1994 and was dogged by failure of every kind – ‘The plan was doomed from the start’.

Compare and contrast the over-optimistic advice given to George W. Bush about the invasion of Iraq, ‘they’ll be welcoming us with open arms and throwing flowers’ etc.

Compare and contrast Britain’s defence staff telling Tony Blair they could easily cope with policing Basra and sending troops to Helmand Province in Afghanistan, no problem.

Compare and contrast the Russian military establishment assuring Putin they could invade Ukraine, overthrow the government and elect a Russia-friendly administration within a week.

These military advisers, eh? Maybe the beginning of wisdom is never trust anything your military advisers tell you.

The First Chechen war (December 1994 to August 1996)

The First Chechen War was a disaster for the Russian army. It has been outsmarted and outfought, even losing cities to a ramshackle guerrilla army. All the inefficiencies, brutality and corruption of the army had been put on public display. (p.67)

The Second Chechen War (August 1999 to April 2000)

This time the Russians had a better plan and knew to advance slowly, pacifying and securing territory as they went, rather than the strategy in the first was which was to race to the capital Grozny leaving all the territory outside under the control of insurgents.

The Russo-Georgian War (August 2008 Russo-Georgian War)

The underwhelming performance of the military in Georgia… (p.88)

In 2008 when mighty Russia took on tiny Georgia, more than a quarter of all the armoured vehicles deployed simply broke down before they even reached the battlefield. (p.239)

It only lasted a week but, according to Galeotti, it was a war of blunders, including the bombing of abandoned airfields, officers lost to friendly fire and advances halted by broken-down vehicles (p.120). From his point of view – concerned with the issue of military reform – this little offensive was important because it gave Shogai and Putin the ammunition they needed to push through their sweeping reforms against resistance from the Army staff.

Annexing Crimea

Crimea had been part of the Russian empire for centuries and only (rashly) given by Nikita Khrushchev to the Ukraine Soviet Republic in 1954. So it was a prime example of the Greater Russia argument, the argument that, at the chaotic collapse of the Soviet Union, many territories which had for centuries been part of Russia were abruptly included in what were suddenly newly independent nations, often against the wishes of their Russian minorities.

Thus Ukrainians in western Ukraine were thrilled when their popular Euromaidan uprising led to the overthrow of Russia-leaning president Viktor Yanukovych and the establishment of a western-friendly government, but the large Russian minority in Crimea was genuinely scared, especially when the Kiev government indicated that they were going to remove Russian as an official language, remove Russian street signs etc. All this played into Putin’s master narrative:

In his 2021 essay ‘On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians’, Putin referred to Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians as ‘one people’ making up a triune Russian nation. He maintained that large parts of Ukraine are historical Russian lands and claimed there is ‘no historical basis’ for the ‘idea of Ukrainian people as a nation separate from the Russians’.

Reading Galeotti’s account of the annexation of Crimea, what’s impressive was the lack of violence and Russian brutality. Russia infiltrated special units (Galeotti, of course, gives minute detail of just what units, led by which commanders, were deployed where) to all the key command points before the Ukraine high command had cottoned on to what was happening.

Crimea was an extraordinary military success. (p.178)

Local support

A key point is that a lot of Crimeans are ethnic Russians and genuinely welcomed the annexation. Putin organised a quick referendum and claimed 97% of the population approved the annexation (p.177). Do they think the rest of the world is stupid? Or are they so trapped inside their chauvinist box that they think Soviet-era electoral fictions are viable? Maybe both. They might as well have claimed 200% of the electorate wanted reunification with Russia. This kind of thing brings down derision and contempt on the Putin administration but they don’t see it.

And all along, as Galeotti points out, it isn’t necessary. If they had held a free and fair referendum, chances are the pro-Russian vote would still have won. But the Russian political elite has no concept of what democracy is and how to use it. The heirs to 250 years of Mongol khans and 400 years of tsars and 75 years of communist totalitarianism, the Russian elite literally knows no other way of ruling except via top-down diktats.

Comparison of Russian nationalism and Islamism

A key point, and a running thread through the book, is that in all these conflicts – Chechnya, Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine – the situation was made messy and confusing by the involvement of local militias. Chechnya is fascinating because some of the forces fighting the Russians were straight nationalists but, given the era and the proximity to Afghanistan, many of them were Islamic groups fighting for something else entirely, for the creation of an Islamic Caliphate in the Caucasus.

In a sense this kind of Islamic ideology and Russia’s chauvinism have a lot in common in that 1) they both inspire a kind of messianic intensity of belief and, 2) on a more practical level, that they don’t believe in borders. Greater Russia chauvinism flies free of accepted borders, borders are the enemy, keeping good Russians trapped in foreign countries created by an alien settlement somehow engineered by the perfidious West. Russia will only be great when these invalid nation states are swept away and the borders redrawn to include all true Russians in the genuine Greater Russia.

Identically the same with Islamist ideology, which believes all the borders and nation states of the Middle East were created by Western imperialists and the region will only be strong and pure when all believers are united in the restored caliphate, free of the trappings of the imperial West.

It’s a match made in heaven.

The role of militias in near Russian countries

To come back to the role of local militias, something which makes all the Russia wars feel very distinctive is that they were and are fought in places which are already riven by ethnic and tribal and cultural division. To read about Chechnya and Georgia is to be impressed by how fissile those ‘nations’ already were. The authorities in Georgia’s capital, Tbilisi, had only nominal control over the entire region of South Ossetia which was packed with pro-Russian separatists or, over to the west, on the Black sea coast, with the region of Abkhazia, ditto.

These are ‘countries’ which 1) already featured a large pro-Russian community and 2) were and are characterised by a high level of clan and tribal attachment which converts into tribal politicians, tribe-based mafias and, by an easy extension, clan-based militias.

The complicated role played by local militias in very clan-based, feuding societies is a central feature of all these conflicts.

Donbas and beyond

And continued in the Ukraine. For even as he was infiltrating his troops into Crimea for what proved to be a surprisingly bloodless annexation (February 2014), Putin was also encouraging local pro-Russian militias in eastern Ukraine.

The fascinating aspect of Galeotti’s account is how the conflict in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine began spontaneously, with coalitions of independence politicians, activists, and rag-tag militias taking on the Ukrainian authorities. It certainly wasn’t a carefully planned operation like the annexation of Crimea, the opposite, and for some time the Kremlin didn’t know how to react. To begin with they began to siphon military hardware to the more successful pro-Russian militias, followed, after some months, by military advisers.

Galeotti says that in these early phases the aim was to warn the new pro-western regime in Kiev of the consequences of allying with the West, no more. However, as the Ukraine army got its act together and, working with pro-government militias, began to drive the pro-Russia forces East, the Kremlin had to decide whether to acquiesce in their defeat or escalate. They chose to escalate and sent in regular Russian troops, breaching the sovereignty of a European nation (p.187).

Galeotti describes the two ceasefire treaties, Minsk 1 and Minsk 2, their predictable failure, and the settling down of the problem into a permanent low-level conflict. It reminded me of some of the civil wars I’ve read about in Africa, contested borders, governments relying on local militias, all sides using exemplary violence i.e. carrying out atrocities on unarmed civilians designed to warn other villages and towns to surrender without a fight.

As 2014 turned into 2015 and 2016 the Ukrainians reformed and reinforced their army with a huge recruitment drive, better training, new kit. They drove the rebels back but could never win because whenever they looked close to victory, the Russians deployed a regiment to block them.

So the pattern was one of on-off ceasefires, trench warfare, sporadic local fighting, mutual sniping and shelling, and equally mutual recrimination, until 2022 when Putin decided that it was time to break the stalemate. (p.191)

Syria, the unexpected intervention

We in the West think the Arab Spring was a spontaneous uprising of oppressed peoples across the Middle East to overthrow their corrupt old rulers. See my review of:

From the paranoid perspective of the Kremlin, though, it looked a lot like the uprisings were the work of a West systematically getting rid of traditional Soviet allies (Gaddafi, Saddam, Bashar al-Assad). At the UN, Russia acquiesced in the West’s bombing of Libyan forces but felt betrayed when this led not to a ceasefire but to the overthrow of Gaddafi. All of this, of course, was in light of America’s overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003 which led not to a pleasant democracy but the collapse of the Iraqi state and chaos within and beyond its borders.

So Russia had at least three reasons for stepping in to prop up the Assad regime:

  1. the Assad family had been a friend and ally in the region: why not make him really indebted to you by saving his skin?
  2. as a message to America that Russia, too, could throw its weight around / be a regional force in the Middle East
  3. genuine concern that if Assad, too, fell, the whole Syria-Iraq strip of territory would fall to ISIS or other Islamist groups, which Russia has genuine cause to fear

Regarding ISIS, see my review of:

Regarding the international aspects of the Syrian civil war, see my review of:

The events of the Syrian civil war are complicated. But for Russia its intervention was surprisingly successful. It showed itself and the West that it could project its power significantly beyond its borders. It saved an old ally, thus bolstering its credibility. It served as a useful blooding ground for large parts of the Russian army, navy and air force, which were rotated through the theatre. It allowed the military to road test new technology, especially new drones, and to road test new doctrines and strategies for different situations and types of engagement.

It also marked the high point and maybe eclipse of the Wagner group of mercenaries, who were vital in holding the line during some attacks alongside the prone-to-run-away Syrian army, but also taught the Russian high command to keep them in their place.

Invasion of Ukraine

The 2022 invasion of Ukraine and the poor performance of Russia’s troops… (p.89)

Requires a post of its own…

List of post-Soviet conflicts Russia has been involved in

  • Transnistria war – November 1990 to July 1992
  • First Chechen war – December 1994 to August 1996
  • Tajikistan civil war – May 1992 to June 1997
  • Yugoslavia – 1992 to 1995 Russian forces were part of the UN peacekeeping force
  • Second Chechen War – August 1999 to April 2009
  • Russo-Georgian War – 7 to 12 August 2008
  • Russian forces joined international anti-pirate patrols off the coast of Somalia
  • Annexation of Crimea – February 2014
  • Start of Donbas war – February 2014
  • Syrian civil war – from 2015 Russian forces supported the Assad government
  • Second Nagorno-Karabakh War – 27 September to 10 November 2020 –Russia sent peacekeeping force in 2021
  • Invasion of Ukraine – 20 February 2014 to the present

Table of contents

For your information, here is a straight copy of the book’s table of contents, from which you can see its comprehensive scope and level of detail:

1. Before Putin

  1. Born in chaos
    • The Soviet Disunion
    • The August coup
    • Boris Yeltsin: the man without a plan
  2. A military in crisis
    • An army gone bad
    • Nukes for sale?
    • Bringing the boys back home
    • Empty dreams
    • ‘Pasha Mercedes’
  3. The first Chechen war
    • Resistance and resentment
    • High hopes, quick defeats
    • The plan
    • Taking Grozny…
    • … and losing Grozny again
  4. The wars of Russian assertion
    • Moldova’s post-Soviet hangover
    • Central Asia: the Tajikistan contingent
    • Balkan dash

2. Enter Putin

  1. Putin’s priorities
    • Who is Vladimir Putin?
    • Putin in charge
    • Putin’s ministers
  2. The second Chechen war
    • Round two
    • Retaking Grozny
    • Operation Wolf Hunt
    • The creation of ‘Kadyrovstan’
    • Lessons learned
  3. Ivanov, the Initiator
    • My name’s Ivanov, Sergei Ivanov
    • The spy and generals
    • Ivanov’s reforms
    • Size does matter
  4. Sedyukov, the Enforcer
    • Enter the taxman
    • Serdyukov’s purge
    • And enter Makarov
    • The Georgian excuse
  5. Georgia 2008: Tblisi’s move…
    • Harbingers
    • Provoking a war
    • The Georgian advance
    • The battle for Tskhinvali
    • The Russian advance
  6. Georgia 2008: …Moscow’s counter
    • The tide turns
    • The Abkhaz front
    • The audit
    • Did anything work well?
  7. ‘New Look’ army
    • Command and control: unified battle management
    • The ground forces: divisions to brigade
    • The air forces: rationalised
    • The navy: integrated at last
    • The airborne: survival

3. The New Cold War

  • Shoigu, the Rebuilder
    • Who is Sergei Shoigu?
    • ‘A servant to the tsar, a father to the soldiers’
    • General Gerasimov
    • Rearmament and recruitment
    • Ready for action
  • Crimea, 2014
    • Russia and Ukraine
    • ‘Returning Crimea to Russia’
    • Taking Crimea
    • Enter the ‘little green men’
    • ‘Crimea is ours’
    • An audit of the operation
  • Donbas, 2014-
    • Strelkov’s spark
    • A war of irregulars
    • The ‘Northern wind’
    • The fixing of the conflict
    • Stalemate
  • Lessons of the Donbas war
    • Command and control in a proxy war is hard
    • Information warfare is a powerful force multiplier
    • Implausible deniability has its place
    • Drones are the next big thing
  • Syria 2015 (1): the unexpected intervention
    • A long, bloody war
    • A friend in need
    • Heading to Hmeymin
    • Hmeymin’s hammer
    • Turning the tide
    • Victory of sorts
  • Syria 2015 (2); lessons of the Syrian campaign
    • Airpower is not (usually) enough
    • Mercenaries have their place, but need to know it
    • Brutality can work, but hearts and minds matter, too
    • Frenemies can find themselves in battle
    • A nice little war is good for business

4. Rearming Russia

  1. Rumble for ruble
    • When comparisons fail
    • ‘Let us starve, but let us export’
    • The metal-eaters
    • Buyer beware
    • Modernising the military
  2. Armiya Rossii
    • The battalion tactical group
    • The return of the division
    • Heavy metal
    • Specialised forces for specialised operations
    • Logistics
    • Capabilities
  3. The sky is Russia’s!
    • Always in transition
    • The aerospace forces
    • Defence of the motherland
    • Fist of the motherland
    • Heavy lift
    • Drones
  4. Contesting the sea
    • Never a naval power
    • Rusted, rebuilt
    • Organisation
  5. Power projection: blue and black berets
    • ‘Nobody but us’
    • By parachute, plane or track
    • The black berets
    • ‘Black Devils’
    • ‘Where we are, there is victory!’
    • Underwater sentinels
  6. The Spetsnaz
    • Special people, for special tasks
    • Tip of the spear
    • Putin’s Spetsnaz
    • The special operations command
  7. The nuclear backstop
    • Post-Soviet armageddon
    • Rail, road and tube
    • Under the waves
    • Strategic aviation
    • Modernisation and magic
    • Why nukes matter so much [they bolster Russia’s sense of itself as still a superpower]

5. The Future

  1. Political warfare
    • The rise of the spooks
    • Hybrid, ambiguous, non-linear, political
    • Outsourced warfighters [the Wagner group]
    • Information warfare
  2. New generation warfare
    • Small wars
    • Limited deployments
    • Big wars
    • Escalation, de-escalation and lesser apocalypses
  3. The challenges of the future
    • The Western flank
    • … And the turbulent South Caucasus, too
    • Central Asia: instability and jihad
    • China, the great frenemy
  4. Ukraine 2022: Putin’s last war?
    • Not the generals’ war
    • A police action, not a war
    • From Kyiv to the Donbas
    • How hubris destroyed a military
    • Deadlock
  5. Conclusions: the Eurasian Sparta?
    • A nation under arms?
    • The military myth
    • The security state?
    • A weak hand played well
    • After Putin?
  6. Ukraine 2023: a dispatch on a war in progress
    • The paradox of reform
    • War Putinism
    • The mutiny
    • The war in Russia
    • The imagination race
    • Prospects

General conclusions

The whole spectacle confirms my strong feeling that human beings simply cannot govern themselves. The naive expect humanity to take some kind of concerted action against climate change. Really? With people like this in charge?

Are modern wars doomed to failure?

Are modern wars winnable? When was the last time either Russia or America actually won a war?

For the Russians – Afghanistan, Chechnya, Georgia, Yugoslavia, Syria, Ukraine.

For the Americans – Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq.

Russian lies

I watched the BBC TV series ‘Putin and the West’ in which French president Francoise Hollande and British Prime Minister David Cameron baldly stated that Putin is a liar. Hollande said not only is Putin a liar but his entire approach to diplomacy is to lie, his strategy is based on lying about everything.

The Russians even lie when the lie is so blatant and absurd it damages their own cause. Galeotti’s book contains some nice examples. In 1993 during the Georgian war the Russians broke a ceasefire agreement by bombing Sukhumi while it was still held by Georgian forces.

Russian defence minister Grachyov responded with the implausible and widely derided claim that these were Georgian aircraft painted with Russian colours, bombing their own positions as a provocation. (p.122)

In moments like that you can see how lying is such second nature to the Russian establishment that it can’t see how stupid and ridiculous it makes them look to the outside world. This was captured in a recent press event in Delhi where Russian foreign minister Lavrov claimed the Ukraine war started when Ukraine attacked Russia and went on to claim that Russia was trying to halt this unfortunate war.

This is Göbbels-level lying which is so absurd that it makes you worry about the sanity of the Russian leadership. Putin ordered the military invasion of Ukraine but, having read Galeotti’s book it’s easy to think that Putin and his circle genuinely believe that they invaded the territory of a neighbouring country because they genuinely see Ukraine’s defection to the West as a kind of attack on Russia, on Russia’s idea of itself, on the Russian nationalist belief that Ukraine and Belarus aren’t independent nations at all. They felt culturally, psychologically and strategically ‘attacked’ and so sincerely believe that the military invasion was a justified response to the Ukraine government’s insult and threat to Russian hegemony.

At moments like this you can see how the Russian elite inhabits a different mindset, in effect a different reality, from the rest of the world, utterly blinded by their Greater Russia nationalism and prepared to do anything to protect it.

But there is, of course, an alternative interpretation, which is that a lot of these lies uttered in public fora are for domestic consumption. Edited by Russia’s totally cowed and quiescent media, they can then be broadcast on the nightly news, with the laughter track removed and roars of applause edited in.

Yes, it’s important to remember that the Russian government lies to everyone including its own people, and that if anyone finds out the truth and starts broadcasting it they are quickly locked up or pushed out a window or die of mystery poison. But then being lied to by your government is another venerable old Russian tradition. This isn’t my prejudice, it is a factual point Galeotti makes over and over again:

Russians have decades’ or even centuries’ experience of being lied to by their governments, especially regarding wars… (p.375)

The Russian bearhug

There’s a hoary old proverb about Mexico, ‘Poor Mexico! So far from God, so close to the United States!’ How much more true this is of every nation which borders Russia today. China, Mongolia and Kazakhstan probably needn’t be too worried, too big, nothing to steal.

But poor Georgia, Belarus, Latvia, Estonia and Finland – the Putin Doctrine, the concepts of Greater Russia, near abroad, Russian irredentism, Russian neo-imperialism, Russian nationalism – all these variations on the same theme mean the leaders and peoples of those countries must be permanently anxious about whether Russia will attack and invade them next.

It’s unlikely, seeing as most of the Russian army’s resources are deployed to – and being consumed in – Ukraine. But in planning for the future, the next five, ten years, should they be factoring in invasion by Russia?

Thank God there’s the whole length of Europe between my country and the resentful, angry, permanently aggrieved Russian bear.

War with China?

Although I’ve spent my entire life worrying about a nuclear war, subjected to movies and novels and documentaries about the horror of a nuclear war with the USSR or Russia, and although Putin and his mouthpieces go on and on about the threat from ‘the West’, Galeotti disarmingly says Russia is never going to face the threat of an invasion by NATO. Do you think the people of Belgium or Italy or Austria would ever want to attack Russia? Why? Let its people stew in the repressive authoritarian culture which they seem to love and recreate in every generation.

Galeotti argues that the real threat is China. The majority and the best Russian armed and air forces are concentrated in the west of the country, all on high alert for the mythical invasion by Holland and Denmark and Lithuania which is never going to come. But what about the vast area of Siberia?

Galeotti explains that during the imperial nineteenth century Russia seized large bits of territory from China. In principle these borders were re-agreed by a treaty of 2008, but what if China wants them back? Russia’s border with China is 4,000 kilometres long and very thinly protected (p.339).

The relationship between China and Russia is set to become more asymmetrical with China increasingly becoming the economic master and Russia the vassal. Deprived of trade with the West because of Ukraine sanctions, Russia is increasingly forced to sell its oil and gas to China which is aware of its partner’s weakness. What if China’s demands for unequal trade deals slowly, steadily increase? And apparently there has been growing concern in the FSB, some of it expressed publicly, at the growth of Chinese cyber activity against Russia, spying and hacking. And what about China’s growing influence in the five vast ‘stan’ countries to Russia’s south, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, where Chinese promises of investment and cash prove more attractive than Moscow’s penniless bullying? Likelihood is all these tensions will slowly ratchet up, the direction of travel is one way, with Russia contracting before an ever-growing China…

All of Russia east of the Urals is serviced by just two enormous train lines both of which could be easily ruptured and then none of its western forces could be redeployed. Any incursion could not be contained by forces which can’t reach the battlefield and so it is here, out East, that any escalation to battlefield nuclear weapons and beyond is most likely, or least unlikely. Discuss.

Over-optimistic?

The paperback edition of the book has a final chapter written in August 2023 covering the war in Ukraine up to that date and moving onto political conclusions. Galeotti’s account of the war (as of all the other wars he covers) is brisk and very readable, it’s his broader conclusions I question.

Writing in 2022, Galeotti pulls together a raft of evidence to suggest the war has been a disaster for Putin and Russia, it’s the end of the Russian army, public opinion is turning against him, draft dodging is up, there have been firebombing of draft offices, social media is awash with soldiers bitterly complaining about being used as cannon fodder, strongly implying that the president’s days are numbered and throwing in the old canard about him being ill, cancer, some immune disease etc.

It starts out sensible and maybe each of the strands are true, but life isn’t that sweet. There is no justice. Russia is an autocratic nation, ruled for its entire history by lying dictators. It’s not being pessimistic, it’s being coldly realistic, to assume that this will never change.

Credit

‘Putin’s Wars: from Chechnya to Ukraine’ by Mark Galeotti was published by Osprey Publishing in 2022.

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by Simon on January 16, 2026  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on January 16, 2026

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2026/01/16/putins-wars-from-chechnya-to-ukraine-mark-galeotti/

Lee Miller @ Tate Britain

This is a quite amazing exhibition, a complete eye-opener not only regarding Lee Miller’s extraordinary range and ability as a photographer and her staggering achievement in so many different fields – but at the same time a portrait of an astonishingly blessed and yet, in parts, harrowing life.

This is the largest retrospective of Miller’s work ever staged and easily fills 11 decent-sized rooms. It features 230 vintage and modern prints, many (especially her wonderful Second World War shots) on show for the first time. You might think that’s a lot of items to take in but if anything it’s not enough. I could easily have lapped up more.

The show also includes a wide range of supporting material, including original copies of the many magazines her work appeared in, numerous copies of Vogue as well as wartime publications.

Quick overview

A quick overview would refer to Miller’s success as:

  • a fashion model
  • a muse and icon for avant-garde photographers
  • an actor in an avant-garde film
  • a core member of French surrealism
  • a collaborator with the great Man Ray
  • a travel photographer in the Middle East
  • a fashion photographer for Vogue in the 1930s and through the first years of the Second World War
  • a war photographer, at first in Britain among air crews and suchlike, before being early on the scene at the D-Day landings and at the liberation of Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps
  • in post-war life hosting her artist friends at the country house in Sussex she shared with husband Roland Penrose
  • a late-blooming interest in cordon bleu cookery

In room after room, in one area after another, the visitor comes across amazing photos in a wide range of genres. It’s a staggering achievement and this is a thrilling, mind-boggling exhibition.

The exhibition

As I mentioned the exhibition is in 11 rooms. I’ll give a quick summary of each, with an indication of favourite photos.

Room 1. Fashion model

Miller was born in 1907 in Poughkeepsie, New York State. Her father was a keen amateur photographer and she posed frequently for him from early childhood. She began modelling professionally in New York City in 1926 (aged 18) while studying painting at the Art Students League. In March 1927, aged just 19, she appeared on the covers of British and American Vogue, drawn in pearls and furs against a glittering city skyline. She was photographed by celebrated figures like Cecil Beaton and Edward Steichen and room 1 is full of wonderfully atmospheric 1920s photo shoots.

Installation photo of Lee Miller at Tate Britain showing Miller in 1920s cloche hat and furs © Lee Miller Archives, England 2025. All rights reserved. Photo © Tate (Sonal Bakrania)

The photos bring out her height, her strikingly long neck, the rather big nose which gives her a slightly tomboy, androgynous look, which perfectly suited the 1920s era of slender flappers.

The experience of being a model inspired her to become a photographer herself, declaring she would ‘rather take a picture than be one.’ Not only that, but she wanted to be at the cutting edge of photography, which was Europe. So in 1929 she moved to Paris.

Room 2. Association with Man Ray

With extraordinary courage, ambition and chutzpah, Miller tracked down Paris’s leading avant-garde photographer, (the American) Man Ray and announced that she was to be his new student. ‘I told him boldly I was his new student. He said he didn’t take students and anyway he was leaving Paris for his holiday. I said, I know, I’m going with you – and I did.’

Impressed by her looks, confidence and evident ability, Man Ray took her not as a student but as an active collaborator, both a model for many of his most famous photos and a photographer in her own right, and then lover.

The famous photo of a woman’s bottom as she kneels forward, revealing her feet, that’s Miller, along with scores of other striking and iconic images.

This room explains how they jointly stumbled across the process of solarisation, the process where a negative or print is partially re-exposed to light during development, leading to a tone reversal effect where bright areas become dark and vice versa. You can see an example on the left in this photo.

Installation photo of Lee Miller at Tate Britain © Lee Miller Archives, England 2025. All rights reserved. Photo © Tate (Sonal Bakrania)

The Blood of a Poet

Very quickly Miller was established at the centre of Paris’s surrealism circle. In her role as model, she was invited by Jean Cocteau to star in his ground-breaking surrealist film, Le Sang d’un poète, 1930. In it she appears as a classical statue which comes to life. In a darkened room off to one side, you can watch a 3-minute excerpt.

Room 3. The surreal streets of Paris

By the early 1930s, Miller was fully embedded in Paris’s avant-garde circles, in particular befriending artists associated with surrealism, the movement that rebelled against convention and advocated an aesthetic of chance, randomness and the uncanny.

Having established her own studio, Miller took to photographing the City of Light and created a dazzling series of images. Using the avant-garde strategies of photographing everything from above, from an angle, incorporating disorientating reflections – she rendered everyday sights in the city mysterious and surreal.

My favourites were a pair of bird cages set against the ornate metalwork of a shop window. Or the really surreal one of a woman reaching her hand up and behind her to touch her hairdo in a hairdressers’ but which makes the hand look like an alien creature. Tate press give us this one to use, of a sheet of semi-congealed tar oozing across the pavement towards a pair of anonymous feet. All of them weird and wonderful and inspiring.

Untitled, Paris 1930 by Lee Miller. Lee Miller Archives © Lee Miller Archives, England 2025. All rights reserved. leemiller.co.uk

Returning to New York in 1932, she set up Lee Miller Studios Inc. and opened her first solo exhibition. In both the United States and Europe, Miller exhibited regularly alongside fellow pioneers of modern photography and her work was published in numerous artistic journals and magazines.

Room 4. Egypt and other destinations

By 1934 Miller had spent two years running a commercial studio in Depression-era New York and felt burnt out by the repetitive demands of high-profile clients and brands. In that year she met the Egyptian businessman and engineer Aziz Eloui Bey, who had come to New York City to buy equipment for the Egyptian National Railways, and they were married.

At first Miller renounced photography entirely. thanks to her rich husband she no longer needed to earn a living. But a trip to Jerusalem in 1935 reignited her creative spark, and she returned to the camera as a tool of experiment and exploration. Over the next four years, Miller made regular expeditions across remote Egyptian deserts, as well as through Syria, Palestine, Lebanon, Cyprus, Romania and Greece.

This room contains lots of stunning images from these trips, images of the desert, tracks in the sand, decrepit cars, a pile of sandals made from car tyres, the strange and disorientating architecture of the desert world.

Portrait of Space, Al Bulwayeb near Siwa 1937 by Lee Miller. Lee Miller Archives © Lee Miller Archives, England 2025. All rights reserved. leemiller.co.uk.

In Cairo Miller took a photograph of the desert near Siwa that Magritte saw and used as inspiration for his 1938 painting Le Baiser. Miller also contributed an object to the Surrealist Objects and Poems exhibition at the London Gallery in 1934. There’s a great one of bleached snail shells on an old tree.

The room also includes striking black-and-white images of peasants in Greece, Albania and the other ‘exotic’ countries she visited during this period. All of them are good, some are outstanding. I particularly liked the one with the three Albanian peasants and their two bears.

By 1937, Miller had grown bored with her life in Cairo. She returned to Paris and went to a party the day she arrived, where she reconciled with Man Ray, and met the British surrealist painter and curator Roland Penrose who she would marry in May 1947.

Room 5. Arty friends

Charismatic, creative and intelligent, Miller befriended many of the leading artists and intellectuals of her day and throughout her carer created striking, candid, intimate portraits of them.

‘It takes time to do a good portrait … [and] find out what idea of himself or herself he has in mind.’

There’s a set of entertaining ones of Charlie Chaplin, who claimed the shoot was one of the most entertaining days of his life, and best of which appeared in a popular French cinema magazine as well as in modernist photography exhibitions on both sides of the Atlantic.

With Picasso Miller had a long and fruitful relationship, taking over 1,000 photos of him during their lives.

Having returned to Paris in 1937, she took intimate portraits of the surrealists in the troubled period of the late-30s, many of them jolly snaps of larky group holidays. These include Eileen Agar, Max Ernst, Paul Eluard, Leonora Carrington and many more.

Room 6. Vogue and war

Miller moved back from Paris to London to join her lover, Roland Penrose, in September 1939, just as World War Two kicked off.

As a US citizen, Miller was ineligible for war work in the UK and so she offered her services to British Vogue. Before long, with more established figures tied up, she was the magazine’s leading photographer, and this room contains some of her wonderful, inspired photoshoots in wartime London, including shots of the editorial staff busking it after the offices were Blitzed.

Room 7. Photographing the Blitz and women’s war

From 7 September 1940 to 11 May 1941 London was blanket bombed by the Germans. Some 30,000 people were killed during the Blitz but Miller wasn’t the only one to notice the bizarre and surreal imagery produced by intensive bombing of urban landscapes. Placing pristine, beautifully dressed models in tailored outfits against the rubble created jarring but striking images. The Blitz was a whole new look.

Model Elizabeth Cowell wearing Digby Morton suit, London 1941 by Lee Miller. Lee Miller Archives © Lee Miller Archives, England 2025. All rights reserved. leemiller.co.uk

All aspects of wartime life inspired Miller, from a documentary news-style photo like:

To consciously surreal compositions like:

Fire Masks by Lee Miller (1941) Lee Miller Archives © Lee Miller Archives, England 2025. All rights reserved. leemiller.co.uk

And a great one of a melted typewriter, titled Remington Silent to jokily echo the Remington typewriter company’s advertising claim that their typewriters were very quiet. Well, this one’s never going to bother anyone again.

Her sense of humour was never far away.

David E. Scherman dressed for war, London 1942 by Lee Miller. Lee Miller Archives © Lee Miller Archives, England 2025. All rights reserved. leemiller.co.uk

Many of Miller’s Blitz photographs were published as a book, Grim Glory: Pictures of Britain Under Fire (1941). Although intended primarily for a US audience, it proved highly popular on both sides of the Atlantic, and there are several copies open to various pages here in a display case.

At least ten of her photographs were also included in ‘Britain at War’, an influential exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Touring North and South America over the next three years, these works shaped international perceptions of the Blitz.

Women’s war

Several walls here hold photos describing women’s lives in war. British women, conscripted for the first time from 1941, poured into the workplace. Miller took inspiration photos of women working as mechanics, journalists and searchlight operators, a striking photo of a woman fighter pilot in her cockpit, her photos were a vital contributions to the war effort.

Room 8. In warzones

Once the USA had joined the war (Japan. Germany and Italy declared war on the United States on December 11, 1941) Miller was able to apply to become an accredited war correspondent with the US Army. This she did in late 1942. She continued to take photos of war work in Britain. it was only after the Normandy landings of June 1944, that she – like most correspondents – was able to follow the army into combat.

This room contains vivid photos of the Normandy beaches still littered with wreckage, and then a series depicting the claustrophobic lamplit environment of army field hospitals, and then photos of sometimes grossly injured soldiers in their makeshift beds.

Most of these stories were produced for Vogue with whom she’d kept all her contacts. She produced a regular supply of not only photos but reporting to accompany them. Up till now she hadn’t written much but she proved a natural journalist, producing vivid first-hand descriptions of what she saw as she followed the US Army in its fiercely contested progress across Europe.

Installation photo of Lee Miller at Tate Britain showing the case containing Miller’s war correspondent uniform and, at the left hip, her lightweight Rolleiflex camera (photo by the author)

She turned out to have the journalist’s fundamental skill, being in the right place at the right time. In France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, Denmark, Austria, Hungary and Romania she produced a range of images: some, as mentioned, of field hospitals, others artillery exploding on nearby buildings. In many of them she drew on the surrealist aesthetic to bring out the absurdity as well as the stupid cruelty of war.

Room 9. The Holocaust

The war thread reaches a peak of horror in room 9. This displays the photos Miller took after entering Buchenwald concentration CAMP on 16 April 1945, soon after it had been liberated. Two weeks later, on 30 April, she visited Dachau, a concentration camp near Munich. Thirty-five years later I went to Dachau.

Most of these photos have never been seen before. They show piles of bones or prisoners so starved they were little more than skin and bones.

The trains pulling cattle wagons which used to be packed full of victims, now bestilled in the summer heat with just a few corpses lying around on the gravel. There’s a sequence showing Nazi camp guards who have been soundly thrashed. And one which really stuck in my mind, a discomfortingly idyllic one of a dead German camp guard floating in a ditch or canal – a kind of mid-twentieth century version of Millais’s Ophelia, which hangs not far away in Tate Britain.

Miller’s Rolleiflex camera had no zoom lens and so, in order to get the shots, she had to get very close to the subjects, to all those piles of corpses, to the starved inmates dying of disease in the barracks. Up close with the worst evil in history.

This is a devastating subject, Miller captured images with her usual skill and eye for detail, but the experience marked her for life.

Months later, she was among the first to reach Hitler’s weekend retreat at Berchtesgarten just as American GIs began to loot it. In images overflowing with historical irony, she and her war photographer comrade David E. Scherman photographed each other taking baths in Hitler’s own personal bath The sight of the enemy cavorting in the most private inner sanctum of the great Leader rammed home the message of total defeat. It also represented the par washing off the filth and grime of months living through the apocalypse which the deranged leader started. And, for Scherman who was Jewish, a particularly sweet and apposite revenge on the Antisemite-In-Chief.

Unbeknown to Miller and Scherman as they set up these shots, just a few hours later Hitler and Eva Braun would commit suicide in their bunker in Berlin and the war in Europe would soon be over.

Room 10. War’s aftermath

But the suffering wasn’t over, not for tens of millions of people, not by a long chalk. The war left unthinkable devastation all across Europe.

Miller continued photographing and reporting into 1946 and recorded how the euphoria of liberation gave way to disillusionment. Her images and writing show people facing mass displacement, starvation and disease. Much of this is covered in Keith Lowe’s harrowing history of the war’s aftermath:

She travelled in eastern Europe, capturing the poverty of really dirt-poor peasants. There’s an extraordinary photo of the public execution of László Bárdossy, the fascist ex-Prime Minister of Hungary, on 10 January 1946.

Throughout she maintained her eye for the surreal detail, the sur- in the real.

She went out of her way to photograph children, believing they represented the future everyone now had to build towards, but this quote shows her acrid realism:

‘I’m taking a lot of kid pictures, because they are the only ones for whom there is any hope … And also we might as well have a look at who we’re going to fight twenty years from now.’

Room 11. At home in Sussex

Happily married Finally it was over, Miller quit being a correspondent and returned to England. After she discovered she was pregnant by her long-time lover, the artist Roland Penrose, she divorced her Egyptian husband Bey and, on 3 May 1947, married Penrose. Their only son, Antony Penrose, was born on 9 September 1947.

Happy home In 1949 the couple bought Farley Farm House in Chiddingly, East Sussex. During the 1950s and 1960s Farley Farm became a popular resort for visiting artists such as Picasso, Man Ray, Oskar Kokoschka, Henry Moore, Eileen Agar, Jean Dubuffet, Dorothea Tanning, Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy, Humphrey Jennings and many more…

Cookery In the 1950s Miller drifted away from photography and became increasingly interested in cordon bleu cookery, developing her own eccentric and humorous recipes. But her mental health was problematic. What she’d seen so close-up during the war cast a shadow over the rest of her life.

In this final room are many of the photos she took of the artistic giants of the twentieth century who were also her friends, as well as a charming display case showing magazine features about her staid, domestic home life.

Installation photo of Lee Miller at Tate Britain showing a photospread in a 1973 edition of Home and Gardens featuring the interior of her Sussex home complete with some of her cooking (photo by the author)

Sometimes Miller claimed that her photographic archive had been destroyed. The true extent of her work was only discovered after her death in 1977. The roughly 60,000 negatives, prints, journals and ephemera uncovered in the family attic now form the basis of the Lee Miller Archives and this exhibition represents a dazzling opportunity to delve into those archives and savour their countless treasures.

Summary

What an amazing life! What a prodigious, multifaceted talent! And what a brilliant exhibition!

Promo video

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by Simon on October 15, 2025  •  Permalink
Posted in Exhibition, Holocaust, Photography, Second World War
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Posted by Simon on October 15, 2025

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Selected Essays by Virginia Woolf – 4. Looking On

‘… to give up this arduous game… of assembling things that lie on the surface…’
(Woolf describing the effort required to hold her mind together, in ‘Flying over London’, page 211)

‘Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it.’

The Oxford World Classic edition of ‘Selected Essays by Virginia Woolf’, edited by David Bradshaw, brings together 30 of her essays, reviews and articles and groups them under four headings:

  1. Reading and Writing
  2. Life-Writing
  3. Women and Fiction
  4. Looking On

Summarising each of the essays was taking so long that I broke my review of the book up into multiple blog posts. This post summarises and comments on the ten essays contained in the fourth and final section of the selection, titled ‘Looking On’. Unlike the essays in the previous sections, which closely addressed the relevant topic heading, the volume’s editor, David Bradshaw, has deliberately chosen these ones to be more diverse in subject matter and approach. The essays are:

  1. Thunder at Wembley (1924) [the British Empire exhibition at Wembley]
  2. The Cinema (1926)
  3. Street Haunting: A London Adventure (1927) [a walk from her home at Hyde Park Gate to the Strand one winter evening as night was falling]
  4. The Sun and The Fish (1928) [a solar eclipse and visit to London Aquarium]
  5. The Docks of London (1931)
  6. Oxford Street Tide (1932)
  7. Evening Over Sussex: Reflections in a Motor Car (1942)
  8. Flying Over London [an imagined flight in a small plane over London]
  9. Why Art Today Follows Politics (1936)
  10. Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid (1940)

I keep reading references to Woolf being an ‘intellectual’ which astonishes me because she hardly anywhere mounts clear, sustained arguments, with reasons and evidence to support her. Even when she is making a point – as in her essays criticising the Edwardian novelists and promoting her new version of literature, or discussing what a feminist literature might be like – what her essays are far more noticeable for their slow beginnings, their whimsical digressions, her easy distraction by the surface of things, objects and phrases, by her indirections and odd approaches, which sometimes barely make sense.

This is more than usually true of these ten descriptive and impressionistic pieces.

If there’s one common theme or thread linking all of them, and maybe all her writing as a whole, I think it’s her mental illness. In Street Haunting, Sun and Fish and Evening over Sussex she describes having multiple ‘selves’, which initially sounds cool and post-modernist but, I think, was an aspect of her mental illness.

You particularly feel the struggle it involved when she talks about the need to marshal all these selves back together, to create a unified personality to face society with. This isn’t a criticism, it’s the opposite: it’s sympathy. Both my kids have mental health issues and I struggle sometimes. Maybe that’s why I’m making too much of it as an issue…

Anyway, my interpretation is that her obsessive listing of everything she sees, on all her walks and travels, her distraction by endless streams of shiny details, was both a symptom of her problems but also a way of coping with them. When the inner world gets cluttered with multiple selves all shouting at you, you take refuge in the ever-changing world outside you to try and regain, and hang onto, some calm, something outside yourself. I take this to be the message made explicit in ‘Street Haunting’ and lurking, implicitly, beneath all the other pieces; maybe, beneath her whole oeuvre.

1. Thunder at Wembley (1924: 3 pages)

A brisk description of attending the 1924 Empire Exhibition at Wembley. It has an odd tone. She mocks the organisers for not making the vast concrete edifice which enclosed the exhibition, sealed off from the sky, for making the error of letting nature intrude here and there: a few trees, some birds. But the real feeling that comes over is Woolf’s lofty snobbish view of the crowds who are attending it. The words vulgar and mediocrity recur. She ironically comments that the exhibition would have been much better if the organisers had only kept all the people out. In the last paragraph she becomes delirious and has a vision of the end of the world.

The sky is livid, lurid, sulphurine. It is in violent commotion. It is whirling water-spouts of cloud into the air; of dust in the Exhibition. Dust swirls down the avenues, hisses and hurries like erected cobras round the corners. Pagodas are dissolving in dust. Ferro-concrete is fallible. Colonies are perishing and dispersing in spray of inconceivable beauty and terror which some malignant power illuminates. Ash and violet are the colours of its decay. From every quarter human beings come flying—clergymen, school children, invalids in bath-chairs. They fly with outstretched arms, and a vast sound of wailing rolls before them, but there is neither confusion nor dismay. Humanity is rushing to destruction, but humanity is accepting its doom.

What?

The Cinema (1926: 5 pages)

It starts out in the typically frivolous and gaseous style which makes Woolf’s essays such a trial to read.

No great distance separates [we moderns] from those bright-eyed naked men who knocked two bars of iron together and heard in that clangour a foretaste of the music of Mozart. The bars in this case, of course, are so highly wrought and so covered over with accretions of alien matter that it is extremely difficult to hear anything distinctly. All is hubble-bubble, swarm and chaos. We are peering over the edge of a cauldron in which fragments of all shapes and savours seem to simmer; now and again some vast form heaves itself up and seems about to haul itself out of chaos.

?

Woolf briefly describes the black-and-white newsreels of the day. She begins to be interesting when she says that one of the disconcerting features of film is that it shows what life is like when we’re not there and a world which has gone.

But that’s newsreels and factual movies. As to the development of fiction movies, lots of other arts stood ready to help. Of course Woolf has only one art in mind, her own specialist subject, literature. But the marriage of literature and film has been a disaster. Why? Because literature shows people from the inside, shows us their minds and thoughts and emotions, whereas movies can only show them as stock figures from the outside.

So we lurch and lumber through the most famous novels of the world. So we spell them out in words of one syllable, written, too, in the scrawl of an illiterate schoolboy.

I’m sure all Hollywood screenwriters were flattered by this description. On the other hand, I like this next bit which I totally agree with, that movies simplify complex human emotions down into stock gestures and expressions.

A kiss is love. A broken cup is jealousy. A grin is happiness. Death is a hearse.

In Woolf’s view film needs to free itself from a literalistic interpretation of content from another medium, books, and free itself to explore its own language and vocabulary.

It seems plain that the cinema has within its grasp innumerable symbols for emotions that have so far failed to find expression… Is there, we ask, some secret language which we feel and see, but never speak, and, if so, could this be made visible to the eye? Is there any characteristic which thought possesses that can be rendered visible without the help of words?

Interesting thought. Obviously there’s been a hundred years of movies since Woolf wrote but you feel her point is still valid. Film ought to consist of more than just popcorn-munching, Technicolour-fabulous summer blockbusters, surely it does have the potential to convey human experiences in an utterly novel and revolutionary way. And yet it has failed. The movies I see nowadays (2025) are crushingly banal and familiar, and the whole concept of a ‘film’ is bleeding out into the extravaganzas shown on Netflix et al. There are more films than ever before but at the same time, a strong sense of exhaustion and repetition.

As usual, Woolf invokes Shakespeare, her go-to guy for symbolising the peak of literary complexity i.e. multiple associations are triggered in the brain by his verse. But it’s precisely the multi-faceted and evanescent and subjective nature of the reader’s response, which is unique to literature and cinema’s tactic of showing a man on a screen talking fails to convey.

Instead, she repeats the thought: surely there are visual symbols, maybe accentuated with music, which could convey complex emotions in a purely filmic way.

That such symbols will be quite unlike the real objects which we see before us seems highly probable. Something abstract, something which moves with controlled and conscious art, something which calls for the very slightest help from words or music to make itself intelligible, yet justly uses them subserviently – of such movements and abstractions the films may in time to come be composed.

Then indeed when some new symbol for expressing thought is found, the film-maker has enormous riches at his command.

All this guessing and clumsy turning over of unknown forces points at any rate away from any art we know in the direction of an art we can only surmise.

She concludes with the thought that cinema has been born the wrong way round: it demonstrates tremendous sophistication of technology, engineering, design and logistics, but has no soul, no content, no emotional complexity worth the name.

The mechanical skill is far in advance of the art to be expressed.

This falls into the category of one of her Hortative Essays. In linguistics, hortative modalities are verbal expressions used by the speaker to encourage or discourage an action. In more common speech, hortative is an adjective meaning something which to encourages, urges, or calls to action. So in an earlier section of the book, ‘Life-Writing’, we read her essay claiming that the genre of biography was poised at the dawn of a new era, which would require hard work and commitment but would lead through to a new vision. Same here. In her opinion film is just at the start of an era of innovation and discovery.

I guess she was right, insofar as film was poised on the brink of introducing talkies (published in 1926, this whole essay is based on the experience of only silent movies) and continued to evolve at a rate of knots throughout the twentieth century. But whether it ever developed the symbols and methods to really convey the human soul, as she hoped, is very much to be doubted. Maybe in lots of rarer, indie or art or non-American movies. One for film buffs to discuss forever.

3. Street Haunting: A London Adventure (1927: 11 pages)

How beautiful a London street is…

After a long day cooped up in a room writing, what better release than going for a ramble across London. Evening is best and winter the best season when there is magic in the air. The lamplight gives the bustling passersby a spurious glamour.

This is all unusually high-spirited and positive for Woolf and she deploys some stylish phrases.

Here under the lamps are floating islands of pale light through which pass quickly bright men and women, who, for all their poverty and shabbiness, wear a certain look of unreality, an air of triumph, as if they had given life the slip, so that life, deceived of her prey, blunders on without them. (p.178)

Once or twice she is tempted to imagine the lives of the people in the houses and has to remind herself to stay on the surface of things, an observer, a wandering eye, as the characters in so many of her books.

The eye is not a miner, not a diver, not a seeker after buried treasure. It floats us smoothly down a stream; resting, pausing, the brain sleeps perhaps as it looks… Let us… be content still with surfaces only—the glossy brilliance of the motor omnibuses; the carnal splendour of the butchers’ shops with their yellow flanks and purple steaks; the blue and red bunches of flowers burning so bravely through the plate glass of the florists’ windows.

For some reason she pops into a shoe shop and is there when a dwarf enters, accompanied by two normal-sized adults. Woolf describes her preening over he normal sized foot but when she goes back out into the street and Woolf follows her, she finds all the other passersby infected with the grotesque.

(This all reminds me of the French poet, Charles Baudelaire, famous for his visions of strange passersby in the streets of Paris, and of the whole French nineteenth century intellectual cult of the flaneur, all of which was being written about seventy years before Woolf wrote this essay.)

The dwarf had started a hobbling grotesque dance to which everybody in the street now conformed…

So she sees two drunk men pass by both leaning on a small boy, a stout woman dressed in shiny sealskin, a feeble-minded boy sucking the silver knob of his stick, an old man squatting on a doorstep as if suddenly overcome by the absurdity of the human spectacle – the randomness of these people seen in the street reminds me very much of all the background people who appear in her wandering-round-central-London novel, Mrs Dalloway.

In shops windows she sees good which spark fancies. Sofas and furnishings allow you to create and decorate a fantasy home of your own. When you wave that away, a glimpse of pearls in a jewellers’ window prompts visions of herself at a grand party in Mayfair, in June, looking out over the darkened streets while back in the main room the Prime Minister describes some political crisis to Lady So-and-So.

Why this continual turnover of fantasies? Because nature made human beings with ‘instincts and desires which are utterly at variance with his main being, so that we are streaked, variegated, all of a mixture’.

I’ve commented on how the same dozen or so ideas recur across Woolf’s oeuvre. Here she mentions the idea of multiple selves which features in the mature novels and Orlando.

Is the true self this which stands on the pavement in January, or that which bends over the balcony in June? Am I here, or am I there? Or is the true self neither this nor that, neither here nor there, but something so varied and wandering that it is only when we give the rein to its wishes and let it take its way unimpeded that we are indeed ourselves? (p.182)

Then she comes to the neighbourhood of second hand book shops and for a couple of page sings the delights of exploring the strange detritus of sold-off libraries and dead men’s collections, the eternal hope that you will take down some little treasure and be transported by dashing narratives or wonderful poetry, and all those travellers to far-off lands. But there’s no end to books and so after this cosy interlude in a warm second-hand bookshop, it’s back out into the streets.

She passes two women complaining about how selfish ‘Kate’ is, then they’re gone and she never finds out more. Two men discussing racing tips under a lamp-post. Thousands of other commuters, freed from work and thronging from the Strand over Waterloo bridge, who she fondly fantasises are themselves fondly fantasising about being ‘great cricketers, famous actresses, soldiers who have saved their country at the hour of need.’

When you stop and read that you realise how essentially childish her view of other people is. Those aspirations – ‘great cricketers, famous actresses, soldiers who have saved their country at the hour of need’ – are the aspirations of the Famous Five. Real people who are worried about money, worried about their marriages, their children about work, don’t enter in, they are too real, sordid, vulgar. None of her imagined people ever think about sex because that is crude and vulgar. The fantasy must be kept pure, romantic, chaste and childish.

Coming into the Strand she feels her conscious mind telling her she has to do something. What was it? Oh yes, the spurious aim of buying a pencil with which she justified this evening stroll in the first place. That’s one self, the practical self. But another self steps in and says Why can’t we just enjoy ourselves and ramble where we wish? Multiple selves in conflict. You can see why she was interested in Freud’s dynamic model of the mind, and why the Hogarth Press was to publish his complete works in a definitive English translation. You can also hear a ghost of her lifelong mental problems: the voices in her head, conflicting and arguing.

From a psychiatric point of view it’s telling that the only way she can manage the voices is to transcend them with another image, with the sight of the wide cold black River Thames. And memory. Memory which we saw so important in coping with a task in Memories of a Working Women’s Guild and Leslie Stephen, The Philosopher at Home: A Daughter’s Memories. We get a deeper understanding that backing away from the clamorous present and retreating into distant memories is not so much a cop-out as a psychological coping mechanism.

This becomes really obvious when she remembers leaning over the parapet last summer and being happy. Maybe if she goes to the same place now she can regain that mood of calm.

We see it through the eyes of somebody who is leaning over the Embankment on a summer evening, without a care in the world. Let us put off buying the pencil; let us go in search of this person—and soon it becomes apparent that this person is ourselves. For if we could stand there where we stood six months ago, should we not be again as we were then—calm, aloof, content? Let us try then…

But the attempt fails. A young couple are smooching nearby, the air is cold, a tug with two barges slowly passes under the bridge, she can’t regain that last-summer mood. She draws the conclusion that:

It is only when we look at the past and take from it the element of uncertainty that we can enjoy perfect peace.

To be honest, I don’t understand what that means. Finally, she arrives at a stationery shop where she can buy the pencil which was the pretext for this trek and this essay. As soon as she enters she realises she’s interrupted an argument between the old couple who own it. They break up and the old buffer tries to find her a pencil but keeps making mistakes amid the many shelves and boxes, until his wife comes back into the shop and silently indicates the correct box. Even then, Woolf lingers in order to enjoy the experience of the couple slowly calming down until, eventually, full peace is restored.

The old man, who would not have disgraced Ben Jonson’s title-page, reached the box back to its proper place, bowed profoundly his good-night to us, and they disappeared. She would get out her sewing; he would read his newspaper; the canary would scatter them impartially with seed. The quarrel was over.

Now, either you think that last sentence is beautifully imagined or, like me, you find it too pat. In fact the entire episode feels too neatly rounded and complete to be a depiction of real life, which is always more edgy and incomplete than this little fable.

When she exits back onto the street, it is completely empty and she walks home through the silver city which triggers another reflection on the idea of multiple selves.

Walking home through the desolation one could tell oneself the story of the dwarf, of the blind men, of the party in the Mayfair mansion, of the quarrel in the stationer’s shop. Into each of these lives one could penetrate a little way, far enough to give oneself the illusion that one is not tethered to a single mind, but can put on briefly for a few minutes the bodies and minds of others. One could become a washerwoman, a publican, a street singer. And what greater delight and wonder can there be than to leave the straight lines of personality and deviate into those footpaths that lead beneath brambles and thick tree trunks into the heart of the forest where live those wild beasts, our fellow men?

On my reading, all of literature provides a cure for mental illness by allowing us to escape from our troubled selves into other, more completed and so simpler, more manageable lives.

She sings the praises of her big ‘adventure’ in the streets of London and this triggered a memory of Three Guineas with its angry attack on how women in her lifetime and for all British history before her, had been legally, socially and financially excluded from public life, from all the professions, from business, from paid work, from any independence. And so had to make from the tiny incidents of their cramped lives what satisfaction and adventures that they could.

And one last thought: any writer, male or female, can describe the lovely, warm comfort of arriving home but, given the Enid Blyton interpretation I’ve given to much of the narrative, I couldn’t help the ending feeling like the cosy rounding-off of a reassuring children’s story.

As we approach our own doorstep again, it is comforting to feel the old possessions, the old prejudices, fold us round; and the self, which has been blown about at so many street corners, which has battered like a moth at the flame of so many inaccessible lanterns, sheltered and enclosed. (p.187)

4. The Sun and The Fish (1928: 5 pages)

This is the most peculiar essay in the selection.

Exordium: The introduction tells us that memory works by yoking together two, sometimes random elements i.e. we remember things best when they’re associated with something else memorable.

[A] sight will only survive in the queer pool in which we deposit our memories if it has the good luck to ally itself with some other emotion by which it is preserved. Sights marry, incongruously, morganatically… and so keep each other alive.

This appears to be the justification for the collocation of the two memories which follow.

Memory 1: On 29 June 1927 Leonard and Virginia Woolf travelled with a party of friends to Bardon Fell in Yorkshire, where they stood on the ridge at dawn with thousands of others to witness a total eclipse of the sun. That is a rational, factual account of the event, but Woolf’s account is delirious. She compares the watchers to participants in the prehistoric ceremonies at Stonehenge and then gives a vivid description of the eclipse itself, during which the entire world loses colour and laments its death. Fear and anxiety lest the sun never returns. I’ve been reading D.H. Lawrence alongside Woolf, and this essay is more or less the only which one which has the psychological intensity of Lawrence. Maybe because it’s the only place in any of her works where the narrator is scared.

This was the defeat of the sun then, and this was all, so we thought, turning in disappointment from the dull cloud blanket in front of us to the moors behind. They were livid, they were purple; but suddenly one became aware that something more was about to happen; something unexpected, awful, unavoidable, The shadow growing darker and darker over the moor was like the heeling over of a boat, which, instead of righting itself at the critical moment, turns a little further and then a little further; and suddenly capsizes. So the light turned and heeled over and went out. This was the end. The flesh and blood of the world was dead and only the skeleton was left. It hung beneath us, frail; brown; dead; withered… (p.191)

Memory 2: But weirder is to come because Woolf links the eclipse memory to a visit she made to London Zoo and, in particular, to the Aquarium. This again makes it seem nice and logical when it is anything but. Instead it’s a fantasia on the life and being of fishes, in their watery tanks, and the sense of them being far more at home in their element than we poor, helpless, pink animals are on ours.

The fish themselves seem to have been shaped deliberately and slipped into the world only to be themselves. They neither work nor weep. In their shape is their reason. For what other purpose, except the sufficient one of perfect existence, can they have been thus made, some so round, some so thin, some with radiating fins upon their backs, others lined with red electric light, others undulating like white pancakes on a frying pan, some armoured in blue mail, some given prodigious claws, some outrageously fringed with huge whiskers? More care has been spent upon half a dozen fish than upon all the races of mankind.

And having exhausted this strange vision, the essay finishes with the abrupt line:

The eye shuts now. It has shown us a dead world and an immortal fish.

5. The Docks of London (December 1931)

In 1931 Woolf published The London Scene, a collection of six essays published individually in ‘Good Housekeeping’ magazine, over the course of a year. They were not published as a collection until long after her death. According to Wikipedia, the title was not chosen by Woolf but comes from the 1975 republication of five of the essays. Originally the essays were referred to as ‘Six Articles on London Life’.

The first of the six essays was The Docks of London. It records a guided tour Woolf was given round the docks on a Port of London Authority launch on 20 March 1931.

Compared to the eclipse fantasia it is a model of sense and description. She describes coming up the Thames from the Kent end, coming across ruined warehouses and reeking waste dumps and barges full of the city’s refuse, a pub and a few trees in this wasteland, then turning a corner and coming across the beautiful Greenwich Hospital buildings, up and round and so arriving at the Tower of London.

She cuts to a description of a cargo ship being unloaded with careful regulated industry and all its goods being stored in a low unadorned warehouse. She lists the bizarre items sometimes found stashed amid all this imported goods: a snake, a scorpion, a lump of amber, a basin of quicksilver. Among a pile of elephant tusks the customs officers have found older browner ones which they think come from mammoths. Virginia is finding out about the big world of work, and the imperial trade which her pampered life relies on for its luxuries and perquisites. She learns the great principle:

Trade is ingenious and indefatigable beyond the bounds of imagination. (p.196)

Everything is weighed and graded. A use is found for everything. Nothing is wasted. She savours the ‘dim sacerdotal atmosphere’ of the wine vaults. In the precision and dexterity of the work, the endless movement of the cranes, the unloading and stacking and packing and storing, she sees beauty. This feels like an awakening for young Virginia into the world of real work and the appeal of doing a job well, the subject of so many Rudyard Kipling stories.

She ends with the slightly unexpected thought that it is we, the consumers, who dictate all this energy, day in day out, all year round. It is we with our taste for shoes, furs, bags, stoves, oil, rice pudding, candles, that dictate what crops are grown, what animals are reared, what minerals extracted, what is brought here to the world’s largest port. So that:

One feels an important, a complex, a necessary animal as one stands on the quayside watching the cranes hoist this barrel, that crate, that other bale from the holds of ships that have come to anchor. (p.198)

6. Oxford Street Tide (1932: 4 pages)

The garishness and gaudiness of the great rolling ribbon of Oxford Street has its fascination. (p.199)

This was the second piece in her ‘Six Articles on London Life’ series, published in the January 1932 issue of Good Housekeeping. As you might expect, it’s about shops. In her day, as now, Oxford Street didn’t have the best shops, in fact it was looked down on for its bargains and sales. ‘The buying and selling is too blatant and too raucous’.

What stood out for me was the differences. In 1932 one could find barrows parked selling fresh tulips, violets, daffodils; see magicians make bits of paper unfold into clever shapes on bowls of water; sell live tortoises which are kept in litters of straw.

She gives a blizzard of sense impressions: placards selling endless editions of newspapers; a whole brass band; omnibuses grazing kerbs; buses, cars, vans, barrows streaming past. The old aristocracy were dukes and earls who built grand town houses along the Strand. The new, commercial, aristocracy build department stores along Oxford Street which dole out music and news, welcome you in to their high and airy halls, thickly carpeted and with the magic of lifts. (The notes tell us that the American Harry Gordon Selfridge opened his department store on Oxford Street in 1909.)

You can’t help noticing how flimsy these new stores are, concrete walls and metal floor bases. When you see other buildings being demolished so quickly and thoroughly, you realise these stores, to large and showy, with such modelled facades, are less solid and enduring than a labourer’s stone cottage from the time of Elizabeth I.

Then again, that’s the appeal. ‘The charm of modern London is that it is not built to last; it is built to pass.’ The owners of the citadels of consumer capitalism must:

persuade the multitude that here unending beauty, ever fresh, ever new, very cheap and within the reach of everybody, bubbles up every day of the week from an inexhaustible well. (p.202)

It is vivid and wrily comic, and she doesn’t mention Shakespeare once!

7. Evening Over Sussex: Reflections in a Motor Car (1942: 3 pages)

Despite the title, it’s a very static, ghostly impression of Sussex, which she prefers to imagine at dusk, as night falls and the stars come out and the busy fret of the day disappears and you see the country in its essentials, as it was in days past. She gives a vivid poetic description of the county but then feels unhappy, conflicted. It is too beautiful, too big to contain, to master and this triggers her characteristic psychological reaction or problem, of feeling divided into multiple selves.

It is well known how in circumstances like these the self splits up and one self is eager and dissatisfied and the other stern and philosophical.

She has to struggle with herself, to force herself to sit still and take in what’s in front of her. While these two selves argue about how to cope with beautiful scenery, a third self, observes to herself how happy both the other selves were when they were driving around in a motor car, just to see the never-ending stream of sights. Although when they were quiet and happy, the conscious self was in fact unhappy at the thought that everything is transient, everything passes out of sight and memory so fast as you zoom around the country.

This is, in other words, an essay about Virginia coping with her mental health issues and struggling to maintain an even keel. Compare ‘Street Haunting’, where she similarly struggles with the voices in her head and tries to find some way of calming them. Her mental illness is never very far from the surface.

Then there appears a fourth self, an ‘erratic and impulsive self’, interrupts the others with an unexpected perception, pointing out a light hovering in the sky. Only after some moments of confusion does her rational self realise it’s a car’s headlights coming over the brow of a hill, but this visionary self takes it as a portent of the future, of a distant future when Sussex will be full of magic gates and electric light.

In the final paragraph she tells us she assembles her many selves, as official presider over them, and tries to reckon up the sights they have all seen. But this is a surprisingly thin list and almost immediately describes ‘disappearance and the death of the individual’. That’s a bit shrill, isn’t it?

David Bradshaw’s notes tell us this wasn’t published during her lifetime but in the posthumous collection Death of the Moth and Other Essays. Is it an indication of how she was ‘declining’ into mental illness? Or does its candour about the struggle of managing multiple selves suggest a new art, a new style which she might have explored and expanded?

8. Flying Over London (6 pages)

The notes tell us this essay was only published in 1950. Reading the book’s notes builds up the impression that Woolf wrote a huge amount, that gathering together all the essays and fugitive pieces published in numerous outlets, from classy Vogue to transient student magazines, has taken decades to track them all down and been a labour of love for Woolf scholars.

It opens with a strikingly fanciful analogy, comparing the planes lined up at the aerodrome to giant grasshoppers, ready to spring into the air. She is self-consciously aware that ‘a thousand pens have described the sensations of leaving earth’ and you can’t help feeling how dogged she is by a self consciousness so intense that it is consciousness of multiple selves. Woolf is crippled by selves-consciousness.

Anyway, she makes the original observation that, when the plane takes off it’s not so much that the land falls away as that the sky falls upon you, immerses you. A lifetime of judging all objects in your field of view by their static appearance at ground level is swept away by this radical new perspective. ‘Land values’ have to be swapped for ‘air values’.

She wonderfully describes being in the air, amid the clouds, where perspectives and orientation disappear and this reminds me of the extended passage describing looking up at the clouds in ‘On Being Ill’.

And yet, as the previous essay has made clear, there is always another self in Woolf, tugging and restraining all her attempts at spontaneity. She knows it. ‘So inveterately anthropomorphic is the mind’ that she imagines the plane is a boat, and then imagines it, as in some Victorian poem, sailing towards a harbour:

And there we shall be received by hands that lift themselves from swaying garments; welcoming, accepting. (p.207)

Don’t you think that’s very Pre-Raphaelite, the hands that lift from swaying garments? I’m sticking with my impression that, despite the so-called modernism of her deploying a dreamy kind of stream-of-consciousness and jumping between characters’ points of views in her books, deep down – in fact not very deep down at all – Woolf has an essentially Victorian sensibility, Keats and Tennyson and Christina Rossetti, everything must be elegant and decorous and just so.

She sees the Thames as the Romans saw it, as paleolithic man saw it, reprising the theme of prehistoric London found in Mrs Dalloway and especially Between the Acts where Mrs Swithin is reading H.G. Wells’s Outline of History which starts with just such prehistoric descriptions of dinosaurs in what were to become London landmarks. But then things suddenly take a dark turn.

It was the idea of death that now suggested itself; not being received and welcomed; not immortality but extinction. (p.208)

She sees a flight of gulls and thinks how alien they are, where only gulls are, is death. ‘Life ends; life is dowsed in that cloud… That extinction now becomes desirable… And so we swept on now, up to death’ Why? Again you have the strong sense of a woman fighting her own psychological demons.

The pilot’s head suddenly reminds her of Charon, the ferryman across into the realm of the dead, and she claims the mind is proud of extinction ‘as if it deserved extinction, extinction profited it more and were more desirable than prolongation on other terms by other wills.’ Usually the experience of flying in a small plane is one of exhilaration. For Woolf it brings flooding thoughts of death. She wants to die, and die she soon would, at her own hand.

The pilot turns into a flame of death and she imagines dying together with him. ‘Extinction! The word is consummation’. But there’s a lot more. We’re only half way through. She vividly imagines flying into cloud, being immersed in the ever-changing shapes and colours.

All the colours of pounded plums and dolphins and blankets and seas and rain clouds crushed together, straining – purple, black, steel.

It’s as if John Keats went for a plane ride. Here’s a stanza from John Keats’s poem Ode to a Nightingale:

O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cool’d a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country green,
Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stained mouth…

The technology and the subject and the continual changing of scene may be from the 1920s but the sensibility dates back a hundred years, to the 1820s, an impression confirmed by lots of details of phrasing like when she says that when they emerge from the clouds and see ‘the fairy earth’ beneath them.

The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that oft-times hath
Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

I wonder if she’s just been reading ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ and that explains why the sensibility and even specific phrases of Keats spill over into this fantasia?

One way of thinking about Woolf’s writing is that she had to adopt different techniques to shake herself out of her madness, out of being dominated by the voices in her head. The ‘Street Haunting’ essay describes one technique, which was to go to a place where she had been calm and try to recapture that feeling. A cruder one is to change the subject to something which focused all her selves into a unity, such as her feminist scorn of men. This lines up all the voices into unanimity. Here’s something the squabbling voices can all agree upon.

I think this is why, after the fantastical passages which have seen her mind split into multiple levels and ages and perspectives, she brings everything back with the tried-and-tested technique of taking the mickey out of pompous rich men in the City of London.

There were blocks in the city of traffic sometimes almost a foot long; these had to be translated into eleven or twelve Rolls Royces in a row with city magnates waiting furious; and one had to add up the fury of the magnates; and say – even though it was all silent and the block was only a few inches in length, how scandalous the control of the traffic is in the City of London. (p.211)

This is feminism as therapy, submerging her squabbling selves and the multifarious observations which threaten to overwhelm her conscious mind, into the reassuring, all-pulling-together mode prompted by the activity of mocking rich men. Ha ha ha, silly little men. Oh, I feel much better now.

The narrative goes on to describe flying over the East End and seeing good working people wave up at them, flying over Oxford Street where everyone is too busy with bargain hunting to acknowledge them, onto Bayswater with its deadening rows of identical houses and then does something odd. She claims to see a door in one house open, and to see into a flat, and to see a particular woman and… you realise it has all been a fiction. Then I woke up and it was all a dream.

And a glance at the notes indeed confirms that Virginia Woolf never went up in an airplane. The entire thing is a fiction. It is a bold and strange fiction, and candidly reveals some of the ramifications of her mental illness and yet… I couldn’t help feeling disappointed that it was utterly fictional.

In fact she tries to make a joke of it. The last paragraph is a rare attempt by Woolf at explicit humour. After she’s given a vivid description of coming in to land and bumping over the grassy airfield, she goes on:

As a matter of fact, the flight had not begun; for when Flight-Lieutenant Hopgood stooped and made the engine roar, he had found a defect of some sort in the machine, and raising his head, he had said very sheepishly, ”Fraid it’s no go today.’ So we had not flown after all.

Contemporary flying reviews

9. Why Art Today Follows Politics (1936: 3 pages)

Surprisingly maybe, this very short piece was first published in The Daily Worker newspaper in 1936. Woolf opens the piece, as so often, by candidly explaining the terms of its commission:

I have been asked by the Artists International Association to explain as shortly as I can why it is that the artist at present is interested, actively and genuinely, in politics.

I think her views on this subject are not much worth considering, since she had made a career out of ridiculing, mocking and ignoring conventional politics as irredeemably male. Bit late in the day to change her tune.

What struck me most about this essay was the way that, when she came to consider examples of classic artists, the very first name she came to was John Keats and the very first ‘work of art’ his poem, Ode to a Nightingale. This, for the umpteenth time, confirmed my sense that underneath her modernist tricks and strategies, Woolf remained, in her core sensibility, an unreformed Victorian Romantic of the purest kind, oblivious of the radical art being created in Bolshevik Russia or Weimar Germany, of symbolist or Expressionist or Surrealist poetry, but again and again and again and again, judging everything by the purest, most conservative, arch-Romantic figure of John Keats.

As to the essay, I found it pompous, self-satisfied twaddle. This is because of her narrow, blinkered, restricted and wildly unrealistic notion of what an Artist is and what Art is, something pure and untainted by Society which aspires to the perfection of a Shakespeare. Instead of a much more realistic sociological view of ‘art’, which sees it being produced by a huge array of people, working in all kinds of fields, at multiple levels.

It is a fact that the practise of art, far from making the artist out of touch with his kind, rather increases his sensibility. It breeds in him a feeling for the passions and needs of mankind in the mass which the citizen whose duty it is to work for a particular country or for a particular party has no time and perhaps no need to cultivate.

This notion of the artist as a special superior and privileged personage, blessed with more sensibility than the average person, feels, to us today, I think, absurd. Artists in all fields may have been trained to a level of specialist knowledge in particular fields and techniques but this doesn’t make them ‘superior’ to everyone else. Plus we have had too many examples of artists who were very superior, refined and sensitive but who still wrote books and poems against the Jews, say, or in favour of Stalin or Mussolini.

Between Woolf’s narrow, conservative values and our own times stands the dire history of the twentieth century which ought to have disabused anyone of these Victorian notions of the Superiority of Art.

She’s on firmer grounds when she leaves off her notions of art and takes a more sociological view of the pressures modern artists come under. This echoes, repeats or invokes the notion of multiple voices which we’ve encountered her struggling with in earlier essays. Here she gives them external form as types or groups or classes of people who are perpetually haranguing the modern artist, including:

  • the voice which cries: ‘I cannot protect you; I cannot pay you. I am so tortured and distracted that I can no longer enjoy your works of art’
  • the voice which asks for help: ‘Come down from your ivory tower, leave your studio and use your gifts as doctor, as teacher, not as an artist’
  • the voice which warns the artist that unless he can show good cause why art benefits the state he will be made to help it actively – by making aeroplanes, by firing guns etc
  • the voice which artists in other countries have already heard and had to obey, the voice which proclaims that the artist is the servant of the politician, of a Hitler, Stalin or Mussolini

So, in the face of all these voices shouting at him, no wonder the modern artist is forced to take part in politics, and decides to form or join societies like the Artists International Association.

And that’s what she was commissioned to explain, and she has just explained it. You can see how it’s still written from a position which mocks and scorns all these external voices, the voices of society, and tries to preserve the separateness and aloofness of the artist, the high artistic calling she learned in her father’s library in the last years of Queen Victoria’s reign.

10. Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid (1940: 4 pages)

Written in August 1940, for an American symposium on current matters concerning women.

As she writes in London, Germans are flying overhead dropping bombs trying to kill her. This is the same situation with which George Orwell starts his famous essay, The Lion and the Unicorn. The difference is that Woolf is a woman and a feminist. Therefore she is aggrieved that women on both sides of the fighting are not given guns or any material means of helping. Sure they can make guns and munitions and serve food and protect the children. But there’s another way. They can use their minds. (This is always a doubtful tactic in Woolf whose mind was liable to stray and loses its place far more than the average person, as all her writings show.)

But she sticks to her feminist message. The whole Establishment tells women they are fighting Hitler because he is the embodiment of aggression, tyranny, the insane love of power. And yet she quotes Lady Astor in a speech saying:

Women of ability are held down because of a subconscious Hitlerism in the hearts of men.

It’s the same point she made in the ferociously powerful feminist tract, Three Guineas. So I understand that the challenge is how to get rid of this subconscious Hitlerism in the hearts of men, but I didn’t understand what she was proposing to do.

She makes a detour to describe how training to become a soldier and readiness to fight appears to be instinctive to many men. How can this instinct be eradicated? Well, imagine if the government told all women that childbearing would be banned for most of them, and restricted to a tiny handful i.e. sought to abolish a fundamental instinct of women, what luck would it have? Not much. So trying to make young men more peace-minded is the same kind of challenge.

We must help the young Englishmen to root out from themselves the love of medals and decorations. We must create more honourable activities for those who try to conquer in themselves their fighting instinct, their subconscious Hitlerism. We must compensate the man for the loss of his gun.

What does this mean in practical terms? She repeats the same ideas in a slightly different formulation.

If we are to compensate the young man for the loss of his glory and of his gun, we must give him access to the creative feelings. We must make happiness. We must free him from the machine. We must bring him out of his prison into the open air.

These ‘We must…’ sentences could be written on till infinity but won’t change anything and so have no meaning except as expressions of fine feelings.

Comment 1: the failure of feminism

Like so many of the feminist articles and essays I read every day in the Guardian, New Statesman, London Review of Books, The Atlantic, The Conversation, the New York Review of Books, even in the Financial Times and sometimes in the Economist, Woolf laments that (some/quite a few) men are violent, in thrall to ‘the subconscious Hitlerism in the hearts of men’, and calls for a wholesale transformation of human nature.

Go on, then. Transform human nature. In fact I’ve been reading the same lament, and hearing it from feminist friends and girlfriends and wives and daughters for over 40 years, tens of thousands of articles, documentaries, films, plays and so on calling for a radical overhaul of human nature to try and make men less toxic and more like women.

How is the project to radically transform human (male) nature going? Well, according to the thousands of articles lamenting the election of Donald Trump or bewailing the rise and rise of Andrew Tate, it is going backwards, which is impressive. I don’t mean I applaud Trump the know-nothing bully or the poisonous snake Tate, far from it. It’s just impressive that the feminist cause seems to be going backwards.

And I’m not especially singling out feminism. Although everyone knows that they are being exploited by huge corporations and multinational banks, that every service in their lives is ripping them off, yet somehow, magically, more and more voters are turning to an essentially right-wing solution, rather than what seems to me the more obvious need for a string of left-wing policies to rein in excess wealth, excess pay and excess control of corporations over our lives. (Just think of all the privatised water companies paying their shareholders huge dividends while filling our rivers with sewage.)

Same with global warming and the environment. Although everyone knows about it now, and governments are taking steps to invest in renewable energy and diversity power grids, on the cultural level society seems to be taking against the green and environmental policies we desperately need.

What I’m trying to do is understand and report what people are actually like instead of what high-minded progressives would like them to be like.

So back to Woolf, I know she’s a patron saint for feminists, but, tome, she’s also a kind of patron saint of feminist fantasy. I mean her narrow, blinkered, limited, upper-middle-class experience of life excluded her from understanding the great majority of population in her time and my thesis is that, in following her, in adopting her voice and tone, latterday feminists make the same mistake – of not understanding human nature in all its squalid horribleness and of simply wishing toxic masculinity away, without any practical plans to deal with it. To repeat, her solution is:

If we are to compensate the young man for the loss of his glory and of his gun, we must give him access to the creative feelings. We must make happiness. We must free him from the machine. We must bring him out of his prison into the open air.

Like so many progressives, she thinks that if only we could give our enemies a reading list of classic literature – and in particular make them read more Keats and Shakespeare – we could magic the problems of managing human nature away.

My position is simply that it’s much harder than that.

Comment 2: preparing for war

Eighty-five years after Woolf wrote this piece, the British government and fleets of commentators are all worrying about how to encourage more young Englishmen to cultivate their fighting instinct and join the British Army which, like the armies of all European nations, need to be significantly increased to counter the threat from Putin’s Russia.

Telling men to cultivate their finer feelings is not really an adequate strategy for coping with Putin’s Russia or Xi Jinping’s China, just ask the young men of Ukraine. Why are there always wars and the threat of wars? The feminists I knew at university and subsequently all had one answer: it’s men’s fault. It’s toxic masculinity. There. Done. Understood. Sorted. Dismissed.

Except it isn’t sorted, it’s never sorted. All the essays in the world – no matter how high minded and correct and lovely in their sentiments and wishes – can change human nature with its endless lust to fight the enemy and destroy the planet.

Credit

‘Selected Essays of Virginia Woolf’ was published by Oxford World Classics (OWC) in 2008. Most but not all of the essays can be found online. The OWC introduction can be read on Amazon.

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by Simon on April 30, 2025  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on April 30, 2025

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Brecht: fragments @ Raven Row

This is a fascinating and thought-provoking exhibition, in a lovely setting, I’m just kicking myself that I found out about it too late to see the theatrical performances (see below).

Raven Row

Raven Row is a secret treasure of a gallery tucked away in Spitalfields. It’s adapted from the domestic rooms of a tall thin eighteenth century building at the eastern end of Artillery Lane (nearest tube station Liverpool Street station). Raven Row is a charity committed to displaying art which is diverse and unusual, sometimes by established international artists, sometimes more out-of-the-way figures, united by having escaped the notice of the big name London art galleries. Their programme aims to be ‘improvisatory and undogmatic.’

This photo of the interior of one of the rooms immediately gives you a feel for how they’ve retained most of the original Georgian features and decoration.

Installation view of ‘brecht: fragments’ at Raven Row (photograph by Marcus J Leith)

Bertolt Brecht

Bertolt Brecht (1898 to 1956) has a claim to be the greatest German writer of the twentieth century, certainly the most famous. He had a first burst of fame when his musical, The Threepenny Opera, became a hit, and its signature tune, ‘Die Moritat von Mackie Messer’ was covered by American performers as ‘Mack the Knife’.

But it was after the Second World War when the radically innovative approach of his so-called ‘epic theatre’, as performed by his touring theatre company The Berliner Ensemble, revolutionised the possibilities of theatre. The spread of his technique was also helped by the fact that he wrote some of the great plays of the period such as ‘Mother Courage’, ‘The Chalk Circle’, ‘Galileo’ and many others.

But Brecht wasn’t just a world class playwright, he was also a noted poet, he wrote many essays in support of his theatre theory and, as this exhibition sets out to show, he could also be considered an artist of a particular type.

brecht: fragments

In the late 1930s Brecht came under attack from Soviet administrators of the new doctrine of Socialist Realism, most notably the powerful critic Gyorgy Lukács, who criticised him for using elitist, avant-garde techniques which were difficult for ‘the masses’ to understand. In one of his replies defending the use of modernist aesthetics for revolutionary communist purposes, Brecht mentions that, even though he was now in exile in Denmark, he was currently working on a surprising number of projects and goes on to mention 2 novels, a play and a book of poetry, not including the essay in which he describes all this (Aesthetics and Politics, Verso Books, 1977, p.70).

In other words, it was Brecht’s working practice throughout his career to be working on a multitude of projects, and to be surrounded by fragments of works in progress, across a range of genres and forms.

Found images

What this many-sided exhibition at Raven Row shows is how this concept, or category, of ‘fragments’ can be seen as not just a side effect of Brecht’s work-in-progress, but a fundamental principle which applies to them at every level. For, as this exhibition shows, Brecht was a compulsive collector of found images, often from newspapers and magazines. He pasted these into notebooks where he collected them by theme. He strewed his manuscripts with them where they obviously acted as inspiration or captured ideas, sometimes literal, sometimes tangential.

Installation view of ‘brecht: fragments’ at Raven Row showing a typical page from his notebook from the mid-1920s (photo by the author)

For example, why paste a postcard image by Pieter Breughel onto the front page of the manuscript of his great play ‘The Caucasian Chalk Circle’ except that it, in some sense, crystallised or captured the mood, or a mood, which the work was designed to present?

Installation view of ‘brecht: fragments’ at Raven Row showing the cover page of the manuscript of The Caucasian Chalk Circle, showing the cut and pasted letters and a postcard of a painting by Breughel (photo by the author)

Photomontage

Photos could be used in another way, to create photomontages, cutting out images from one context and pasting them into others, in the style of the radical photomontage artist John Heartfield. In actual fact, there isn’t much here in that style. For the most part, Brecht didn’t interfere with, cut and paste together, his images. They tended to go into his albums and notebooks and be pasted into play manuscripts unaltered. The artistry was in the initial selection.

The War Primer

Another use of news photos was when Brecht began collecting images during the Second World War and writing one four-line quatrains underneath them, producing what he came to call ‘photo-epigrams’. Over time this developed into a book which, after the war, came to be called the ‘War Primer’, containing 75 photo-epigrams.

A bunch of the original paste-ups for the book (actually created by Ruth Berlau, one of Brecht’s long-term collaborators) are hung across one wall. The quatrains, like most of Brecht’s poetry, consist of direct statement, unadorned by similes and metaphors, blunt and political. For example, under a photo of a bombardier in uniform inside a bomber:

You’re looking at a bastard, and a poor one!
‘I laugh at news of other men’s distress,
A corset salesman, formerly from Nürnberg,
A dealer now in death and wretchedness.’

Here’s an example, a striking magazine image of men in a steelworks which inspired Brecht to write the quatrain you can see, typed out, cut and pasted beneath it.

Paste-up for a page of War Primer (1940 to 1949) by Bertolt Brecht in collaboration with Ruth Berlau. Courtesy the Bertolt Brecht Archive, Akademie der Künste, Berlin (BBA 2096/38)

The quatrain for this one reads (in English translation):

‘What are you making, brothers?’ ‘A car of steel.
‘And what about these plates here, lying on the side?’
‘For shells that slice through sheer armoured walls.’
‘Why all this, brothers?’ ‘That we stay alive.’

Encyclopedia of gestures

Yet another use for images was that, heavily involved as he was in the staging of  his plays, he was very interested in the actors’ gestures. What happens if you get an actor to stand on a stage so? Or hold his arms just so? And now in this position? And now in that? How much can be achieved without words, without even action, just by posture and gesture? And then what happens if you add words to gestures, is it possible to make the words and gestures contradict each other or at least play off each other.

Dictatorial poses

Which explains why there’s a room of sheets from his numerous notebooks, which consists of newspaper photos of generally eminent men of the time (the obvious tyrants – Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin – with other lesser known politicians such as Daladier, Laval et al). Anyway, Brecht managed to get hold of photos them making speeches and it’s genuinely fascinating to study how they held themselves and what they did with their arms and hands. Thus prompted I adopted some of the poses of Hitler in full flow (hold two clenched fists up, palms towards you, in front of your chest – and instantly felt some of the coiled rage at the world. Elsewhere, Brecht picked up this improbable series of snaps of the Führer throwing a few shapes.

Installation view of ‘brecht: fragments’ at Raven Row showing the sheet of photos of Hitler posing and prancing (terrible photo by the author)

And, in the next glass case, copied a series of poses of Comrade Stalin addressing a meeting, which have him leaning forward and pointing an accusing finger, – and you immediately feel yourself dominating a room full of people petrified that there going to be the next one accused of some crime and hauled off to the gulag.

Installation view of ‘brecht: fragments’ at Raven Row showing the sheet of photos of Stalin, smiling, playing the affable good fellow, and pointing a finger at people he’s about to send to the gulag. Copy the poses for yourself and see how they make you feel (photo by the author)

Collaboration

Back to the plays, the wall labels tell us that it was Brecht’s common practice to be highly collaborative, to sit round a table with other writers, director, actors, to discuss parts and action and dialogue. Lines of dialogue or action were typed on strips of paper and often moved around in a process of continual shuffling and improvement.

Installation view of ‘brecht: fragments’ at Raven Row showing a typical Brecht manuscript showing how sections of dialogue were created as blocks before being moved around, all accompanied by a typical contemporary news photo (photo by the author)

Pictures for plays

Once you grasp the centrality of collaboration in Brecht’s practice then it makes perfect sense that so many of his manuscripts are not neatly typed out finished products, but highly fragmented texts made out of typed lines pasted onto notebook pages, often with lines of commentary scrawled around then and, as mentioned, often with a photo from a newspaper pasted in. Now you can see how the use of images like this 1) helps everyone involved understand the directly political context of a piece 2) captures the mood of discussions and decisions without needing to be put into words. ‘Yes, that’s it.’

Hence the examples here of work notebooks, and ‘finished’ manuscripts, which are festooned with cut out lines of dialogue or text, crystallised in newspaper photos.

Many scenes

In his conversations with Walter Benjamin, Brecht explained how he conceived of his plays less as made from ACTS, in the traditional way, but more as collections of lots of freestanding scenes. In the reply to Lukács mentioned above, he describes how the play he’s working on, describing life under the Nazis, consists of 27 short scenes with no overarching narrative arc. In other words, Brecht constructed many of his plays as if they were a series of snapshots.

Development and flux

Because another key part of Brecht’s practice is that the plays were never really finished. They always changed and developed in production as the actors and director discovered what worked, and from production to production as Brecht changed lines, or action or moved about the scenes. Narrative ideas, situations and segments of dialogue were subject to continuous cutting and rearrangement, often literally, using scissors and glue.

Recap

So from the smallest photo cut out from a magazine and pasted into a notebook, to the large scale of his three-hour-long plays, this sense of flux and fragments was foundational to Brecht’s conception of his works and his practice in assembling them.

The Brecht Archive

That’s probably enough to give you a feel for the exhibition and the light it sheds on the practice and process of Brecht’s imagination, and an indication of the kind of visual material you see (lots of pages from his notebooks and scrapbooks, lots of news and magazine photos from the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s).

Just a note that the entire thing hails from the Brecht Archive now, of course, housed in Berlin and this is the first time most of this (largely unknown) material has ever been shown in the UK. It is, as I hope I’ve indicated, a fascinating treasure trove of ideas, images, documentary background to not only Brecht’s numerous works, finished and unfinished, along with glimpses of the social history of the period (1930s to the early 1950s) all combined.

Performances

A major part of the exhibition was the theatrical performances which took place twice a day during most of its run. Because I only stumbled across this so late, like a fool I missed them. The idea was that twice a day a bunch of actors led visitors through the gallery spaces, performing dramatic fragments from four of Brecht’s unfinished plays from the 1920s, showing how montage and snapshot techniques played a crucial part in his conception of playwriting.

Unfinished

Because that’s another aspect of the show I’ve forgotten to mention, which was that not only a lot of his plays changed and evolved during production, but a sizeable number never even made it that far. In short, Brecht left behind lots and lots of unfinished works. So four of the galleries contain props and production notes, including photos and visual materials relating to four plays which were never completed, but are here summarised and explained, namely:

Performance 1: The Breadshop

A 1930 collaboration addressing issues of poverty and hunger after the Wall Street Crash, which eventually ran to 245 pages but was never completed or performed. For some reason the conception began to focus on the role of the Salvation Army (SA), with a surprising number of accompanying images and biographies of SA notables.

Installation view of ‘brecht: fragments’ at Raven Row showing the performance space for The Breadshop (note the production notes and accompanying photos pasted to the wall) (photo by the author)

Performance 2: The Flood

An unfinished draft for a radio play, written 1927 to 1928, about a man-made apocalypse, inspired by a hurricane which devastated Miami in 1926.

Performance 3: Fleischhacker

A collaboration with Elisabeth Hauptmann, worked on till 1931, this told the story of Jae Fleischhacker, a futures trader in Chicago, as he plays the wheat market. This is interwoven with the story of a ‘Family from the Savannah’, who move to Chicago to try their luck following crop failure in the wheat district.

Installation view of ‘brecht: fragments’ at Raven Row showing the performance space and props for the performance of Fleischhacker (photo by the author)

Performance 4: Fatzer

Title of a dramatic fragment that Brecht worked on intensively for four years, from 1926 to 1930, and returned to throughout his creative life. It tells the story of a four-man tank crew, led by Johann Fatzer,  who desert their post during the First World War. Amazingly, the manuscript ended up running to 500 pages but remained fragmented and unresolved and unperformable – until, that is, some scenes were reshaped and performed here, for this show.

Concluding scene from the performance of Fatzer in ‘brecht: fragments’ at Raven Row (2024) photograph by Anne Tetzlaff

Two films

And there are two films.

1. On a small TV monitor an experimental contemporary filming of a production of Mann ist Mann (Man Equals Man) from 1931. Set in British colonial India, the play concerns the brainwashing of an ordinary civilian, Galy Gay, into the perfect soldier. This film documents the 1931 production of the play at the Berlin State Theatre, for which Brecht was director, Peter Lorre played Galy Gay, and stage design was by Brecht’s long-time collaborator Caspar Neher. It was made using the experimental procedure of shooting film at a slowed rate of around one frame per second.

2. And in a darkened room, projected on a larger screen, are excerpts from the 1932 German feature film ‘Kuhle Wampe or Who Owns the World?’ about unemployment, homelessness and left-wing politics in the Weimar Republic. Brecht conceived and wrote the script, and directed the final debate scene, while the music was written by his long-term collaborator Hanns Eisler.

Gallery

Here’s the star performer of the era, Herr Adolf Hitler, cut out and pasted on the back of a manuscript page from ‘The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui’. There are many photos of him, the most fascinating ones being the series depicting him in the full flood of his impassioned speeches.

Manuscript page from ‘The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui’ (1941) courtesy the Bertolt Brecht

This one is a highly political photo showing Spanish peasants marching off to seize land owned by exploitative landlords.

From an album compiled by Brecht in the late-1940s, courtesy the Bertolt Brecht Archive, Akademie der Künste, Berlin (BBA 1198/058)

Here’s a vivid snapshot of Berlin men, the guy at the back giving it a particularly thuggish, threatening tone.

Image from research for Fatzer (1926 to 1930) by Bertolt Brecht. Courtesy the Bertolt Brecht Archive, Akademie der Künste, Berlin (BBA 0111/062)

The booklet

Usually galleries produce coffee-table catalogues to accompany their exhibitions, large-format, heavy books full of colour reproductions, which cost anything from £20 to £50.

Rather amazingly, the brecht: fragments exhibition at Raven Row is accompanied by an impressive 113-page pamphlet, consisting of five high quality essays by experts in the field, along with a chronology and bibliography, and it is COMPLETELY FREE. I can’t remember a comparably generous gesture by any gallery I’ve ever visited.

Envoi

One of the things that made Brecht such an interesting, innovative and powerful poet was his commitment to direct statement undeformed by the needs of scansion or rhyme. The power derives from the fundamental gestus, a word he coined to mean attitude or opinion but indicating more than that, evoking the pose and gestures of an actor onstage, a kind of mental image of how you would stand and move as you declaim the words. It’s a style epitomised by the plain but powerful final poem in the huge volume, ‘Poems 1913 to 1956’, edited by John Willett and Ralph Mannheim (1976):

And I always thought

And I always thought: the very simplest words
Must be enough. When I say what things are like
Everyone’s heart must be torn to shreds.
That you’ll go down if you don’t stand up for yourself
Surely you see that.

Although most of us disagree with his doctrinaire Marxism and foolish faith in Soviet communism, it’s hard not to be impressed by Brecht’s unflinching commitment to the victims of tyranny and exploitation everywhere, captured in so many of these photos, and in the texts and poems and fragments he derived from them.

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Posted by Simon on August 17, 2024

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Mussolini: His Part in My Downfall by Spike Milligan (1978)

I was determined to pursue the matter to its illogical conclusion.
(Spike summarises his methodology in Mussolini: His Part in My Downfall, page 8)

I was getting twitchy, doing nothing positive for so long. I had started talking to myself and I wasn’t satisfied with the answers.
(Spike beginning to lose it, page 60)

Mussolini: His Part in My Downfall is the fourth of Spike Milligan’s seven (!) volumes of war memoirs. It covers the period from his regiment’s landing in Salerno, Italy, on 23 September 1943 to the date he was invalided out of the front line with nervous exhaustion in March 1944.

Longer, seriouser

Although covering a period of just under six months, the text, at 288 pages, is longer than the two previous volumes put together. Although the relentless gags and wisecracking are similar, the Hitlergams have, mercifully, ended (actually, he sneaks a few through, e.g. p.139) and there are far fewer visual elements i.e. photos, sketches, cartoons and so on, than in previous volumes.

There are still quite a few photos but they are documentary and factual, in the sense that they show members of his brigade, tanks, lorries crossing Bailey Bridges and so on. Mind you, although of military subjects, Spike still comes up with some funny captions. I laughed at the photo of squaddies working on setting up a Bailey bridge across a river where the caption tells us that ‘the ugly soldiers’ were told to face away from the camera.

But overall the tone is quite a bit more serious than in the previous volumes and quite a few passages are entirely serious in intent such as the description of: air attacks, of devastated Italian villages, of the fury of Allied attacks on German positions, the terrible scenes after a direct hit on a neighbouring battery, and so on. It has a permanent edge, a barely suppressed anger which I didn’t feel in the previous volumes (see final section, below, for examples) all building up to the intense and unhappy final passages of him being wounded and psychologically traumatised, returned to the front too soon, bullied for being a coward and then his final collapse.

Spike is peeved

The more earnest tone is set by the surprisingly cross preface or author’s note preceding the text. Spike had been really nettled by a review by Clive James of one of the previous books which jovially referred to it as ‘an unreliable history of the war’. This upset Spike who, in this preface, goes to great lengths to insist that, on the contrary, the text is very heavily researched and completely factual.

All that I wrote did happen, it happened on the days I mention, the people I mention are real people and the places are real…I wish the reader to know that he is not reading a tissue of lies and fancies, it all really happened…I’ve spent a fortune on beer and dinners interviewing my old Battery mates, and phone calls to those overseas ran into over a hundred pounds…Likewise I included a large number of photographs actually taken in situ…

He goes on to mention 18 former colleagues by name for their help with documents, maps, photos and recollections. There are lots of photos but, as I mentioned, most of them are documentary i.e. factual photos of individuals in his battery or contemporary scenes – the silly Edwardian photos with humorous captions which littered the earlier volumes have disappeared.

He also gives excerpts from Alf Fildes’s diary and regularly includes written anecdotes from his best mate Harry Edgington (e.g. pages 120, 142, 234). In fact he mentions ringing up Harry (who had emigrated to New Zealand) and also calling Ken Carter (p.232), to confirm specific facts and memories.

This irritated preface ends with another (i.e. they also appeared in the previous volumes) tribute to his mates and their ongoing closeness, mentioning their twice-a-year reunions, and the text is sprinkled with references to meeting old comrades at reunions or at other events, decades later. These links to old comrades matters a lot to Spike and their importance comes over with far more urgency, and need, than in the previous volumes.

Day-by-day diary format

As with the previous three, it’s done in diary form. But in line with his irritation Spike’s diary entries are given in capitals and preceded by MY DIARY just to ram home the message that it all actually happened.

So what we read is the daily account of how Spike and the boys lived, day to day, with very little analysis, little overview of the campaigns he took part in, no detachment or distance. Instead this happens, and they take the mickey out of it – then that happens, and they make gags about it – then this happens and they all have a larf about it, and so on, for a surprisingly long 288 pages in the Penguin paperback edition.

Gags

Kidgell looks pensively out towards Italy. ‘I was worried about the landing.’
‘Don’t worry about the landing. I’ll hoover it in the morning.’ (p.9)

‘I thought you were a champion swimmer.’
‘Yes, but you can’t swim in army boots.’
‘You’re right, there isn’t enough room.’ (p.9)

Lunch was a mangled stew, lumps of gristle floating on the surface. Edgington said if you held your ear to it you could hear an old lady calling ‘Helpppp.’ (p.13)

Budden tells us, ‘We’ll walk to HQ and get fresh orders.’
I tell him I don’t need fresh orders. I’m perfectly satisfied with the ones I’ve got. (p.29)

Edgington is speaking heatedly. It’s the only way to keep warm. (p.68)

Ernie Hart was a nice lad with a quiet sense of humour, so quiet no one ever heard it. (p.123)

Outside I rubbed my hands with glee. (I always kept a tin handy.) (p.245)

Incidentally the boys themselves are aware that many of these gags are corny or stretched. He often recalls the bit of repartee then writes ‘(groans)’ afterwards (pages 102, 218).

‘I’m too bloody tired to smoke,’ he said.
‘Try steaming,’ I said. ‘It’s easier.’ (p.253)

They were joking on the battlefield, whistling to keep their spirits up, trying to encourage and cheer each other up and fairly often it seems stretched and contrived. I’ve pointed out in some of my reviews of thrillers that many of the classic thriller writers of the 50s and 60s carried the intense atmosphere of the war, its threat and peril, into civilian life; their protagonists carry it around with them. In the same way, maybe, we can say that Spike carried the rather desperate gagging which kept him and his mates going through the war into his civilian career, to great effect in the Goon Show but with diminishing returns after that.

(Incidentally, more, if very casual, information is thrown on the origin of the term when Spike tells us that it was a common nickname for Gunners like himself to be referred to as Gooners or just Goons. And at one point he parodies someone referred to as Florence Nightingale, saying they were more like Florence Nightingoon, the Lady of the Lump, p.135.)

(A few days after reading Spike I was reading Fitzroy Maclean’s war classic, Eastern Approaches’, and came across references to him and fellow members of the SAS listening to Tommy Handley and It’s That Man Again on the wireless and went to listen to some on YouTube. It’s immediately obvious that Handley’s humour uses the same kind of bad puns and deliberate misunderstandings as Spike – ‘I’ve been taking a walk, and if anybody else wants to take it, they can have it. I’ve finished with it’ – making me realise that Spike was peddling the same kinds of gags into the late 1970s that he’d grown up listening to in the 1930s. A proper appreciation of where he was new or innovative would have to start with a really thorough understanding of the British comedy landscape of the 1930s, something which is way beyond my scope.)

(Deliberately?) bad proofreading

Mussolini: His Part in My Downfall is written in a deliberately flaky style. Lots of the sentences contain three or four or five clauses just separated by commas which would be better broken up into shorter sentences by full stops. There are unnecessarily hyphenated words, unnecessarily capitalised words:

  • He stayed for launch, a lovely Stew (p.108)
  • Bentley has diagnosed his own illness as Malaria only to have another doctor diagnose it correctly as Jaundice. (p.136)

Both together:

In the dark night the war went on, being able to sleep peacefully, dry, snug and warm was I suppose, Luxury. (p.144)

There are occasional grammar errors (‘This bloody army were food mad!’, p.98) and erratic typographical gaps or breaks between main text and quotations (from other people’s diaries or letters etc). And regular outbreaks of multiple exclamation or other punctuation marks:

An OP has been established on Monte Croce. Not again! Rain!!! Where does the stuff come from?? (p.104)

The overall effect is of deliberate scrappiness, like a scrapbook, like a kind of student mag or fanzine, as if this adds to the spontaneousness and wackiness of the text, as if breathless sentences and random capitals make it all more wacky and humorous.

Same goes for the misspellings. He talks about ‘the Scotts’ (p.47) or a ‘recoco chair’ (p.67), describes his Major playing the clarionet (although that one’s debatable, p.82), refers to ‘the Bosche’ (p.94), writes ‘Above us the battle was going on full belt’ (p.278). My point being some of these are such egregious errors no professional proofreader would have missed them, so it must have been a conscious editorial choice – all of it, the caps, the misspellings, the bad punctuation, the random caps…

Maybe the manuscript arrived like this from Spike and the editors decided to leave them in to increase the sense of wackiness and improvisation. But then the whole thing was supposedly ‘edited’ by Jack Hobbs, so it was clearly a high-level decision to let it be like this.

Sex

They’re young, fit, healthy men so they think about sex all the time, a great deal of the banter is about sex and, being men, this means rude observations about the size, shape and state of each other’s penises. Any woman – our nurses or Italian civilians – will be mercilessly ogled.

‘Buon giorno, Maria.’
She smiled and blushed, the innocence of Italian country girls was something to see. Something else to see was the top of her stocking tops when she bent over. (p.171)

Travelling on the back of a lorry, the sight of a pretty girl immediately erupted into mass drooling until she was out of sight. (p.194)

There were loads of pretty girls who came under fire from the tailboard. The cries ranged from ‘I can do you a power of good, my dear’ to the less poetic ‘Me give you ten inches of pork sword, darlin”. (p.218)

Not just unacceptable but illegal, these days.

There are the usual half-disguised references to masturbation, which must have been rife (and again I refer the reader to Eric Newby’s mention of men masturbating every night in his prisoner of war camp) (pages 154, 265).

There’s a running joke that Edgington doesn’t join in chatting up every ‘bird’ they see and certainly doesn’t go to the two brothels described in the text; instead he writes long letters to his sweetheart back home, Peg, the joke being that the more he writes the more he remembers having sex with her, the more aroused and frustrated he becomes, for example pages 86 and 87:

At the mention of Peg his eyes went soft and his trousers boiled.

Some of the sex slang was new to me. A simple-minded soldier refers to squeezing liquid mud through the holes in a hessian sack so as to create little worms of mud spaghetti as ‘sexy’. To which:

‘Sexy?’ said Bombardier Fuller. ‘You must be bloody hard up for it if you get the Colin’ watchin’ that.’ (p.130)

‘Get the Colin?’ Later he refers to vaseline by its navy nickname ‘starters’, as in ‘a pot of starters’ and goes on to explain that if the reader doesn’t understand this they should contact Royal Navy PR, as ’70 per cent of the officers are Gay up there’ (p.137). So he is aware of homosexuals, I had been wondering (and p.158).

Race

Spike refers to Indians as wogs (pp. 16, 133) and to Black people using the n word (pages 133, 195) and ‘coon’ (as in ‘Coon-type singing’, p.265) – though not all the time, he also refers to Blacks as ‘negroes’ (p.182) or ‘coloured’. In other words he used (or was depicting) the idiom of the time. It feels done without malice, because (re. ‘wogs’) he was raised in India and liked the culture and people and (re. the n word) he was a massive fan of Black jazz music. Still, the modern woke reader should be warned.

The politically correct would also be incensed by the three or four times the lads do cartoon impersonations of imagined Black servants on a southern plantation from a Hollywood movie (‘Gone with the Wind’ had been released just four years earlier, 1939). Thus, when his mate Edgington turns up at a new billet:

‘Welcome home, young massa,’ I said. ‘De plantation ain’t been de same widout you.’ (p.254)

It’s the idiom of the day and it’s spoofing a popular movie (1943) but it does, admittedly, have an extra edge of satire or sarcasm or needle. Given a choice Spike always prefers the slangy or disrespectful term for anything (the Germans, the army, officers, soldiers as a whole, the Brits, himself, anything if it’ll raise a laugh). It was part of the humour of the day, but double edged. He can never mention Gunner Kidgell without called him ‘short-arse Kidgell’. And he refers to the Italians throughout as ‘Itis’.

Spike is also very aware when people are Jewish and, again, invokes stock stereotypes of Jews i.e. being tight with money or being in the rag trade in the East End (pages 160). I think I remember from the 70s that calling someone a ‘Jew’ was an insult indicating that they were tight (with money). Unacceptable these days, and has been for some time. He mentions someone being Jewish or Jews in general, often emphasising their alleged tightness with money, on pages 160, 193, 198, 202, 223, 258, 271, 274.

At one point an attack by German Messerschmitts forces him and comrades to run naked from showers and jump into nearby slit trenches for protection. But what bothers him is not the risk of getting killed but that he left all his money in his battledress hanging up outside the shower. The second the danger’s over, he goes running back.

Thank God! Money was safe! I just have Jewish blood. (p.258)

Events

The journey aboard ship from North Africa to Italy. Landing on Salerno beach, unopposed because it’s secure, but with the wreckage of fierce fighting all around. Journey up into the hills and then a long slog of positions taken up by his artillery battery, Battery D.

Almost immediately he comes down with sand fly fever and is taken off to hospital for a week long interlude of clean sheets, decent food and pretty nurses. But he starts to go round the bend with boredom and is relieved to be one day collected by a truck and taken back to his mates on the battery. Here, as in every memoir I’ve ever read about war, it’s about friendship, mateship and camaraderie rather than any grand cause.

The new-found seriousness extends as far as an argument he gets into with a northerner who sings the praises of Gracie Fields and George Formby who Spike cordially loathes, explaining that he is a devotee of the Marx Brothers and Bing Crosby (p.54). (Regarding styles of humour, later he hears a broadcast by ITMA and thinks ‘corny bastards’, p.256).

There’s still quite a lot about music, they hear the kind of big band jazz they like on the radio, in an Italian church they discover a piano and play Cole Porter (in fact they perform and sing some Cole Porter but then the Italian priest sings plays and sings some Verdi opera thus trumping them). Othertimes they perform with what they have, including one night they have a little performance with an ocarina, guitar and shaken matchbox, with the others joining in banging mugs (p.138).

He visits the ruins of Pompeii (pages 51 to 53).

Spike’s job

I’d read his descriptions of his duties in volume 2 but it was only in this one that it was made unmistakably clear that Spike’s job was ‘wireless operator’ for an artillery battery (p.46) i.e. laying (or retrieving) phone cables, then using radio sets to co-ordinate with other observation posts to target artillery fire accurately at enemy positions, as described pages 76 to 77.

His battery constantly move to new positions as the front line advances, and enemy planes fly over and occasional shells land nearby but he is repeatedly grateful that he’s not in the poor infantry, sent forward into withering machinegun fire.

The Germans slowly retreat into the mountains which the poor bloody infantry have to storm while Spike’s battery and many others lob shells up into the mountains. The main event is the rain: it rains incessantly, the tents, the men, their uniforms and equipment become sodden. The artillery stands become so sodden that the guns slip backwards or sideways when they fire. All their efforts become devoted to trying to find somewhere dry to shelter and sleep.

Maybe the most vivid scene, possibly the longest lasting all of three pages, is his vivid recreation of a concert he and his mates organised and staged on Christmas Day 1943, giving us the full list of acts, an impressive series of farcical performances and musical interludes.

Just days later they’re given four days’ leave in Amalfi which seems like Disneyland after the muddy farms they’ve been staying in. Memorable evening, standing on the garden terrace watching night fall over the bay, and then onto a cafe kept by a Cockney-speaking Italian momma who lays on an unprecedented feast.

In Amalfi he’s invited into a brothel and initially refuses all offers, preferring to sit relaxed, drink and get pissed, until – according to his account – the lady of the house dragged him into a bedroom and not only screwed him but paid him.

On 5 January they are moved to a new forward position just outside the village of Lauro.

15 January a direct hit on a gun emplacement, exploding munitions and burning four gunners he knows to death, with many other burns casualties. Happens in the middle of the night, Spike is up and running round helping as best he can.

He develops piles (‘the curse of the Milligans’), goes see the medical officer (MO) but there doesn’t seem to be any treatment short of having them operated on and removed. They go from painful to actively bleeding. Normally irrepressibly chirpy, this throws him into a depression (p.271).

The climax, Spike is wounded

On 20 January 1944 Spike is in pain from bleeding piles, depressed, and hasn’t had much sleep for two nights when a lieutenant asks for a volunteer to go and replace a signalman up at Tac HQ, which is near the front lines, also where their commanding officer, now regularly referred to as ‘Looney’ Jenkins, is based. Very reluctantly Spike volunteers and sets in train the sequence of events which will see him wounded and invalided out.

Alf Fildes drives him to Tac HQ which entails crossing the makeshift bridge across the river Garigliano, shrouded in camouflage smoke because the Jerries are throwing over lots of artillery. They pull up outside a cluster of farmhouse buildings which is Tac HQ. All round are dead German bodies no-one’s had time to bury.

the moment Spike arrives Major Jenkins puts him on the headphones and keeps him at it for 17 hours without a break (‘the bastard’), monitoring and sending radio signals, he even has to argue for permission to go for a piss. Machinegun bullets whine over the roof and shells land, some scarily close, shaking the buildings. His piles start to bleed and he feels at the end of his tether.

Then Jenkins orders him and three colleagues to go forward, under fire, to the observation post (OP) carrying batteries and a new 22 wireless set. They cross a field containing a recently hit Sherman tank, scramble up a gully full of cowering infantry and emerge into the open to climb up the hillside, tiered for agriculture, as machine gun bullets and mortars land all around.

They all throw themselves to the ground then Spike remembers lying on his front, then a terrific explosion and he’s lying on his back, regaining consciousness, seeing red, strangely dazed (p.278).

He knows if they stay there they’ll be sitting ducks and turns and scrambles back down the mountain. Next thing he knows he’s talking to Major Jenkins crying his eyes out – the major tells him to get his wound dressed and he realises he’s wounded in the right thigh, couple of inches long quarter of an inch deep, but it’s not the wound, it’s the shaking and the crying – he’s put into an ambulance, given pills, in a gesture of kindness he’ll never forget, comforted by another wounded man – then he’s on a stretcher, loaded into a Red Cross truck – arrives at a camp and tent and bunk…

Next morning he’s woken up by an American band playing reveille – an orderly tells him he’s at camp 144 CS and has been categorised as suffering from Battle Fatigue – bereft of any kit he goes to the American camp where, true to form, the Yanks are fantastically generous, giving him a towel, razor soap etc and Spike starts crying Thanks – it’s not the wound that bothers him it’s the way he can’t stop crying…

He’s taken to see a psychiatrist who’s an army captain who tells him, rather threateningly, that he will get better, understand? He’s given a hot dinner and more tranquilisers –

On 27 January, just a week later, far from rested and recuperated, Spike finds himself back with his battery, still in the same position outside Lauro but he feels broken…

I was not really me any more

The spring that made me Spike Milligan was gone (p.284)

He has stopped crying but can’t stop stammering – Major Jenkins gives him a dressing down for being a coward and he is stripped of his one stripe i.e. demoted from Lance Bombardier back to Gunner. He is taking the pills prescribed him at the hospital which deprive him of his old personality.

I am by now completely demoralised. All the laughing had stopped. (p.284)

In retrospect, Spike thinks that if they’d given him a couple of weeks rest he might have bounced back, but being sent straight back and then shouted at by the martinet Major finished him off. After a couple of days he can’t take it any more and is driven away from the Battery, no longer to serve, never to see his mates again…

I felt as though I were being taken across the river Styx. I’ve never got over that feeling. (p.285)

Psychiatric hospital

10 February 1944. He is sent to a proper hospital, bright, light, clean, airy, miles behind the lines. Psychiatric ward. About 50 patients, most doped to the gills. Silence.

He is seen by a Major Palmer, a tough former boxer who suffers no malingerers but who accepts he is in shock. He is sent to a rehabilitation camp north of Naples.

Final collapse

Cut to a month later, 9 March 1944. Spike is now out of his unit and far from the front. He is taken to a terrible muddy camp outside a suburb of Naples called Afrigola. He is given a job in ‘reception’ i.e. in a tent at the gateway to the camp where he asks the same questions of new arrivals, fills in and files their paperwork. The last paragraph of the book tries to put a brave face on it:

Will Milligan recover? Will he get back to the big time among the Lance-Bombardier set? Above all, will he lose the stammer that makes him take four hours to say good morning? All this and more in Vol. 5, Goodbye Soldier, to be serialised in Gay News. (p.288)

So he ends the narrative by trying restore the cheeky chappy, zany character of the preceding text but, well, it doesn’t work.

(Incidentally the last gag isn’t homophobia, I think, just surrealism. It’s an off-the-cuff gag citing just about the last place the memoirs of girl-mad shagger Milligan were likely to be serialised.)

Shall I read volume 5? Volume 4 is not as funny as its predecessors and, at 288 pages, turned into quite a grind. Plus I always knew it was heading for this sad denouement. According to the blurbs volume 5 is just as long at 280 pages, and devoted to Spike’s personal battle with depression and psychiatric problems… Not a thrilling prospect, is it?

Class animus

Spike really hates their new commanding officer, the over-officious unbending Major Jenkins, ‘Fuck him’ (p.128) and this dislike curdles into outright hatred, citing everyone under Jenkins’ command who gave him the nickname ‘Loony’ for his impenetrably stupid orders.

He enjoys retailing stories of officers making wallies of themselves, like the officer who very grandly swanked into view of the battery, took out a shooting stick, unfolded it, sat squarely on it, and then it sank slowly into the quagmire till he fell on his back in the mud. How they laughed (p.76).

He is also thrilled to bits when the officers’ mess catches fire and gleefully describes how hated Major Jenkins runs into the flames to retrieve his belongings into a pile which some of the men (who all hate him), as soon as his back is turned, promptly throw back into the fire (p.152).

He contrasts Churchill meeting Roosevelt in the warmth and Cairo in some luxury hotel with the plight of him and his mates, living for weeks in soaking tents, wearing sodden clothes which start to fall apart and riddled with lice.

(Anti-officer stories or reflections on pages 164, 165, 202)

Spike doesn’t need to comment when he and a few comrades, who are billeted in farm outbuildings covered in centuries or ordure lay a phone line up to headquarters and open the door to the officers mess to find it a cosy clean billet with a warm fire and the officers all swigging whisky and laughing (p.195). The class resentment bubbles off the page.

Seriouser

I mentioned that, although Spike continues to blitz us with gags, he also shares quite serious opinions, much more so than in the previous three volumes:

We drive through Sparanise, badly shelled and bombed, some buildings still smouldering. The inhabitants are in a state of shock, women and children are crying, men are searching amid the ruins for belongings or worse, their relatives. It was the little children that depressed me the most, that such innocence should be put to such suffering. The adult world should forever hang its head in shame at the terrible, unforgivable things done to the young… (p.80)

This reminded me of the description in ‘SAS: Rogue Heroes’ of a German artillery attack on the Italian town of Termoli which wiped out a civilian family except for the little boy who was running round screaming with his intestines hanging out of a terrible stomach wound, till SAS hard man Reg Seekings grabbed him and shot him dead on the spot.

Any leader who declares war, whether in Congo, Sudan, Yemen, Syria, Gaza, Ukraine, Myanmar, is committing to blowing up little children and should be damned forever.

Half a dozen times he refers to coming from an Irish family and having been raised a Catholic but, in the face of the suffering he’s seen, he has suffered a fairly predictable loss of faith:

A Catholic priest visited us this evening and asked if anyone wanted Confession and Holy Communion. I nearly went but since the war started my belief in God had suffered a reverse. I couldn’t reconcile all the killing by two sides who both claimed to be Christian societies… (p.83)

Undertones of madness

Because I know this is the volume which ends with him getting invalided out with shell shock or PTSD, I noticed the increased number of references to madness littered throughout the text. If he’d been a literary author i.e. one who carefully planned his narrative and effects, I’d say he had carefully seeded the notion, or references to different types of madness, in a cunning preparation for his eventual collapse. In practice, the text is so chaotically assembled I doubt there was that much calculation. Conscious or not, they’re there.

At one point there’s a shortage of fags and Spike goes four days without a puff. The pupils of his eyes dilate and ‘I spoke in a high strained voice on the edge of a scream’ (p.48).

‘There’s a bloke in a truck waiting for you.’
‘Is he wearing a white coat.’ (p.60)

Inside the farm an Italian an Italian baby was crying and the mother was trying to calm it in a hysterical high-pitched shriek. (p.63)

From the distant hill we hear the dreadful sound of Spandaus and Schmeisers that are spraying the early morning with bullets, and I can’t but wonder at the courage of these lads in the Guards brigade going forward into it. What a terrible, unexplainable lunacy. (p.75)

‘How?’ said Gunner White looking down at the brown sea of mud, ‘how can we get out of this before we all go stark ravin’ bloody mad?’ (p.82)

And on pages 200, 204, 228, 229, 265, 272…

‘See?, we’re not the only ones who’ve lost our marbles,’ said Edgington. (p.228)

‘Your power to bend words will one day end you in the nick, nuthouse or graveyard.’ (p.229)

On page 193 the boys discuss the random theory that Hitler was driven mad due to piles. In which case a tube of Anusol would have prevented the whole war.

There are also rumbling references to suicide. They are kept so long at a position on the hill in the endless rain that Milligan wonders if some of the men will commit suicide to escape and, in fact, a soldier at HQ does (p.178).

Part of it is the cognitive dissonance of war. He and his mates enjoy a hot meal, stew and potatoes, huddled round a fire in their freezing dugout. Down in the plain they hear a sudden outbreak of machinegun fire, first theirs, then ours (they can recognise the different makes of machinegun by the sound). Down there, two patrols have clashed and are murdering each other.

I slide another spoonful of dinner in. I really can’t get it all together, us dining, them dying… (p.257)

You can hear the mental strain, the same insanity of war which Kurt Vonnegut struggled to manhandle into the fantastical storyline of Slaughterhouse Five and Joseph Heller transformed into the masterpiece of bureaucratic craziness, Catch-22.

Il Duce

Volume 3 is named after Montgomery who is never actually mentioned in the text (just in one picture caption). Mussolini, by contrast is, I think, mentioned three times, pages 55, 63 and 197.

Evelyn Waugh

Why has he got it in for Evelyn Waugh? There was a fantasy scene depicting Waugh getting drunk and buggering Randolph Churchill in the previous book. In this one he envisions Waugh, pissed off his face, standing up during an air raid in Yugoslavia shouting abuse at Randolph Churchill (p.175). Are they symbols, for Spike of upper class privilege.

Angry or grumpy?

When does justifiable anger against the world morph into sounding like a grumpy old man? At what point do you cross the line from righteous indignation to sounding like a tirade in the Daily Mail or Daily Telegraph, homes for people who can’t adapt to a changing world? Spike and this book are a kind of test bed for that question.

Pity the children

One morning after roll-call I was exploring the environs of the camp when I discovered the remains of what had been a big bonfire. The surviving pieces were interesting: Fascist uniforms worn by schoolchildren during indoctrination training, Bambini della Lupa (Children of the Wolf) and along with them were little wooden rifles and kindergarten books praising Mussolini, Il Duce nostra Buona Padre … etc etc. How in God’s name can adults do this to children? To pervert their minds… (p.56)

And the passage quote above, from page 80.

General misanthropy

During the brief R&R in Amalfi they watch fishermen kill octopuses they’ve captured by turning them inside out.

It was obscenely cruel, but then Man is. (p.238)

Reunions

The reunions with his old army pals were obviously important to Spike. He goes out of his way to mention, in his irritated preface, that he and his comrades have not one but two reunions a year ‘something no other British Army unit have’, before spelling out that he’s referring to D Battery, 56th Heavy Regiment, Royal Artillery. And he repeats this again at the very end when he’s spelling out what esprit de corps means, how his mates had it and their hated CO, Major Jenkins, absolutely didn’t (p.285).

He tells us that in December 1976 he organised a reunion at the Medusa Restaurant of those involved in the fighting in and around Steam Roller Farm, 26 February 1943. Strikingly, they invited one of the Germans who’d been fighting opposite them to the meal (p.63).

On a particularly freezing wet night one of the lads. Gunner Trew, asked for a sip of Spike’s tea and ended up draining it.

Now, whenever there’s a reunion, I walk straight up to him and say ‘Gi’s a sip’, take his beer and drain it to the bottom and say ‘Remember Italy’. (p.89)

Vindictiveness

This points to another aspect of the text which feels new, which is that Spike never forgets a grudge. The Trew story is, if you read it briskly, funny – but it chimes with other places which aren’t funny and where resentment smoulders on after 35 years. For example, he doesn’t let up in his criticism of their unbearable commanding officer, Major Evans.

In another, surprising, passage he has it in for his Dad. He says that his Dad’s letters from home become an increasing pain in the arse. This is because his Dad relentlessly nags him to reply to his Mum’s letters. But Spike insists to the reader that he does answer all his Mum’s letters. He goes on to tell us that, after the war, he sent every letter to his Mum registered post and kept the receipts and pasted them into a book and showed his Dad the book – at which he claims his Dad said the book could be a fake! It reveals Spike’s inability to let it go.

And he also emphasises to the reader that it cost him a ‘fortune’ in registered letters, an indication of his own ‘tightness’ with money which, as we’ve seen, he tends to attribute to Jewish people. (Compare the phrase in the preface which emphasises that calling up old comrades who live abroad, to check the facts, ‘ran into over a hundred pounds’. Money was obviously an issue for Spike who never really made it big, not ‘big’ like his frenemy Peter Sellers.)

Post-war sadness

A number of remarks are more redolent of 1970s Britain than 1940s Italy, especially the references to Britain going down the tubes, no longer being ‘Great’ and so on. Daily Mail territory.

…even today the indoctrination goes on. China. Russia. Out own democracies corrupt with pornography and Media Violence… (p.56)

Combined with the sense, which comes over in the references to contemporary reunions, that they will never recover that carefree esprit de corps, they will never be so young or so free again, which takes shape as quiet despair at the dullness of suburban life. For example, they bunk down in an abandoned farmhouse and Spike records the graffitti including ‘The Tebourba Tigers’.

The latter refers to the name they conferred on themselves after a savage action at Tebourba in Tunisia. Where are those tigers now? Watching telly? Washing up?… (p.67)

At moments like this the book reflects the general sense of frustrated malaise widespread across the Britain of the 1970s, see the Reginald Perrin novels, or the exasperated frustration at the start of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy or any number of 70s sitcoms like Rising Damp. ‘Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way,’ as Pink Floyd sang in 1973.

And then throw Spike’s own, personal, depression into the mix. It doesn’t explicitly appear that often in this long text, but it’s a strong, depressive tone which flavours the whole thing.

The ugly English

Related to the sense of Britain going down the tubes and the dullness of suburban life goes a passage about the sheer crapness of English ‘cuisine’.

the Anglo-Saxon will devour stale bread, bully beef, hard rolls, food boiled to death and obliterated with artificial seasoning – yet delightfully cooked octopus in garlic? No! You are what you eat, that’s why we all look so bloody ugly. (p.238)

Similarly, tea. I, personally, hate tea but the soldiers lived for mugs of the sweet brown dishwater. But even so:

As I walk I sip the life-giving tea – why do we dote on tea? It tastes bloody awful, it’s only the sugar and milk that make it drinkable. It’s like fags – we’ve got hooked… (p.261)

Emigration

All this explains why he sympathises with the idea of emigrating away from poor old Britain…

His brother Desmond is 17 and has a crappy job. No wonder he emigrated to Australia p.263

The Russian threat

It’s not untrue but Spike’s warnings against Russian threat reminded me of another radical turned grumpy old man, Kingsley Amis, who wrote several novels warning against a Russian conquest of Britain p.249

Other complaints

He complains that in a village they came to, the British were allowing suspect collaborators to be kept packed in the tiny local police station in inhumane conditions.

Why this situation was allowed to exist can only be put down to the wonderful ‘I’m alright, Jack’ attitude of the British. We are not cruel but, by Christ, sometimes we come very close to it. (p.251)

He describes a local woman cook, Portence, who helps out in the cookhouse, working from dawn till one in the morning and then compares her with:

some of the soppy females of today who get a charlady to clean their flat of three rooms while they phone their friends and eat chocolates. (p.252)

These examples go to show, I hope, that although there are still loads and loads of quickfire gags, there is also a lot more moaning and complaining about the modern (1970s) world. That’s what I meant by the way his anger against a world which started a world war and destroyed entire cities and killed so many civilians and good blokes and damaged little kids forever morphs and mutates into general ranting against the modern world, modern women, modern TV and porn and video nasties etc etc, into a general rant.

Some of the rants can be funny. Many are interesting as examples of social history. But between the rants and the grim descriptions of (distant) battles and death, it feels like we have travelled a long way from the relative innocence of the first volume, Adolf Hitler: My Part in his Downfall (1971).

Credit

Mussolini: His Part in My Downfall by Spike Milligan was published by Michael Joseph in 1978. References are to the 1978 Penguin paperback edition.

Related reviews

  • Adolf Hitler: My Part in his Downfall (1971)
  • ‘Rommel?’ ‘Gunner Who?’: A Confrontation in the Desert (1974)
  • Monty: His Part in My Victory (1976)
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by Simon on May 10, 2024  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on May 10, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/05/10/mussolini-his-part-in-my-downfall-spike-milligan/

‘Rommel?’ ‘Gunner Who?’ A Confrontation in the Desert by Spike Milligan (1974)

‘Halt! Who goes there?’ came the midnight challenge.
‘Hitler!’
‘Can’t be. He came in ten minutes ago.’
(Squaddie repartee in ‘”Rommel?” “Gunner Who?”: A Confrontation in the Desert’, page 31)

I didn’t know Spike Milligan’s dad was a sergeant-major in the Indian army, which explains why he had an informed view of army life long before he was conscripted into the service in 1939. I also didn’t know Spike Milligan’s actual name was Terry. We learn this on page 27. Full of autobiographical facts, it is.

‘”Rommel?” “Gunner Who?”: A Confrontation in the Desert’ was Milligan’s second volume of war autobiography, published in 1974. In these early volumes he says they will form a trilogy but in the event he ended up writing seven volumes of memoirs of the Second World War (!).

Typical example of a serious Edwardian illustration with Milligan’s comic caption

Period covered

Its predecessor, ‘Adolf Hitler: My Part in his Downfall’, covered from the outbreak of war in September 1939 through to January 1943 – from Milligan’s call-up to the 56th Heavy Regiment Royal Artillery, and then time spent training at bases all round the south of England, before posting to Bexhill on the south coast, from which they often watched German bombers flying north to bomb London. It concludes with his regiment’s embarkation to travel by ship to North Africa in January 1943.

‘Rommel?’ ‘Gunner Who?’ picks up exactly where its predecessor left off, in January 1943 and covers a relatively short period, just until May 1943, describing increasingly intense fighting (in which Milligan’s artillery regiment was directly involved) leading up to the capture of Tunis by the Allies and the end of the Desert War on 7 May.

So whereas the Hitler book took 140 pages to cover nearly 3-and-a-half years, this one takes longer (208 pages) to cover a much shorter period (23 January to 12 May 1943, four-and-a-half months).

Sources

This is explained by the fact that Milligan uses a number of diaries as sources for the text and these give him a wealth of detailed day-by-day information to draw on (or just plain copy).

Thus the book, beneath the blizzard of gags, cartoons and silly pictures, is laid out in a basic diary form, with one or more entries for most of the days in the January to May period.

An introductory note tells us he used not only his own diary but the official regimental diary, and also the diaries of the regiment’s CO Lieutenant Colonel Chater Jack and of one Al Fildes. In addition, Milligan cites letters and photos and various other memorabilia supplied by his mates so, taken altogether, this wealth of source material explains why the entries for each individual day are so surprisingly detailed and factual, and why the whole book is longer than the first one, despite covering only a tenth of the period of time. Here’s a typical entry, combining solid factual information with a bit of humour.

April 8 1943: This way to another battle. At sunset we drove to a rendezvous with Captain Rand, Bombardier Edwards, Gunner Maunders in a Bren driven by Bombardier Sherwood, it was dark when we met. ‘We’ll sleep here tonight,’ said diminutive Captain Rand in a voice like Minnie Mouse. We slept fitfully by the roadside as trucks, tanks etc rumbled back and forth but inches from our heads. (p.157)

Broad overview

The narrative follows Spike and his fellow bombardiers in the 19th Battery as they arrive in North Africa and are posted, to begin with, at Camp X, not far from Algiers. This is staggering distance from the sea, which our boys sit in up to the waist, naked, sobering up after a heavy night, sometimes watching Algiers getting bombed by Jerry.

After 50 pages they are sent forward to a real observation post (OP) in the front line where they for the first time come under fire. Here Spike is sent on a dangerous mission to lay phone cable from the rear headquarters up to the OP. Later, during daylight, Spike watches our boys trying to hit German Tiger tanks in the plain below, comes under artillery fire and is part of a sudden retreat back to their starting position and then on to a new base.

The narrative has the feel of military action in that it is confused and the movements of his little unit generally incomprehensible. He is at the level where you just obey orders, no matter how contradictory, confusing and abrupt they seem.

There aren’t many dead bodies but his unit is attacked by Stukas, comes across burned out buildings, he talks about this or that regiment on their flanks ‘catching it’. On 8 April they stop at Djbel Mahdi before driving along the route of a Jerry retreat, past burning vehicles, some containing carbonised bodies. He and his mates keep up a stream of non-stop banter, but it’s a war book, alright. They stop to consult a map and Spike notices an Italian corpse nearby, not long dead, still oozing blood. He helps himself to his wristwatch and a not tells us he later gave it to his dad as a gift (p.158).

In the final 50 or so pages his unit is at the front, directing artillery fire and coming under repeated attack, from mortar, artillery and German planes. Right at the end his favourite officer, Lieutenant Goldsmith, is killed. Milligan remembers crying his eyes out, the text includes a crudely cut and pasted newspaper tribute from Goldsmith’s friend, playwright Terence Rattigan.

He and his mates keep up a stream of non-stop, cheeky chap banter but it’s a war book, alright.

Format

As with its predecessor, ‘Rommel?’ ‘Gunner Who?’ is a deliberately disjointed, scrapbook-style book, with the (surprisingly coherent chronological) narrative constantly being interrupted by:

  • sections of spoof communications between Rommel, Hitler and other senior Germans (so-called ‘Hitlergrams’)
  • Edwardian illustrations from the peak of the empire in the 1890s with silly captions scrawled on them
  • Milligan’s own sketches and cartoons
  • photos of his mates in the battalion
  • letters home
  • selections from the ‘zany’ battery newsletter and poems he wrote
  • and any other stuff he can cram in

The deliberate scrapbook effect reminded me of the series of Monty Python scrapbook-style books from the 1970s (especially using pictures of stiff-upper-lipped Edwardians and adding silly captions) which were also laid out like surreal pastiches of schoolboy comics, only not as funny or as imaginative. Spike’s efforts always seemed somehow tight and clumsy. Take the Hitlergrams. These are a promising idea but woeful in practice.

Hitlergram number number 27

ADOLPH HITLER: You realise soon zer Englishers people will be crushed!
ME: It must be rush hour!
ADOLPH HITLER: Zere is no need to rush!! Soon it will be all over.
ME: Hooray! Back to civvy street!
ADOLPH HITLER: Civvy Street is no more! It was destroyed by zer bombs of mine Luftwaffe. (p.57)

Vulgar, crude, puerile, sometimes very funny

It is deliberately vulgar, crude, puerile and sometimes very funny. But often just vulgar and crude.

Suddenly, without warning, ‘Strainer’ Jones lets off with a thunderous postern blast, he had us all out of that tent in ten seconds flat. (p.22)

Farting, wanking, pissing, shitting, the subject matter of satirists and comedians since the advent of literature (see Greek and Roman comedy, Chaucer, Rabelais). There’s quite liberal use of the c word, not so much by Spike as by the very working class lads around him.

Driver Cyril puts on his boots. ”Ere, my feet ‘ave swelled.’
‘No they ‘aven’t, cunt, they’re my boots.’ (p.180)

Hoggins

But it’s hard not to feel a bit oppressed by the constant references to shagging. The book is an account of healthy young heterosexual men in their sexual prime, absolutely boiling over with hormones and randiness and talking about it all day and all night:

‘A man can never have enough hoggins. A good shag clears the custard,’ said Gunner Balfour as he wrote a tender letter home to his wife. (p.29)

Hardly a page goes by without reference to erections and groins, lads boasting about the sexual conquests, jokes about the shapes of some lads’ knobs, references to the (many) men who masturbate every night in the shared dormitories (a subject, incidentally, mentioned by Eric Newby as a common nightly occurrence at his POW camp in Love and War in the Apennines). The lads eye up every woman in sight, reminisce fondly about shagging huge numbers of birds and barmaids back in Blighty, or about more recent escapades with the Arab whores in Algiers. Here they are setting out from the base on an evening’s R&R.

A three tonner full of sexual tension rattled us towards Algiers docks. Most others were looking for women and booze. not Gunner Milligan, I was a good Catholic boy, I didn’t frequent brothels. No, all I did was walk around with a permanent erection shouting, ‘Mercy!’ (p.32)

Shagging and going on the piss and scrounging extra grub, those are these men’s central interests. Oh, and the footie.

The lazy sods! That’s all they ever think of. Booze, football and sex. (p.66)

I suppose sex is more present than in real life a) because (as mentioned) we are reading about an unnatural concentration of fit young men, and b) because it’s all they can talk about, far from home and work and hobbies and all the other things young men divert their energies into – it’s something they all have in common: it’s a unifying subject. Also c) because sex is not only a theme which occurs in real life, but is also the subject of so many jokes, subject and punchline of an infinity of gags.

The view from the observation post was magnificent. Below lay the vast Goubelat Plain, to our right, about five miles on, were two magnificent adjoining rocky peaks that rose sheer 500 feet above the plain, Garra el Kibira and Garra el Hamada, christened ‘Queen Sheba’s tits’ (p.87)

But sometimes it’s just sex. When he’s sent to hospital for a few days with a swollen knee:

There was one magnificent nurse, Sheila Frances. She had red hair, deep blue eyes and was very pretty, but that didn’t matter! because! she had big tits! Everyone was after he and I didn’t think I stood a chance but she fancied me. I got lots of extra, like helping me get her knickers off in her tent and she eased my pain no end. (p.194)

If you can take, or even enjoy, this kind of thing, this book is for you.

Class war

Spike is very much a man of the people. He constantly refers to his family’s address in the lower class suburb of Brockley, to his ma and da and brother, identifies very strongly with ‘the lads’, and misses no opportunity to take the mickey out of the upper-class officers and their general air of bewilderment.

Officers tried to occupy us with things like ‘Do that top button up’. They were then hard put to it to think of something to do next, they settled for ‘Undo that top button’. (p.61)

The officers were grouped round a map and appeared more excited than is good for English gentlemen. (p.67)

In the dim light of the OP Chater Jack and the three officers were sipping tea. I saluted. To a man they ignored me…Gunner Woods, slaving over a hot primus, filled my mug. The officers were talking. ‘I don’t like hybrid strains,’ one was saying. ‘Too much like having a queer in the garden. Ha ha ha.’ ‘What a crowd of bloody fools,’ I thought. ‘You should have come earlier,’ whispered Woods. ‘They were on about the price of tennis shoes.’ (p.155)

If you read Milligan’s account alone you’d be amazed that the British Army ever won anything.

Types of humour

I tried to categorise aspects of Milligan’s humour in my review of the Hitler book. The commonest feature is gags, quickfire puns and comic misunderstandings. Because these are not extended sketches, don’t rely on character of clever setups, but are just bad puns, they a) are not very deep or satisfying and b) can easily become irritating. Here’s a successful little bit of repartee.

We were driven at speed to a massive French Colonial Opera House where at one time, massive French colonials sang. A sweating sergeant was waiting.
‘I’m the compere. You are the Royal Artillery Orchestra?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Where’s the rest of you?’
‘This is all there is of me. I’m considered complete by the medical officer.’
‘We had been expecting a full orchestra.’
‘We are full – we just had dinner.’ (p.36)

I spent a lot of it thinking the humour is very puerile, literally for boys, maybe 11 year-old boys would find it funny. But then you turn a page and find material radically inappropriate for an 11 year-old.

An hour later we settled in our beds listening to the lurid exploits of Driver ‘Plunger’ Bailey because he had a prick the size and shape of a sink pump. (p.35)

So the continual flow of sex references mean it’s not really appropriate for children. Is it? I first read these when I was 10 or 11, I loved the humour, can’t remember what I made of the knob jokes.

Some gags feel very stock and routine – such as describing almost any bad aspect of the war, and then tacking on a homely cockney sentiment for comic incongruity:

About 1 o’clock we arrived at the GP. Our guns were firing. What a bloody noise. What in heaven’s name did they think they were doing – it was past midnight. What would the neighbours say? (p.73)

It’s a common tactic, not only of Spike’s but of all the men around him, to make humour by taking a dangerous or exotic aspect of the war and deflating it with homely references to tea and buns or buses or family.

Somewhere a donkey was braying into the darkness. ‘Coming mother,’ said Gunner White. (p.48)

But most of it consists of comic routines arising naturally from the situation:

Wilson was a dour Scot sporting pebble glasses (only the British Army would make him a driver). I think he drove in Braille. In peacetime he’d been a shepherd. He rarely spoke, but sometimes in his sleep, he bleated. (p.132)

Or:

‘Milligan, this dog is half wild.’
‘Well, only stroke the other half, then.’ (p.139)

Or:

‘Who’s there?’ said a voice.
‘A band of Highly Trained Nymphomaniacs.’
The tent flap flew open and an unshaven face that appeared to belong to Bombardier Deans appeared. ‘Ah, you must be the one that goes around frightening little children,’ I said. (p.140)

Or:

A bath! Ten minutes later I stood naked by the thermal spring soaping myself, singing, and waving my plonker at anyone who made rude remarks. ‘With one as big as that you ought to be back home on Essential War Work.’ It was nice to have these little unsolicited testimonials. (p.164)

Or:

There was a silence. ‘I wonder what Jerry’s up to?’ said Deans. ‘He must be up to chapter 2, they’re slow readers, it’s all them big German words like Trockenbeerauslese that slows them down.’ (p.189)

Or:

A swelling had started on my knee. I said so to Lt Budden.
‘A swelling has started on my knee.’
‘It’s got to start somewhere,’ he said. (p.192)

Actually reading them out of context makes me laugh. Maybe it’s best to dip in and out of or have someone read out aloud the funniest bits.

Some facts

He is promoted from Gunner to Lance Bombardier and acquires one stripe on his arm.

On 16 April 1943, at the front, helping to direct his artillery and coming under periodic enemy fire, he turns 25 (p.178).

First mention of encountering Gunner Harry Secombe, and then namechecking Peter Sellers, serving in the RAF in faraway Ceylon (p.200).

Moments

Just occasionally, through the blizzard of gags, there are rare moments of sensibility. Some of his descriptions of the landscape peep out like shy children from a hiding place and you wonder whether this is the real Spike, buried under a) all the info from the diaries and b) avalanches of quickfire gags.

At the foot of El Kourzia, a great salt lagoon two to three miles in circumference. Around the main lagoon were dotted smaller lagoons and around the fringe, what appeared to be a pink scum. In fact it was hundreds of flamingoes. This vision, the name of Sheba, the sun, the crystal white and silver shimmer of the salt lagoon made boyhood readings of Rider Haggard come alive. It was a sight I can never forget, so engraved was it that I was able to dash it down straight into the typewriter after a gap of thirty years. (p.87)

In particular I was struck by his unexpected knowledge of flowers:

We were walking over wheatfields now flattened by war machines. It was magnificent country, spring was at hand, the wild flowers were beginning to sprout, the wheat crops were about a foot high, and lush broad beans were about to flower. Compared with the English variety, these were giants, and there were acres and acres of them around El Aroussa flat lands … Another plant, borage, was growing freely in the ditches as were little blue and ed anemones that grew among the wheat stalks. Broom was about to bud… (p.84)

Traumas

In fact, suddenly and without warning, on page 156, there is a completely candid, joke-free passage, describing him sitting in a hotel room in Madrid, describing how powerful the emotions experienced at that time still remain, eclipsing everything that came after, and how little things, a smell a snatch of jazz melody, transport him right back to the battlefield and the bases and the most intense friendships of his life. They aren’t really happy memories and yet they’re addictive, like a drug. Poor Spike.

This turns out to be the first of a new thing in these books, short sections titled ‘Traumas’, which are printed in smaller font than the main text and describe nightmares. He dreams he’s blown to pieces by a direct hit from a mortar and hears the stretcher bearer saying ‘this one’s dead’ (p.161). There’s a really grisly nightmare about being slowly crushed to death by the tracks of a Panzer tank (p.173). Another of taking a direct hit from a shell but being conscious enough to turn round and see his entrails spread out like a fan behind him (p.194).

According to this (and every other war book you read) there’s a lot of banter and humour among squaddies but Spike’s goes leagues beyond that, to border on mania and he knows it.

I went raving on, I was mad I know, under these conditions it was advisable. (p.162)

The same kind of conditions being endured by soldiers on the front line in Ukraine right now.

Credit

‘Rommel?’ ‘Gunner Who?’ A Confrontation in the Desert by Spike Milligan was published by Michael Joseph in 1974. References are to the 1976 Penguin paperback edition.

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Posted by Simon on May 6, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/05/06/rommel-gunner-who-a-confrontation-in-the-desert-spike-milligan/

Captain Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis de Bernières (1994)

This is, to begin with, a wonderful, warm, life-affirming and then, as it develops, a thoroughly harrowing and upsetting, and then, at the end, some kind of redemptive and redeeming, novel. But whatever the changing subject matter and mood it overflows with old-fashioned pleasures of narrative, character and plot. It fully deserved the prizes it won and its widespread popularity. To cite the facts of its success: it was on the Times bestseller list for four years, has sold more than 600,000 copies, has been reprinted in paperback more than thirty times, and has been translated into more than 17 languages. It also won the 1995 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book and I’m surprised it didn’t win more.

Overview

It’s set on the Greek island of Cephallonia during the Second World War and its aftermath. The narrative follows a core handful of characters through:

  • the golden days of peace (1939 and 1940)
  • the advent of war i.e. having promised they wouldn’t Italy declares war on Greece (October 1941)
  • the Greco-Italian war (28 October 1940 to 23 April 1941)
  • the island’s lazy, peaceful, comic opera occupation by the Italian army from May 1941 to September 1943, with a token presence of the German army which mostly kept itself to itself
  • the armistice between Italy and the Allies in September 1943 which placed all Italian forces in an ambiguous and confusing position, and triggered the awful massacre by the Germans of every Italian soldier on the island – a total of 1,315 Italians were killed in the resultant, 5,155 were executed, and 3,000 drowned when the German ships taking the survivors to concentration camps were accidentally bombed by the Allies: the mass murder is considered a war crime second only to the Russian massacre of Polish officers at Katyn
  • the period when the island was occupied solely by the German army, hugely more brutal and rapacious than the Italians (September 1943 to October 1944)
  • the troubled period after ‘liberation’ of the Greek Civil War (1946 to 1949) when, in de Bernières’ view, the Communist forces of ELAS (Ellinikós Laïkós Apeleftherotikós Stratós – the Greek People’s Liberation Army) behaved with even greater brutality to anyone they considered traitors, bourgeois or just wanted to loot and rape, than the Nazis

Having got to about page 370 and supped deep of horrors, massacres and mutilations, you’d have thought de Bernières would draw this sorry sage to a conclusion but there’s more.

Central characters

For the first hundred pages or so we are introduced to the central characters of a small village not far from the town of Argostóli, on Cephallonia, being:

  • Dr Iannis, a widower, small, alert, curious wise old bird, who has a gift for healing despite not actually having a medical degree
  • Iannis’s wife died some time ago (of tuberculosis) so he lives alone with his beautiful, 17-year-old daughter, Pelagia, who has picked up much of her father’s medical knowledge and secretly wishes to become a doctor herself
  • dodging around is the 6-year-old girl Lemoni who’s always getting into pickles ‘in her capricious and erratic manner’ (p.175) from which Pelagia rescues her

The first hundred or more pages consists of a slow, relaxed and deeply pleasurable introduction to the peacetime life of a Greek town, with its annual festivals described in great detail along with its charmingly picturesque characters, including:

  • huge local strongman, Velisarios, whose party trick is to pick up mules
  • Father Arsenios, a fat, roly-poly drunken priest, always sweating like a pig and dogged by his failure to live up to his calling
  • Kokolios the cartoon communist
  • Stamatis the cartoon monarchist

This is all hugely enjoyable because it is how we Brits imagine Greek rural life to be. the narrative is peppered with the many sweet and eccentric little incidents in the village and the characters’ reactions to them. Every morning Dr Iannis goes off to the kapheneion to meet up with Kokolios and Stamatis where – being a republican, a monarchist and a communist – they have the same grumpy old arguments, very much like a Greek version of ‘Last of the Summer Wine’.

And behind the individual characters and chapters what comes over is the wonderfully urbane, amused, wise and droll attitude of the ‘implied author’ i.e. the authorial voice created by the text. To put it more simply, de Bernières’ voice. His treatment of his characters, his focus on the eccentric and charming, his immense good humour, radiate through every sentence and make it an immensely warming, lovely read.

A narrative of sorts gets going when, during the feast of the island’s saint, Saint Gerasimos, Velisarios does his party trick of holding an enormous heavy Venetian gun while the local kids stuff it with all the junk and rubbish they can find, then he gets someone to light the fuse and holds it while it goes off, a deed which requires staggering strength.

Anyway, on this particular occasion he fires it at the empty end of the street just as the handsome young fisherman Mandras comes round the corner. He isn’t badly injured but is taken to the house of Dr Iannis where he comes round to find the beautiful face of Pelagia looking down on him and promptly falls in love.

This Mandras proceeds to hang around the doctor’s house, continually bringing them offerings of fish for Pelagia to cook, until one day he’s fooling around in a tree and falls out, landing on an urn below and getting loads of shards of terracotta stuck in his bum, an absurdity which endears him even more to Pelagia.

On one occasion Pelagia goes down to the sea and not only sees Mandras setting out his nets to catch whitebait naked – i.e. sees what a dazzlingly lithe, fit young body he has – but is then astonished to see him whistle to three tame dolphins and allow himself to be pulled out to sea holding their fins.

Mandras’s mother is Drosoula, a strikingly ugly woman whose bad looks everyone forgets after a few moments in her company because of her warm nature. (On one occasion Drosoula tells Pelagia she only secured a husband because he had ‘unusual desires’ which she was prepared to satisfy – sodomy?).

Anyway that gives you a flavour of the charming and gently amusing first 100 pages or so.

A chapter per character

I haven’t yet mentioned the key ‘formal’ aspect of the novel, which is that each chapter represents the point of view and voice of a different character. The chapters are relatively short (5 or 6 pages) and each time you start a new one, you know it will be a new character and a new point of view.

In fact the chapters come in (at least) two flavours. First of all, there are chapters where the narrative is told by a third-person narrator but with a strong leaning towards a specific character’s point of view. The character in question is usually indicated in the first sentence if not in the very first words, making it pretty easy to understand and orient yourself:

  • Dr Iannis had enjoyed a satisfactory day in which none of his patients had died or got any worse… (first words of the novel)
  • Father Arsenios ruminated bitterly behind the iconostasis… (p.36)
  • Pelagia returned from the well with a jar upon her shoulder… (p.127)

The second kind of chapters are those told from a first person point of view, which I’ll elaborate below.

Politicians

What this technique allows de Bernières to do with tremendous effectiveness is cut between scenes and settings: it allows him to move the story along without having to set scenes each time; he can just cut away to a new character in a new setting in a very effective, filmic kind of way. Thus although the book is quite long, and very packed with text, it feels relatively light because you can just take it one bite-sized scene at a time.

In the early parts, the most striking use of this technique is when he cuts away from the idyllic island altogether to give us entire chapters devoted to the international statesmen responsible for running affairs in the early 1940s.

Thus we get chapters taking us into the mind of the Greek leader, Ioannis Metaxas, a Greek attempt at the kind of strongman leader typified by Hitler and Mussolini. The chapter devoted to him reveals a man who is browbeaten by international events and defeated by his disreputable daughter, Lulu.

But it’s also in these chapters that we get the first use of the other type of narrative, first-person narratives. The most recurring of these first person narratives is, unexpectedly, by a hulking Italian soldier who is in fact a repressed homosexual, and who, indeed, appears in chapters titled (all the chapters have titles) ‘L’Omosessuale’. Like the third-person chapters and to make it pretty simple and clear, the protagonist of these first-person chapters tends to be introduced in the first sentence:

I, Carlo Piero Guercio, write these words with the intention that they should be found after my death… (p.22)

This touchingly sweet, gentle giant and his inexpressible homosexual yearnings turn out to be a major thread running through the whole narrative.

At the furthest extreme of this spectrum is the sole chapter in which we hear the non-stop speech of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, chapter 2 given as a Joycean monologue. It’s only seven and a half pages long but it is priceless, wonderfully conveying Il Duce’s stream-of-consciousness thinking, his vanity, his posing, combined with his madcap military schemes and would-be clever-clever ruses. He comes over as a dangerous idiot but is brilliantly conveyed and satirised. Just this one chapter could be presented as a hilarious short story or short prose text standing by itself.

Captain Antonio Corelli

So that’s a summary of all the elements of the text, namely ten or so characters on the island of Cephallonia, the Greek Prime Minister, the Italian dictator, an Italian soldier, plus a few other characters, so what happens?

What happens is the novel covers the true historical events leading up to and then during the Greco–Italian War of 28 October 1940 to 23 April 1941; which was followed by the German invasion and conquest of Greece in the summer of 1941, and the occupation of Greek territories by German and Italian forces. We follow our cadre of characters through several years of occupation up till armistice made between the Italian government and the Allies in September 1943, at which point the German army was ordered to regard their erstwhile allies, the Italians, as enemies, with the result that they rounded them up and massacred them.

These are the high-level historical events which provide the backdrop to developments among the characters we’ve slowly got to know on the island of Cephallonia. So who is Captain Corelli?

Well, from a technical point of view it’s interesting that Corelli only turns up on page 157 i.e. a little over a third of the way through the text. Corelli is a handsome, charming, charismatic Italian officer who inspires love and affection in his men and finds himself billeted on Dr Iannis and Pelagia with, as they say, comic and romantic consequences. Oh and he plays the mandolin which he takes everywhere with him (and which he calls ‘Antonia’) because he is a music lover and also to charm the ladies.

Detailed plot summary by chapter

1. Dr Iannis Commences his History and is Frustrated

Introduces us to humane and humorous Dr Iannis as he removes the dry pea lodged in the ear of his friend Stamatis then returns home to carry on composing his ‘New History of Cephallonia’, an ongoing project which allows de Bernières to fill in the backstory of Greek and Cephallonian history. And introduces his humorous, chiding daughter, Pelagia, 17 years old (p.19).

2. The Duce

Rome. The hilarious chapter given as the free-associating, idiotic ranting of Mussolini to secretaries and underlings and introduces his illogical reasons for declaring war on Greece – i.e. it will make Italy look strong, put him up in the same league as Hitler, the war will only last a few weeks etc.

3. The Strongman

Introduces us, first, to Alekos, a goatherd who lives high up on Mount Aenos and who will, from time to time, cast a cold, detached, uninvolved eye on events down n the plains. But the chapter is titled after Megalo Velisarios, the famous strongman. We also meet the cheeky little girl, Lemoni, who’s constantly getting into mischief. And fat waddling Father Arsenios who waddles into the square as Velisarios is entertaining the crowds and who Velisarios picks up and places on a wall to great cheers and Arsenios’s mortification. Velisarios fires the ancient (1739) Turkish culverin and accidentally hits Mandras the fisherman coming round the corner (the wound is caused by an old donkey nail). So Velisarios carries the wounded boy to Dr Iannis’s house where he first meets Pelagia.

4. L’Omosessuale (1)

First person account by the Italian Carlo Piero Guercio, a sensitive man tortured by his homosexuality:

I am exploding with the fire of love and there is no one to accept it or nourish it. (p.23)

He joins the Italian Army to be among men and escape conventional expectations. In a novel full of good things this sensitive portrayal of a vexed homosexual is one of the best.

5. The Man who Said ‘No’

Third person account of authoritarian Greek Prime Minister Ioannis Metaxas (1871 to 1941) in which he surveys the course of political events which brought him to power, his motivation for enforcing an authoritarian form of rule, to befriend Hitler and Mussolini and his dawning realisation that they are about to betray him and invade his country (‘Why had his international brothers betrayed him?’ p.29). Interspersed with rueful regrets about his wayward daughter, Lulu. All building up to his decision to say NO to Mussolini’s bullying ultimatum.

6. L’Omosessuale (2)

Guercio describes being a member of the Italian Julia Division sent to fight in Albania.

No civilian can comprehend the joy of being a soldier. (p.31)

The joy of being among young, beautiful, virile comrades. Unfortunately, he learns from bitter experience that the Italian chain of command is an inept joke, led by the idiot Mussolini, with the result that there isn’t enough support, organisation, arms, equipment or winter uniforms. He falls in love with a young married corporal from Genoa named Francesco (p.34) but becomes disgusted by the squalid lies and deceptions imposed on the Army and the public to justify Italy’s invasion of Albania.

The Italian invasion of Albania was a brief military campaign which was launched by the Kingdom of Italy against the Albanian Kingdom April 7 to 12, 1939. The conflict was a result of the imperialistic policies of the Italian prime minister and dictator Benito Mussolini. Albania was rapidly overrun, its ruler King Zog I went into exile in neighbouring Greece, and the country was made a part of the Italian Empire as a protectorate in personal union with the Italian Crown. (Wikipedia)

7. Extreme Remedies

Father Arsenios is at the back of the church and feeling sorry for himself for being a fat, useless, vice-ridden priests when he realises villagers are coming to leave gifts in the main body of the church, to apologise for the indignity he suffered when the strongman, Velarios, picked him up and place him atop a wall to general laughter. There follows a comic scene where Arsenios, dying for a pee, can’t bring himself to exit through the church and be seen by everybody (there is no toilet in the church) so he employs the desperate remedy of drinking one of the bottles of wine brought for him so as to have a receptacle to pee in. He does this several times with the result that he is completely plasters and lying in a pool of his own piss by the time that Velisarios comes to apologise in person.

Velisarios carries the unconscious priest to the house of Dr Iannis who forces him to drink vast amounts of water. Then Iannis is visited by Stamatis, whose ear he unblocked and now comes comically complaining that for the first time in decades he can hear his wife’s endless nagging and asks if the doctor can put the pea back in his ear.

8. A Funny Kind of Cat

Dr Iannis departs for the kapheneion to meet his friends Stamatis and Kokolios the communist for their daily argument. But the little girl Lemoni begs him to come and see the funny kind of cat she’s found deep in a labyrinth of brambles. Undignifiedly crawling on his hands and knees the doctor discovers it is a pine marten caught on wire and carefully detaches it.

Dr Iannis takes it back to his house to treat where, incidentally, Mandras is still laid up with his ‘wound’ and still flirting like mad with Pelagia, who he has just kissed. Iannis contemplates simply snapping the marten’s neck but then is overcome by humane sympathy and instructs his daughter to being straw and dead mice. He’s going to nurse it back to health.

9. August 15, 1940

Dr Iannis returns to the kapheneion encountering Lemoni on the way who is taunting a dog with a stick. She tells him she has decided to call ‘the strange kind of cat’ Psipsina (apparently this is a common Greek word meaning something like ‘puss’, p.374). Back drinking coffee with his mates a good hearty political argument swiftly ensures, with the communist Kokolios telling everyone they’ll be first up against the wall when the revolution comes etc. In casual conversation Iannis delivers what might be the central message of the entire novel:

‘We should care for each other more than we care for ideas, or else we will end up killing each other.’ (p.52)

As usual, the menfolk gather round an old radio set to listen to the BBC news and learn the latest (Churchill has allied with the free French, there’s been another Albanian revolt against Italian occupation).

Pelagia runs in to inform him that Mandras was fooling about in the olive tree in their yard and fell out of it and landed on his bottom on a terracotta pot. His buttocks are packed with shards and bleeding. Iannis has to rush home and spend hours with Mandras lying with his pants down on the kitchen table, while he carefully extracts every fragment (later commenting that Mandras has: ‘the arse of a classical statue, a very fine arse,’ p.69).

When Iannis returns to the kapheneion for the third time it is to find an extraordinary change in atmosphere. Martial music is playing on the radio, both his friends are weeping and the priest is striding up and down declaiming from the Old Testament. They’ve just heard that the Italians have sunk a Greek battleship, the Elli while it was anchored in the harbour at Tinos, participating in the celebrations of the Feast of the Dormition of the Theotokos (sinking of the cruiser Elli). Everyone in the café knows this has brought the possibility of war closer.

10. L’Omosessuale (3)

Guercio and Francesco are chosen for a mission by their officer Colonel Rivolta (p.58). They are to dress in Greek uniform and make an attack on an outpost of what they are told are Greeks masquerading as Italians. When they dress up and sneak up to this border post they realise a) the guns they’ve been given don’t work and b) the Italians really are Italians and c) there are many more of them than they were told and they are expecting them. In other words they’ve been conned into doing one of those ‘border incidents’ which cynical leaders throughout the twentieth century used to justify wars.

In the event they arrive early (at midnight not 2am) discover a big drum of kerosene under the tower and set it alight, causing panic in the tower at which point they open fire with a machine gun massacring the men in the tower. It’s only when one of them falls out of the tower and they recognise him as a fellow Italian that the full depth of the deception dawns on them.

11. Pelagia and Mandras

These two beautiful young people fall in love. The chapter contains a slight formal innovation which is that it contains alternating sections describing first Pelagia and then Mandras’s points of view as they: have a poo in the outhouse and worry about menstruating (Pelagia); load nets onto a boat (Mandras); draw water from a well (Pelagia); sings to his tame dolphins (Mandras). Mandras is given a little speech typifying the motivation of so many men to go to war, to prove themselves a man etc.

I know I will never be a man until I’ve done something important, something great, something I can live with, something to be esteemed. That’s why I hope there’s going to be a war. I don’t want bloodshed and glory, I want something to get to grips with. No man is a man until he’s been a soldier. (p.68)

It’s also tied up with marriage. He envisions going down on one knee and proposing to Pelagia. Pelagia thinks adoringly of the way Mandras now arrives every late afternoon with a gift of fish which she cooks and he sits at the table being polite to her father and rubbing her shin with his foot.

12. All the Saint’s Miracles

An extended and wonderful description of the feast of the local saint, St Gerasimos, with stories of his wonderful miracles. the chapter focuses in on inmates from the local lunatic asylum who have been brought to join the crowds watching the procession of the saint’s mummified body, notably Socrates and Mina. Mandras gets drunk and proposes to Pelagia (p.80) before drinking more and passing out. The day continues on into the evening which is a time of wild partying, music and celebration.

13. Delirium

Mandras doesn’t come for two days and Pelagia is reduced to agonies of worry. Lots of stuff about what traditional marriage meant for a Greek woman back then i.e. consigned to a life of endless labour and childbearing but arguably better than the fates of spinsters and widows.

This is why one had to have sons; it was the only insurance against an indigent and terrifying old age. (p.86)

As in the description of the delusions of the madwoman Mina, so throughout his characterisation of Pelagia, de Bernières displays a supernatural level of insight and understanding. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin is not only deeply pleasurable to read but deeply instructive, too.

On a typically warm and beautiful evening the doctor and his daughter sit outside looking at the stars, thinking about the future. She is fantasising about married life with Mandras until her father gives her a small pistol, warning that war is coming and in war bad things happen to women i.e. rape. She will use this gun only once, and with deep irony, in chapter 63.

The next day is the day when Pelagia goes down to the seashore and stumbles across Mandras, naked, setting his nets then going frolicking with his tame dolphins and is dazzled by the perfection of his young body (p.89).

14. Grazzi

Despite the picture postcard charm of all these village scenes, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin is a historical novel and contains descriptions of, and even soliloquies by, real historical figures. After the chapters devoted to Mussolini and Metaxas we have this one, told in the first-person by Emanuele Grazzi, Italian ambassador to Greece during World War II, who was given the shameful job of delivering Benito Mussolini’s ultimatum to Greek prime minister Ioannis Metaxas on 28 October 1940. Grazzi’s account gives a vivid sense of the incompetence, bad faith and lies of the Italian government which told neither its Army Chief of Staff nor ambassador that they were about to go to war with Greece, operating on Mussolini’s idea of taking everyone by surprise – which just ended up covering everyone in shameful dishonour.

15. L’Omosessuale (4)

Guercio and Francesco keep quiet about the farce they were involved in and are sent to train Albanian guerrillas who they discover to be unreliable lying thieving murderers (p.98). Guercio then goes on to give a vivid description of the chaos and mismanagement of the Italian invasion from Albania into northern Greece, the lack of ammunition, transport, air cover, the right equipment or uniforms for the freezing mountain tops, pages 99 to 104.

Incidentally, in among the memoirs he describes himself as he currently is i.e. sunning himself on the peaceful island of Caphallonia and, on page 100, makes the first reference n the novel to Captain Corelli:

a man who, full of mirth, his mind whirling with mandolins, could not be more different from the vanished and beloved Francesco, but whom I love as much.

16. Letters to Mandras at the Front

Italy and Greece are now at war. These are detailed, worried missives from Pelagia, increasingly begging for some kind of response. What she doesn’t know is that Mandras can’t write (p.130). She describes the inhabitants of their village rallying round to support the war effort and how everyone thinks Metaxas is a hero for standing up to the bully Duce. She describes an outbreak of fortune telling because Mandra isn’t the only son who’s been conscripted and sent to the front – hundreds of families have sent their main earners and supports to the war. She describes the beating up of some unfortunate Italians who live among them:

Why are people such animals? (p.107)

Because dear 17-year-old Pelagia, people are in fact animals, just another species of animals among the 1.2 million species so far identified by scientists. Everything your teachers and priests and leaders told you about humans not being part of the natural world, about our special soul given us by a loving God, was lies which left you completely unprepared for the world as it is and human beings as they are, and so asking such soppy, pointless questions.

Food is becoming short so Christmas Day 1940 wasn’t its usual festive celebration. On Christmas Day the Italians bombed Corfu, the bastards. de Bernières only gives us a selection three (fairly long) letters but the last one states that she has written one hundred letters to Mandras and is becoming frustrated and disillusioned at his lack of reply.

17. L’Omosessuale (5)

Continuation of Guercio’s account of the Greco-Italian War, piling detail on detail of Italy’s mind-boggling incompetence and the bravery, ferocity and effectiveness of the Greek counter-attack which drives the Italians right back to their starting points and then further back.

18. The Continuing Literary Travails of Dr Iannis

Pelagia sinks into a deep depression from which the doctor seeks to rescue her by various ruses like rearranging utensils or stealing stuff from the kitchen, anything to provoke anger and get her out of her mood. War is producing a shortage of medical supplies. He soldiers on with his history of Cephallonia, describing the brutality of the Balkans, crossroads between East and West, and the indolent pederasty of Turkish rulers.

19. L’Omosessuale (6)

Another little formal experiment or piece of playfulness. De Bernières gives a description of Francesco’s miserable death (half his face blown off by a mortar) in the form of an interview Guercio has with his beloved’s mother whereby Guercio tells her heroic patriotic lies, and each of his lies is offset by a long passage in parentheses describing what really happened, in those freezing, lice-infected trenches.

It ends by explaining how the Italians had, to all intents and purposes, lost to the Greeks when the Germans intervened, invading from Bulgaria in the East and opening up a second front which the Greeks couldn’t defend, especially since the Germans sent in 1,100 Panzer tanks against the Greeks 200 light tanks (many taken from the useless Italians).

20. The Wild Man of the Ice

One day Pelagia returns from the well to discover a wreck of man, covered in hair and beard, dressed in animal skins with red eyes and sunburned skin, infested with lice, sitting at her table. She is terrified and it takes several pages of scared enquiry before she eventually realises it’s Mandras back from the front in terrible state, having dodged the Germans and walked hundreds of miles.

21. Pelagia’s First Patient

Shrewdly, Pelagia co-opts Mandras’s mother, Drosoula, herself one of the million Greeks who were ethnically cleansed i.e. deported from their ancestral homes in Turkey after the First Word War. Together they strip and set about healing this broken skinny wreck of a man. Long gone is his god-like arse. De Bernières gives a vivid and extensive catalogue of Mandras’s appalling symptoms (worms, parasites, ticks, fleas, ezcema, gangrene) and shows Pelagia treating them all efficiently. Drosoula is impressed.

‘Koritsimou,’ said the gigantic creature, ‘you are astonishing. You are the first woman I have ever known who knows anything. Give me a hug.’ (p.138)

Dr Iannis had been up in the mountains checking Alekos and his herd of goats (who are always in perfect health). Now, upon his return, he is astonished to discover a huge ugly woman sleeping with Pelagia in his bed, and an emaciated malnourished man sleeping in Pelagia’s. When he listens to the detail of her treatment he is extravagantly proud of his daughter.

22. Mandras behind the Veil

A monologue from Mandras who resents how he is ignored in the Iannis house and realises Pelagia is horrified by him. This is a bitter pill since it was only a hallucinatory determination to get back to Cephallonia and see her again which kept him going after his entire unit was wiped out and he set off on the huge treks through ice and snow and mountains and forests and seas to reach her.

His account includes the magnificently mad episode of him coming across a stone hovel and lying down to sleep, only to be woken by an incredibly ugly old crone with only one eye. She feeds him and he starts to recover a bit but on the third night has a sex dream in which he imagines he’s sleeping with Pelagia but wakes up to discover it is the withered old hag writhing under him.

‘Witch, witch,’ I cried, kicking her and she sat up and shielded herself, her dugs falling to her waist and her body seeping with sores to equal mine. She waved her arms and twittered like a bird in the jaws of a cat, and it was at that point that I recognised the madness in us both and in the very manufacture of the world. I threw back my head and laughed. I had lost my virginity to an antique, loveless, solitary crone, and it was all just one small part of the way in which God had turned His face away and consigned us all to the malice and caprices of the dark. (p.144)

I thought this was inspired in its mocking lunacy, and captured the insanity of the war, and of human existence, in one magnificently grotesque image.

I laid back down next to her and we slept together like that until morning. I had realised that we humans are blameless.

Exactly. If there is a God and he claims to love the human race, he’s got a funny way of showing it. Mandras tells us that the disillusionment of his reception by Pelagia has been absolute. Now he just wants to return to the front to fight.

23. April 30, 1941

On 6 April 1941, the German Army, supported by Hungarian and Bulgarian forces, attacked Yugoslavia and Greece. Hitler launched the assault in order to overthrow the recently established pro-Allied government in Yugoslavia and to support the stalling Italian invasion of Greece. By 30 April the Germans had taken Athens and the Greek king and government had fled to Crete.

There is a hiatus on the island as people wait to see what will happen. They prepare for death or rape. The priest curses God for letting this happen. The doctor starts reading up in his ancient medical textbook, ‘The Complete and Concise Home Doctor’, about wounds.

Mandras is mentally disturbed. Back staying with his mother, he withdraws into himself, except for sudden moments of lucid normality, such as when he joins the celebrations on National Day, 31 March, and Easter on 19 April. Other times he rants and raves. he tells the priest his legs are made of glass. He tries to amputate on with a spoon. He shouts at Pelagia. In one scene he makes her read every one of the 100 plus letters she sent him, humiliating her by pointing out how they got slowly shorter and shorter until in the final ones she asked him to call off the betrothal. Pelagia realises with anguish that she now hates Mandras.

At that moment the Italian invasion starts. Planes fly overhead and landing craft beach and disembark thousands of Italian troops. The islanders are surprised at how diffident and polite they are. At the head of the 33rd Regiment of Artillery of the Acqui Division marches Captain Antonio Corelli, the first time we’ve seen him, so to speak, page 157. He confirms everyone’s stereotypes of Italian men by spotting Pelagia and instructing his men to turn eyes right in order to appreciate the ‘bella bambina’. One soldier does a goose-stepping impersonation of Hitler. Another walks like Charlie Chaplin. Dr Iannis tells Pelagia not to laugh, they are the enemy.

24. A Most Ungracious Surrender

Back to the first person narrative of Carlo Piero Guercio who, for some reason, has stopped being referred to as l’omosesualle. He explains how he was posted to the 33rd regiment in May and how Corelli became a kind of saint to him (p.159). Origin of La Scala club, a group of Italian soldiers who all went to the latrine together and covered up their lavatorial sounds by singing opera (p.160). He receives typically whimsical instructions from the head of La Scala, Corelli, for example rule 4 is that all aficionados of Wagner to be shot out of hand.

He tells the story of the ungracious surrender, namely that the Italian CO and officers marched to the Cephallonia town hall and sent in messages demanding a surrender to which the reply was ‘fuck off’. The Greek authorities said they had defeated the Italian army and refused to surrender except to a German officer so one had to be flown in specially from Corfu.

25. Resistance

The islanders’ response to occupation e.g. graffiti, insubordination and jokes (‘Why do Italians wear moustaches? To be reminded of their mothers.’) A quartermaster arrives to tell Iannis and Pelagia an officer is going to be billeted on them. Iannis gruffly agrees so long as the quartermaster can get him medical supplies. The officer turns out to be Corelli who is driven up by Bombardier Guercio. He is charming and humorous from the start but it is a joy to watch him being steadily put in his place by the doctor and Pelagia who confuse and embarrass him, humiliation doubled when the doctor diagnoses him as having hemorrhoids and then assigns him Pelagia’s bedroom (Pelagia will sleep on the kitchen floor) which destroys Corelli’s sense of himself as a gallant gentleman.

Corelli shyly reveals to them that he plays the mandolin. He joined the army when there was no war and it was a way to get paid for lazing around. That night there’s a scream and he comes running from the bedroom because the pine marten routinely sleeps on Pelagia’s bed and bit him.

26. Sharp Edges

The truck Guercio’s driving to collect Corelli breaks down. Walking, Guercio encounters Velisario, two hulking giants of men who cannot communicate but offer each other cigarettes, nod before going their ways. Velisario comes across the broken down truck, gets a friend, steals the wheels and pours petrol in the radiator.

Corelli is his usual charming self and chats merrily with the little girl Lemoni. When Pelagia breaks them up he asks why and it’s Pelagia’s turn to feel unworthy. These little domestic events and their psychological consequences are so wonderfully done, so real and vivid.

Mandras surprises her by appearing silently. Their every meeting is awkward now. He makes a joke which offends her. She gives him the waistcoat she sewed for him but his first comment is that the pattern is asymmetrical (p.177).

Mandras announces he is leaving now to return to the fight. The army is over but there are partisans in the mountains. Pelagia tells him that every time he is about to do something bad, he is to stop, think of her, and not do it. They hug like brother and sister. Their love is over. Then he walks away.

That evening Corelli finds the hand-made waistcoat on the back of a chair, marvels at its craftsmanship and says he will pay Pelagia anything for it but she insists it’s not for sale.

27. A Discourse on Mandolins and a Concert

Next morning Corelli wakens Pelagia by practicing his mandolin in his/her bedroom. She had been dreaming about the afternoon before when Corelli had arrived on a horse and managed to make it caracole. Corelli explains the structure of a mandolin, how to play it and why he switched to it from the violin which he was useless at. His playing enchants her (p.186). That evening Corelli agrees to perform for the doctor but irritates him by merely tapping the instrument till Iannis loses his temper and makes an outburst. Offended, Corelli explains that he’s playing Hummel’s concerto for mandolin and was tapping out the first 45 bars before the mandolin enters. And now he’s made him lose his place!

28. Liberating the Masses (1)

Describes Mandras’s career as an andarte i.e. partisan. By chance he falls in with the ELAS, the communist group. The resistance is being led by British officers parachuted in to organise and direct assaults, in this case a Brigadier Myers (p.190) who warns his superiors that a lot of their arms are going to communists and storing up trouble for the future (i.e. the post-war civil war).

Anyway, by chance Mandras falls in with a troop of ELAS led by pitiless martinet Hector, wearing his trademark red fez. He is broken in by being led to a village where they drag out a harmless old man, make him kneel then brutally beat his back with a knout before shooting him in the head. His crime? Not reporting a British parachute drop of supplies to ELAS, pilfering a bottle of scotch from it and being found unconscious under the parachute.

Hector makes it quite clear they are going to liberate the people by killing a lot of traitors, royalists, bourgeoisie, lackeys, saboteurs and so on. He is fluent in the death speak of Stalinism. It becomes just as clear that de Bernières loathes and despises the communists.

29. Etiquette

Joke chapter in which Corelli, embarrassed by his inability to communicate with the locals asks for basic phrases from the doctor who waggishly tells him phrases to formally greet all the Greeks he meets which, in reality, mean ‘Go fuck yourself’ and ‘Son of a whore’ (p.196).

30. The Good Nazi (1)

Historical background to the two towns of Argostoli and Lixouri, with explanation that the Italians garrisoned the former and the Germans the latter. Hitler didn’t trust the Italians an inch and sent to Cephallonia 3,000 Germans of the 996th Regiment under Colonel Barge, who were to carry out one of the war’s worst crimes.

One of these is young Leutnant Günter Weber, humourless, obedient, only free when he takes his uniform off at the beach. He is there when the Italians roll up in lorries along with a load of whores shipped there from Libya and much preferring relaxed Greece. They merrily strip off and splash about in the sea to the horror of conservative peasants. Weber is 22, a virgin and has never seen a naked woman before.

Correli introduces himself and when he asks whether Weber is any relation to the German Romantic composer Weber doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He is the son of a pastor in the Tyrol and knows nothing about culture. In the event, they get him drunk, the whores flirt with him, they throw him in the sea, and manage to break down his prim reserves. He becomes an honorary member of the La Scala club.

31. A Problem with Eyes

Two months go by and Pelagia does everything she can to discomfit the captain, almost always spilling food on his uniform when she serves it. She prepares a great speech of outrage at being occupied but somehow never finds the moment to deliver it. He leaves his pistol lying around and then catches her red-handed dunking it in a bowl of water to as to render it inoperative.

Infuriated by his unflappable good humour and manners Pelagia slaps him then throws unripe olives from the tree at him. More months go by and he becomes a fixture. She finds herself looking forward to his morning greeting and then becoming a little concerned if he’s later than usual coming back from the barracks.

He spends his time doing vast amounts of paperwork, or writing music and plucking the mandolin and sometimes watching her crochet. They begin to realise they’re looking at each other and eventually having a childish staring competition which Corelli wins with much laughter. Dr Iannis realises his daughter is falling in love with the enemy occupier.

32. Liberating the Masses (2)

These chapters are about the cruel and heartless communist Hector and his indoctrination of the uneducated lost soul, Mandras. Mandras learns to intimidate the peasants to steal from them, which is fine because Hector dismisses them all as Royalists, petit-bourgeois sympathisers, republicans etc.

33. A Problem with Hands

One dark night the doctor, Pelagia and Corelli are all in the living room, the latter composing music on sheet music paper. Pelagia walks over to look and places her hand on his shoulder as if it’s the most natural thing in the world until she realises what she’s doing and is then crippled by self consciousness. Luckily at that moment Psipsina scratches at the door and Pelagia lets her in from the storm outside and the marten promptly sits on Corelli’s lap make it water-soaked. Pelagia laughs and scoops the marten off his lap then starts to wipe it down, but when Corelli looks into her face she realises the sexual overtones of what she’s doing and straightens up with scorn.

This sets him fantasising, for some reason remembering that Vivaldi taught at a convent full of young women and suddenly Corelli is imagining loads of nubile girls pressing up against him and kissing and caressing him. He now has a prominent erection sticking up through his trousers and when Pelagia calls him to help her with her wind her wool he can’t stand up without revealing it so he makes a big performance of pretending to be a dog and going across to her on all fours which, of course, makes her smile, and they flirt and banter some more. The doctor sighs.

34. Liberating the Masses (3)

Hector is summoned to the headquarters of Lieutenant-Colonel Myers to be given a bollocking. Nobody had warned Myers that he would be spending 90% of his time trying to stop the Greeks being at one another’s throats (p.217). He finds Hector double dealing, dishonest and barbarous, meaning given to torturing and killing any peasants who don’t give him what he wants. Myers gives details of how Hector and his group torture peasants, gouge out their eyes and slit their throats. He knows Hector and his like don’t pay the peasants with the money the British give them a) because they’re greedy b) because they’re storing it up to fund the coming revolution.

Mind you, de Bernières is happy to take the mickey out of the Brits, who are routinely portrayed as upper class twits: ‘Top hole explosion, Absolutely ripping!’ Bertie Wooster meets the Greek communist partisans.

35. A Pamphlet Distributed on the Island Entitled with the Fascist Slogan ‘Believe, Fight and Obey’

A satirical pamphlet which takes eight pages to rip the piss out of the intellectual pygmy, liar, coward and rapist, Mussolini. At the very end of the book we learn that it was written by Carlo and Dr Iannis (p.424).

36. Education

Back with Hector and the partisans, showing that most of his group are thoroughly disillusioned: all they do is loot peasants and avoid any attacks on Germans, leaving everyone else to fight the war. This chapter is another exercise in style because it consists of a brilliant pastiche of a speech by a communist saturated with the self-serving rhetoric and justification for every kind of iniquity characteristic of communist ideology. Compare and contrast the revolting cowardly criminal communists described in Evelyn Waugh’s war novel Unconditional Surrender.

37. An Episode Concerning Pelagia’s belief That Men do not Know the Difference Between Bravery and a Lack of Common Sense

Carlo and the doctor come across Corelli reading the pamphlet quoted in chapter 35, leaping up and hurriedly tearing it in two. But this leads into debate about who wrote it, whether it was an Italian or a Greek and Pelagia, clever woman that she is, begins to speculate out loud that it might have been written by a Greek who was fluent in Italian, had access to BBC broadcasts, and someone who cold distribute it around the island when…she notices her father and Carlo both shuffling in embarrassment and concern. My God – it’s them! And her burbling nearly gave it away to Corelli. She goes inside to prepare dinner.

38. The Origin of Pelagia’s March

It’s the morning after Corelli returned to the house disgustingly drunk, declared his love for her, fell over and was sick. Now he has a crushing hangover and is crushed with embarrassment at his behaviour while Pelagia pours him cold water and berates him. His excuse is his battery’s football team won last night, but she says Weber has been by to explain that the Italians cheated.

While she stands there berating him, into Corelli’s head comes the theme and rhythm for a march which he will compose on the mandolin and write down, hence ‘Pelagia’s March’.

39. Arsenios

The war is the making of Father Arsenios. He quits his parish and takes to walking the length and breadth of the island preaching against the invader and iniquity and the fast-coming arrival of God’s wrath. He is cared for by nuns and monks at monasteries where he stops and by the peasants who feed the itinerant monk and the Italian soldiers enjoy his regular visits and obvious sincerity even though none of them can understand a word. For two years he tramps the length and breadth of the island, burning off his obese bulk, becoming thin and wiry and brown as teak.

40. A Problem with Lips

Short chapter in which Pelagia is passing out of the house as Corelli comes in and she finds herself absent-mindedly kissing him on the cheek. it’s only a few paces later that she realises what she’s done and then tries to furiously back peddle, claiming she though Corelli was her father, a mistake Corelli mocks by saying yes, they are both old and small. Then he throws himself on his knees and makes a comic opera declaration of love, before kissing her on the forehead and running off before she can slap him.

41. Snails

The three adults, Iannis, Pelagia and Corelli, go snail hunting led to a particularly rich briar patch by the ever-inquisitive girl Lemoni. Here Pelagia manages to scratch herself on a bramble then get her hair caught and Corelli can only unravel it by leaning in very close. He takes advantage to kiss her cheek. Suddenly Pelagia bursts into tears. When he asks why she says she can’t take it any more, any of it. He agrees and suddenly they are locked in their first embrace of long passionate kisses.

42. How like a Woman is to a Mandolin

For the first time we go inside the mind of Corelli in a first-person chapter devoted to his thoughts which are, predictably enough, all fantasies about Pelagia, some sexual about her breasts and so on, but mostly lovely scenarios or fantasy scenes or thinking of her actions in terms of musical chords, different moods reflected by different chords, which build together to make Pelagia’s March which he is writing.

43. The Great Big Spiky Rustball

The adults are in the fiddly process of preparing the snails for cooking when the never-mischievous Lemoni comes to the house to announce that she has discovered a big rusty ball on the beach. Carlo and Corelli both realise from her description that it’s a mine, the floating kind used for attacking ships, which has washed ashore.

This longish chapter describes their attempts to clear the villagers out of the way and blow it up safely. In this Corelli is hampered by an officious engineer who tells him all his preparations are inadequate. Corelli gets Stamatis and Kokolios to dig a trench in the sand just 50 metres away and the engineer mocks this. In the event the entire town turns out to watch, shooed away to the safety of the clifftops, while Corelli’s bombardiers have rigged up a small explosive charge underneath the mine and wires leading to a detonator in his little trench.

When he detonates it, sure enough, it goes off with a much vaster explosion than anyone had expected, sending a vast amount of sand mixed with shards of red hot metal flying high into the sky and then raining down on the locals lying flat along the clifftop. This is actually really dangerous and the busy little engineer is decapitated by a red hot piece of shrapnel while other locals are more or less badly burned by the rain of hot metal stinging like hornets (p.260).

Concerned for Corelli, Pelagia leads the charge down to the beach but it’s Carlo who finds Corelli’s trench obliterated and takes a moment before he sees the captain, who was seized in the blast, thrown into the air, dumped back down and covered with sand. He’s mostly alright but is deaf for two days afterwards and suffers periodic tinnitus for the rest of his life. The doctor is infuriated when a small army of people covered in sand with black eyes and cuts all over, presents itself at his house.

Corelli is nearly put on a charge by the Italian Commanding Officer, General Gandin, of whom more below. But he is bedbound at Iannis’s for days and revels in the attention he gets from Pelagia, Carlo and even Lemoni. Even friend Weber brings his wind-up gramophone round and tries to teach him German popular songs.

But he’s even more infuriated to discover that his house is completely infested with snails, these being the hundreds of snails Corelli and Pelagia and Lemoni brought back from their snail hunt which have escaped from their buckets and had all day to ooze themselves into every nook of the house. Charming comedy.

44. Theft

Kokolios discovers two Italian soldiers trying to steal his chickens. This bear of a man grabs them, beats and kicks them and drags them along to Dr Iannis’s house where he wakes up the household and presents them to Captain Corelli for discipline. Corelli goes inside and returns with his pistol and for a horrible moment Pelagia thinks he is going to shoot Kokolios. Instead he points it at the soldiers and, to their amazement, tells them to get down on their hands and knees and lick Kokolios’s boots. Which they do, after he’s threatened and kicked and pistol-whipped them.

At which point Kokolios realises he is stark naked (apart from his boots), suddenly covers his privates, and goes running off. Comedy. Two days later Pelagia’s beloved goat, who she has been feeding and grooming, her consolation in many an emotional drama, has gone missing. She is furious with Corelli, blaming his soldiers and he can only hang his head.

45. A Time of Innocence

Corelli and Pelagia become lovers in the old-fashioned sense, they ‘walk out’ together, kiss and cuddle but have nothing like sex. There is no contraception and Pelagia has seen too many girls her age either shamed by single motherhood or dying after botched abortions.

Weber gifts the captain an old Wehrmacht motorcycle which had broken down, in exchange for Italian rations. Corelli turns up on it and amazes Pelagia. They proceed to have mad adventures biking all round the island, specially when he takes corners too fast and ends up wildly going down side tracks, or when she leans the wrong way on corners.

This allows them to motor to places where Pelagia won’t be seen or recognised (death in such a conservative culture) and then they find a disused shepherd’s hit which becomes a safe place for them to lie and canoodle for hours (p.269).

All their talk is fantasies about what wonderful lives they’ll lead ‘after the war’.

46. Bunnios

Up on Mount Aenos the isolated goatherd Alekos hears a plane booming overhead and then watches a white circle fall from the sky. In his simplicity he thinks it is an angel but it is, of course, a British officer being parachuted in. This officer whacks his head on a rock and required a) untangling from his parachute and then b) days of careful feeding and care.

This is one of the comedy posh Brits who crop up throughout the story. ‘What ho’ is his only remark before passing out. When, after a few days, he tries to talk to Alekos the latter doesn’t understand a word and we are only later told that this is because this typical product of a British public school is speaking ancient Greek (p.275). De Bernières very amusingly conveys the impression this has on his Greek listeners by translating it into Chaucerian English:

‘Sire, of your gentilesse, by the leve of yow wol I speke in pryvetee of certayn thyng.’ (p.2174)

The angel has a mechanical box which he turns on and emits squeaks and squawls though he hears words like ‘Roger’ and ‘Wilco’ and so on. It is a radio.

After some thought, Aleko decides to take the angel to see Dr Iannis. This takes four days of travelling down the mountain by night and hiding from patrols during the day. At Iannis’s the angel reveals his identity as Lieutenant Bunny Warren, seconded to the Special Operations Executive from the Kings Dragoon Guards (p.276).

After discussion, they get him a native outfit and he makes his way off into town where he ends up by sheer chutzpah staying in a local house which already has four Italian officers billeted on it. He confounds them by trying to communicate in Eton Latin. Bunny takes to trekking all over the island, regularly going to the isolated shack where he’s hidden his radio and reporting back to Cairo details of all enemy troop movements.

In his journeys he comes across Father Arsenios and takes to walking with him, passing as another religious lunatic. One more oddity in a book full of eccentrics.

47. Dr Iannis Counsels his Daughter

We find the doctor once again writing a section of his history. He’s gone back to the ancient Romans’ occupation of Cephallonia. More importantly he can’t get his pipe to draw any more because of the vile apology for tobacco which is all you can get in wartime. He reflects that his history is more or a personal lament than an objective factual account. I’m sympathetic to the notion that History writing is actually impossible. We can never fully know the past for the blindingly obvious reason that none of us even understands the present. Like newspaper columnists all we can do is play with stereotypes and clichés, slightly more advanced stereotypes and clichés it’s true, but simplifications nonetheless. Because the true history of any event is beyond our abilities to fully understand. We always shape and interpret everything to suit our own purposes. History is no exception, the reverse: it’s distortion and simplification writ large.

Anyway, next time Pelagia comes in he asks her to sit down and have a heart to heart. He says he realises she and Corelli are in love. She blushes scarlet. He proceeds to calmly make the case against their love: 1) The captain is a foreigner and an enemy. If people discover she’s having an affair with the handsome enemy she will be universally decried as a traitor, spat at, stoned in the street. Her social life will end. 2) If she thinks of leaving for Italy she will leave behind forever everything which matters to her. 3) Infatuated love is transient, 6 months a year. After that it settles down to be hard work and you either discover you are two trees whose roots have entwined (like Dr Iannis and his wife did) or discover that you are separate beings. He is worried this is what Pelagia will discover when the dust settles. 4) She is still officially affianced to Mandras and nobody knows whether he’s alive or dead. 5) Sex deferred becomes more and more obsessed over, but lust can only really function within marriage, otherwise the risks are enormous of pregnancy, complete social death, the man abandoning her, or dying from an abortion. 6) If she did have a child and become a single mum no man would marry her and she would end up like most in that situation, becoming a prostitute. 7) Sexually transmitted infections for which there were, in 1943, no cures.

48. La Scala

Weber brings evidence of crooked Italian scams to Corelli. Carlo is there and the doctor. It turns into a debate about morality and ‘science’, giving Weber the opportunity to expound at length the Nazi idea of the New Morality, Strength Through Joy, the fascist perversion of Darwinian evolution.

Although this then morphs into Weber bringing in his wind-up gramophone and playing Lili Marlene on it, which Corelli plays along to, the sound wafting out into the warm Greek night and enchanting listeners. (Compare with the descriptions of hearing Lili Marlene over the radio in Fitzroy Maclean’s war memoir Eastern Approaches.)

Pelagia expresses such joy at the machine that Weber promises he’ll leave it with her when he finally leaves and she calls him a sweet boy and kisses him on the cheek which makes him blush. She must be 19 or so by now and he, maybe 24. They’re all kids.

49. The Doctor Advises the Captain

Dr Iannis and Corelli are sitting quietly chatting while Corelli restrings his mandolin. Iannis gives Corelli the male equivalent of the talking to he gave to Pelagia a few days earlier. He is nettled when Corelli gives a blithe picture of their future together and says he loves Pelagia, as if that will solve all problems. Iannis tries to explain why he thinks Italians and Greeks are profoundly different, with a view to explaining why Pelagia can never leave the island and go with Corelli back to Italy. She would die of homesickness (p.291).

50. A Time of Hiatus

The Allies invaded Sicily in July 1943. According to the very opinionated narrator this amounted to a betrayal of the Greeks, their most loyal allies and, fatefully, allowed the Greek communists a year to arm and prepare for their takeover i.e. the civil war, although in some places the people rebelled against the 25% tax they imposed everywhere.

The Italians on Cephallonia follow the progress of the Allies up Italy and talk aloud about armistice or surrender. The Germans in their small garrison fume at their perceived betrayal. Father Arsenios passes by with tattered dirty Bunny. Corelli tells Pelagia his boys think they should disarm the German garrison while it’s still small.

51. Paralysis

This chapter opens with another experiment in form for de Bernières has developments in Italy narrated as if in the style of Homer. De Bernières gives a day by day timeline of the collapse of Mussolini’s government in July 1943 and the secret negotiations of his replacement, Marshal Badoglio, with the Allies. The La Scala choir doesn’t meet any more. Corelli doesn’t come to the house any more, too busy training with his unit. On 8 September comes the announcement over the radio that all aggressive actions by Italian forces against the Allies will cease at once. Church bells are rung all over the island and neighbouring islands.

The Italian officers are confused: should they surrender to the Germans? sign an armistice with them? attack them? Corelli is crystal clear that they must disarm the Germans or they’re ‘fucked’. Italian warships in the harbour slip anchor and head back to Brindisi thus preventing the evacuation of the 5,000 or so troops on the island. Hard to credit such cowardly betrayal.

Corelli asks the doctor how he can contact the resistance or andartes but the doctor doesn’t know and all Corelli’s efforts fail.

52. Developments

Consisting of 10 short sections giving the points of view of people caught up in the general confusion.

  1. First person Carlo can’t believe their orders to surrender to the Germans.
  2. Conversation between Italian CO General Gandin who tells his German counterpart, Barge, that the Italians are voluntarily giving up positions to show their good faith.
  3. First person Corelli gives his mandolin to Pelagia for safekeeping, She reveals they’ve also taken Carlo’s manuscript and Corelli is surprised to learn the big man is a writer.
  4. Leutnant Weber cleans his gun.
  5. General Gandin uselessly confers with his chaplains and shows an irrational fear of attack by Stukas, unaware of the fact that’ from a military point of view they were one of the most ineffective weapons of war ever devised’ (p.304)
  6. Someone comes to Corelli’s barracks to tell them Italian officers in another place have been shot by the Germans, prompting Corelli to demand a vote.
  7. General Gandin wastes the next day in indecision.
  8. Quote of the short order sent directly from Hitler ordering the complete liquidation of all Italian forces on Cephallonia. Since Italy hasn’t declared war on Germany, the Italians are to be treated as franc-tireurs rather than as prisoners of war.
  9. General Gandin’s conference with senior officers, at which he highlights contradictory orders from Rome. Indecision.
  10. The British decoded the German order to liquidate the Italians but did nothing because it would reveal the fact that they’d cracked their codes. De Bernières has quite a lot satirical disgust at the British attitude and abandonment of their allies.

53. First Blood

The fighting breaks out piecemeal as Italian officers, abandoned by their commanders and their allies, take courage. Planes fly overhead dropping bombs. Italians take on the Panzer tanks parked at strategic points in the towns. Instead of demanding a surrender, Gandin calls only for a truce, effectively handing the initiative to the Germans.

54. Carlo’s Farewell

Carlo writes a love letter to Corelli saying he has loved him as much as Corelli loves Pelagia.

55. Victory

How the Germans promised the Italians safe passage from Corfu them machine gunned them in the water i.e. German mass murder. Stukas dive bomb the Italian barracks. Gandin makes the mistake of calling all Italians from outposts into the town where they are easier targets. Whatever it was this is now a war novel. From his mountaintop Aleko sees the flashes and hears the bangs and knows the war has come to his island. Bunny Warren tries to get Cairo to send reinforcements for the Italians but de Bernières gives a characteristically scathing characterisation of top hole British perfidy:

‘Dreadfully sorry, old boy, can’t be done. Chin-chin.’ (p.316)

In their house Iannis consoles Pelagia who is terrified Corelli is dead. Stamatis and Kolokios come to ask the doctor’s absolution for they are taking their rifles and going off to kill Germans. Meanwhile, Corelli wanders through the rubble of Argostoli which has been seriously bombed. He comes across a little girl, dead, buried in the rubble of a house. Refugees are streaming in from villages razed by the Germans, clogging the streets and making it difficult to move artillery. Meanwhile two more battalions of Germans land. The Germans flatten villages all over the island in fierce fights with the Italians who run out of ammunition and blame the British for abandoning them.

After days of fighting an exhausted Corelli motorbikes to the Iannis house, kisses Pelagia, tells this is the last time she’ll see him alive. She begs him to stay and hide in the house but he explains he has to be with his boys and motors off.

56. The Good Nazi (2)

Cut to Weber arguing with his superior officer that he doesn’t want to carry out the direct order to murder the Italian prisoners. He and his CO argue about the legality of it, which all depends on the prisoners’ status as either POWs (with rights) or franc-tireurs, who it is legal to shoot.

In the lorry taking them to their deaths Corelli and his pals sing the humming chorus from Madam Butterfly. Weber is appalled that these men arrive singing and jump down from the trucks instead of being forced at bayonet point. Corelli recognises Weber and waves to him. Weber goes up to him, they share a cigarette, Weber hesitates and apologises, Corelli is gracious and shakes his hand but Carlo is rude and unforgiving, Weber walks away.

The order to fire is given but the Italians aren’t lined up against a wall but standing or sitting or lying around crying so the Germans have to shoot them where they are. De Bernières singles out for his loathing a sadistic Croatian sergeant who takes thuggish pleasure in emptying his machine gun into the Italians bodies.

And now occurs the most famous incident in the novel. For as the firing starts, huge strong gay giant Carlo Piero Guercio steps smartly in front of Corelli, seizing his wrists in his hands, and stands in front of him like a human shield, receiving bullet after bullet in his body, seeing if he can count to 30 and nearly getting there before a bullet smashes his jawbone and he falls backwards onto Corelli crushing him. Then Weber walks dazed through the abattoir of bodies delivering the coup de grace with his pistol, bends down and looks directly into Corelli’s face, their eyes meet as Weber’s pistol hesitates, then he pulls it back, stands up and walks away.

57. Fire

And now there is an almighty coincidence when Velisarios – remember him? the village strongman? – comes across the killing field and recognises the corpse of Carlo and lifts him up, with difficulty propping him against a wall, and recognised the bloodied body underneath him as the captain who’s been billeted with the doctor. He has multiple bullet wounds and is covered in blood, so much so that Velisarios wonders if it would be kinder to finish him off there, but Corelli whispers ‘Iatro, Pelagia’ so Velisarios picks him up and carries him to Dr Iannis’s.

Meanwhile up on Mount Aenos the goatherd Aleko who, as I said at the start watches all these vents from an Olympian height and with Olympian detachment, sees fires spring up all over the island. With their usual thoroughness the Germans are now burning the bodies, thousands and thousands of Italian men who they’ve murdered in cold blood.

Father Arsenios comes across then largest fire, it is now dark and the German soldiers are exhausting themselves bringing in truckload after load of corpses and throwing them into the flames, some not yet dead. It is a scene from hell and Arsenios shouts his Biblical anathema on all concerned, then starts beating the Germans with his walking staff until eventually a German officer draws a pistol and shoots him through the nape of his neck and they chuck his body onto the enormous pyre.

Eventually the Germans leave and the Greeks come to rescue the bodies they can, in order to give them a decent Orthodox burial. General Gandin is executed along with all his staff officers. It was a massacre of up to 8,000 Italians and a massive war crime.

58. Surgery and Obsequy

Velisario brings Corelli to Dr Iannis’s. Neither Pelagia nor the doctor recognise him but they set to work to treat him. The procedures are described in great detail. After cleaning the blood off they see six bullet wounds but when Iannis starts operating he discovers that they are shallow wounds i.e. haven’t gone clean through the body. Velisario explains how he found the captain, hidden under Carlo, and they are awed at Carlo’s self sacrifice. They ask Velisario to go and fetch Carlo’s body which he does, at some effort, and Iannis digs a grave in the back garden where they sew up his shattered jaw then give him a decent burial. Iannis reads an eloquent eulogy as dawn breaks and the birds begin to sing.

59. The Historical Cachette

The cachette is the hole under the floorboards which has been used to hide rebels and recusants for centuries. This is where they hide Corelli if the Germans are active locally. When he wakes he is in terrible pain. Iannis had to break some of his ribs in order to extract the bullets and wired them together with mandolin wire. This will have to be extracted in further operations. Iannis gives an unflinching prognosis of what Corelli can expect and when the latter jokingly asks him to lie to him, the doctor replies:

‘The truth will make us free. We overcome by looking it in the eyes.’ (p.341)

Fine words but meaningless because – whose truth?

Corelli develops a fever, requires careful bathing, the fever breaks after four days and then he begins to eat. The doctor makes him stand up and walk on the spot. The pain is very bad but it looks like he’ll live.

60. The Beginning of Her Sorrows

Pelagia is now in very poor shape. Her skin is stretched tight and translucent. She is stick thin. She has grey hairs. Her gums bleed and she’s is worried teeth will start to fall out. She’s lost 50% of her body fat and her breasts have shrivelled. Now they start to starve and are reduced to hunting for lizards and snakes. She and her knackered lover, Corelli, lie on the bed together for hours and fantasise about the future. He hopes there’s a God because he wants to believe all his boys are in heaven. She says she hates all Germans but he makes the point that a lot of the German army isn’t German: they recruited from Poland, Ukraine, Latvia, Czechoslovakia, Lithuania, Croatia, wherever there are thugs and sadists.

(p.345)

They realise that the longer he stays the more likely he’ll be discovered. So with reluctance they ask Stamatis or Kolokios to contact Bunny Warren who, a few days later, comes knocking at the window in the early hours. Provided with gold sovereigns by London, Bunny has for some time been paying local fisherman to smuggle allies out of Cephallonia. Now he arranges for Corelli to be taken by caique to Sicily the next evening.

61. Every Parting is a Foretaste of Death

Corelli and Pelagia’s last day together, full of soppy sentimental fantasies about the future, squabbles about whether Corelli should rejoin the army to carry on fighting Germans, what they will name their children. Almost casually, Dr Iannis tells them he has given Corelli permission to marry his daughter.

That night Bunny comes scratching at the window, gives detailed instructions for how to sneak past the German coast guards, the walk in silence down to the beach, lights flash, a rowing boat comes inshore, Corelli and Pelagia hug, hold and kiss for the last time, then he clambers into the boat and is rowed off into the darkness.

62. Of the German Occupation

After the light-hearted romantic Italians have all gone, shot down in cold blood and incinerated, the Germans prove to be brutal heartless machines, with only one ideology, naked power, and the conviction of their own ineffable superiority. They go into anyone’s house at any hour, beat the inhabitants and steal all their belongings. Both the doctor and Pelagia are beaten and lovely Psipsina is casually beaten to death with the butt of a rifle. Drousoula has cigarettes stubbed out on her breasts for scowling at a German. Four Germans systematically destroy all the medical equipment Dr Iannis has accumulated over four decades. When the Master Race are ordered to withdraw in November 1944, the destroy as many of the houses of Cephallonia as they can.

63. Liberation (the communists)

The Liberation is no liberation because the Nazis are replaced by the brutes of ELAS, the communists, who elect themselves to all positions of power, impose a tax of 25% on everything and start rounding up Fascists and counter-revolutionaries and bourgeois and everyone who poses any kind of threat and sending them to concentration camps. De Bernières really hates them and enumerates their crimes, including stealing food sent to Athens by the Allies for famine relief, destroyed factories, docks and railways the Germans had left intact, created 100,000 refugees, and mutilated anyone who crossed them, castrating and gouging out the eyes of the recalcitrant.

The doctor is dragged away in the middle of the night and sent to a labour camp for the crime of being bourgeois. They beat Pelagia unconscious with a chair. When Kokolios and Stamatis try to protect the doctor all three are arrested and sent to the docks to travel to a camp on the mainland. The communists invite Bunny Warren to a party and shoot him. Chin-chin.

After she’s beaten up Pelagia goes running to Mandras’s mother, Drousoula who takes her to her (shrivelled) bosom and cares for her like a mother. Within a few days she moves into the doctor’s house which becomes a matriarchy.

Return of Mandras

But just when you thought things couldn’t get any worse, they do. Mandras arrives at the doctor’s house and he is now a bloated monster, degraded after years of murdering and raping at will with the communist partisans, gross and disfigured, looking like a toad.

He has come back to claim her as his bride (although he is as disconcerted by the change in his appearance as she is by him). Conversation turns to abuse and he angrily gets out the bundle of letters she wrote him all those years ago and repeats the scene of insisting she read them out loud. This escalates into shouting then he’s accusing her of sleeping with an Italian Fascist, everyone’s told him about it, he starts calling her a whore and when she makes a move to leave, smacks her round the face and when she falls to the floor kicks her in the back, lifts her by the wrists onto the bed and starts to rip off her clothes, as he’s done to so many women over the past three years. (De Bernières gives a horribly convincing psychological insight into the raging joy of rape and then the bitter aftermath, p.366).

Mandras beats her again and again and again till her face is a bloody swollen pulp then hoiks up her skirts but this causes the little derringer pistol her father gave her all those years ago to fall out of the pocket and beside her head. She grabs it and fires, shattering Mandras’s collarbone. He staggers back and at just that moment Drosoula returns, entering the bedroom to encounter this scene.

She rushes over to Pelagia who manages to say through her bloody mouth that Mandras tried to rape her. Outraged, Drosoula produces her own pistol and points it at her son. She formally disowns him, calls him Fascist, Fascist rapist, curses him with traditional curses: may his heart burst in his chest, may he die alone, he is no longer her son, she has no son.

Stumbling outside, Mandras sees the old olive tree, the one he used to fool around in, the one he fell out of onto the pot, the focus of so much love and laughter. Now the whole scene is ashes and emptiness. It’s all been for nothing, all his fighting and suffering and mastering the discourse of revolution, all for nothing. He stumbles along tracks down to the seashore where once he frolicked like a young god, strips off and wades into the sea.

Some time later his body is washed ashore, being nudged and nuzzled by his three tame dolphins. This, the immeasurable degradation of Mandras, more than the killing of Carlo and maiming of Corelli, made me feel really sick and distraught. The charming youth with the arse of a god and a permanent smile had been reduced to a fat, exploiting, bully rapist, symbol of a world degraded to bestial levels.

64. Antonia (the baby)

Someone leaves a newborn baby in a bundle on the step of the house. Drosoula and Pelagia take it in and discover it is a baby girl, to join the matriarchy. Pelagia names it Antonia after Corelli’s name for his mandolin. After so much loss it becomes the focus of their hopes and efforts.

Iannis returns

One of de Bernières’ aims is to flay the communists in the fiercest way possible for their barbaric behaviour. He makes Iannis the vehicle for this, for he has Dr Iannis return, after three long years in communist camps on the mainland, a complete wreck, a broken man. He can’t speak, can barely shuffle, his hands shake, broken by the forced marches without food or water, watching villagers along the way who are slow to feed the people’s army having their eyes gouged out, being castrated or raped, the mouths slit wide. He is haunted by the memory of seeing his two oldest friends, Stamatis and Kolokios, incapable of staggering further, sitting by the road as the column staggered onwards, waiting to be shot as ‘stragglers’. In many ways de Bernières paints the communists as worse than the Nazis.

All the more impressive, then, that he moves back in with the matriarchal household and helps Pelagia who is now the main doctor, healing the sick of the village, despite the deep sense of futility burned into his core (p.371).

She tries to get him interested in his old project, the history of Cephallonia, but the gently whimsical approach to history has been burned out of him. I was recently thinking about Joseph Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ towards the end of which Marlowe discovers that the deranged envoy of ‘civilisation’, Mr Kurtz, has scrawled words of nihilistic despair across the bottom of a missionary pamphlet, ‘Exterminate all the brutes’. In much the same spirit, Pelagia discovers that her father has scrawled across the bottom of the last page of his manuscript:

‘In the past we had the barbarians. Now we have only ourselves to blame.’ (p.372)

L’omosessuale

Pelagia finally reads the stash of writings by l’omosessuale, Carlo Piero Guercio, and marvels at the secret sensitivity behind the man’s giant strength, marvels at the depths of his love, for Francesco and Corelli. Thus the strength and virtue and endurance of gay love is one of the book’s central themes.

The house becomes a matriarchy, run by Pelagia and Drosoula, who raise little Antonia as a free spirit. The conservative neighbours call them witches, exacerbated by the obvious emasculation of the once-proud doctor, throw stones or hiss at them in the street, tell their children to avoid them. (This reminds me very much of the way the villagers treat the Englishwoman at the centre of John Buchan’s 1926 melodrama, The Dancing Floor.)

In 1950 they can’t scrape together enough to bribe an official who has discovered that neither Iannis nor Pelagia has a medical degree and so bans them from working. It looks as if they’re going to starve until Fate steps in in the shape of a Canadian poet, one of the millions of bourgeois intellectuals who, in the postwar boom, were seeking out the ‘authenticity’ of ‘primitive’ life among workers and sailors. To their astonishment he is prepared to pay an outrageous rent for the old house by the quay which Drosoula had abandoned to move in with Pelagia, and their finances bounce back to health.

In this figure de Bernières gently satirises the existentialist chic of the post-war years, humorously saying that the poet found himself living a happy and contented life and unable to write the angst-ridden and depressing verse which had made him famous and so he eventually packed up and went back to Montreal, via Paris:

where freedom was in the process of being recognised as a major source of Angst. (p.374)

I think he underestimates the extent to which existentialist thought, although well-established before the war, was a) coloured by the wartime years and b) was a kind of traumatic response to the war, and especially to the occupation. But it was also a fashionable fad, as well.

Almost inevitably the household acquires a cat. Women and cats. We learn for the first time that psipsina is, apparently, Greek for ‘puss’. They had started calling Antonia psipsina as a nickname and there is some of the old light-hearted whimsy in the comic confusion created by calling out psipsina and both the cat and the child misinterpreting it.

The revenant

In 1946 occurs the first of strange phenomena. One day, outside, nursing the baby, she looks up and sees a man dressed in black standing hesitating at exactly the spot where Velisarios hit Mandras with the canon. She is convinced it is her beloved Corelli, puts down the baby and runs down the street but when she turns the corner the figure has vanished, despite her anguished calls. Later a single red rose appears on Carlo’s grave. Is it Corelli’s ghost? Next year, at about the same time, she sees the figure again and another red rose appears. As the years of her spinsterhood progress, Pelagia is comforted by the love from beyond the grave.

65. 1953 (earthquake)

Pelagia stops thinking of herself as Greek. The barbarity of the civil war destroyed any belief that Greek culture was special or superior. Increasingly she thinks of herself as Italian and buys a radio cheap because its tuner is broken and it can only reach Italian radio stations. She sings Italian songs and raises Antonia to speak Italian.

Wars

Despite the tourist whimsy of many passages, this is fundamentally a book about war and wars. In one sentence de Bernières positions the events of this chapter after the Greek Civil War (March 1946 to August 1949), after the end of the Korean War (June 1950 to July 1953) and just as the French were drawing near the disastrous climax of the First Indochina War (December 1946 to July 1954). The Second World War may have ended but it was still a world in flames.

Earthquake

This chapter is a fantastically vivid and almost magical realist depiction of the 1953 Ionian earthquake as experienced by our main characters i.e. weird electrical phenomena, followed by a series of shocks, then the Big One, as they desperately try to escape from the collapsing house.

The most destructive [of the shocks] was the August 12 earthquake. The event measured 6.8 on the moment magnitude scale, raised the whole island of Kefalonia by 60 cm (24 in), and caused widespread damage throughout the islands of Kefalonia and Zakynthos … Between 445 and 800 people were killed. (Wikipedia)

The practical upshot is 1) the doctor’s old house is reduced to ruins 2) the doctor is crushed to death, the peg for another of the book’s countless ironies:

[The ruined house] also contained the disillusioned soul and tired body of the doctor, who had planned his dying words for years, and left them all unsaid. (p.383)

66. Rescue

De Bernière’s attitude to his homeland, Britain:

In those days Great Britain was less wealthy than it is now, but it was also less complacent, and considerably less useless. (p.383)

but remember this was published in 1994 and so written during the chaos at the end of the Thatcher regime, marked by the poll tax riots, and then the Conservative Party’s typically squalid and shambolic sacking of the greatest leader it’s ever had, in November 1990 and hurried replacement by the sad and ludicrous figure of John Major, who depressed all progressive-thinking people by winning the 1992 general election by a landslide. So, yes, from the perspective of 1994, Britain was indeed an unhappy, disgruntled, rather ludicrous country.

But there’s more, de Bernière expresses the standard liberal lament over Britain being America’s poodle:

[Britain] had not yet acquired the schoolboy habit of waiting for months for permission from Washington before it clambered out of its post-imperial bed, put on its boots, made a sugary cup of tea, and ventured through the door. (p.384)

You could argue that the crudeness of this is unworthy of the writer who’s delivered so many luminously subtle moments throughout this wonderful book. Then again, satire is, in general, crude. It prompts a second thought: that de Bernières and the world at large had seen nothing yet, and would be amazed ten years later at the behaviour of Tony Blair who rightly earned the nickname ‘Bush’s poodle’ and sent British forces into Afghanistan and Iraq…

Back to the text: it’s the British who send the most aid and stay the longest to help the inhabitants of the Ionian islands to recover but the chapter then goes onto become an overview of all the rescue attempts and aid sent by various countries, as well as the impacts on the locals, some of whom fell into despair, some intractable guilt at having survived, some set up businesses, unlikely leaders emerged such as Velisarios, the strong man, who took charge in Pelagia’s village. The narrative details his heroic acts (single-handedly cleaning out the village well so that nobody went thirsty) deeds which were remembered and venerated for decades afterwards.

In among the general confusion, an Italian fireman borrows an American jeep and drives out to Pelagia’s village, making his way to the ruins of the old house and identifying the ancient olive tree, split in two by the quake, and then sees the grave of the gentle giant Carlo, which has been opened up. He gets a spade from the jeep to recover the big man but as he does so the earth shakes again and the grave closes of its own volition.

Surely this is Corelli, but the text doesn’t say so.

67. Pelagia’s Lament

First-person lament by Pelagia for everything she’s lost, specifically her upbringing by her wonderful father, fount of fantastical stories, which leads up to her memory of Velisarios digging through the rubble to find her father, so small and limp and empty without his soul, and she realised how beaten and broken he had been but how he was the only man who loved her to the end. This lament made me cry.

68. The Resurrection of History

Pelagia sinks into profound guilt that she panicked and ran out of the house and left her father to die. Drosoula and Antonia sympathise to start with, but become more irritated as Pelagia becomes more morbidly obsessed. Eventually they make up the story that her father has appeared to them in dreams and told them to tell her to complete her father’s history of Cephallonia. After initial scepticism, Pelagi discovers that she can do it, enjoys doing it, starts flexing her intellectual muscles, expresses opinions she never knew she had, writes off to experts in Europe and America for more information and is amazed at the enthusiastic replies she receives. Several publishing houses turn it down but it doesn’t matter. Her father’s project has saved her.

It is 1961. Part of her intellectual exercise is enjoying teasing and contradicting the now teenage Antonia. But the girl dismays her and Drosoula by announcing that 1) she is a communist and 2) she is getting married, at the age of 17 (p.397).

69. Bean by Bean the Sack Fills

Life continues. Pelagia starts to receive postcards from cities round the world with short cryptic messages in Greek. They can’t be from Corelli, he couldn’t speak Greek and what was he doing gallivanting round the world. She decides they’re from the ghost of her father continuing the peregrinations of his youth.

Antonia gets a job serving in a café in Argostoli and is chatted up by short, plump, 32-year-old radical lawyer Alexi (p.399). Despite all her mother’s opposition, Antonia gets married at a happy traditional ceremony.

Time passes. Drosoula sets up a ramshackle taverna in the space down by the quay where her house used to be and becomes a tourist attraction, famed for her slow service but eccentric company. Lemona, now the plump mother of three children, helps out as does Pelagia.

Antonia cries when King Paul dies, comes for comfort when Alexi is locked up by the colonels in 1967 and again in 1973, goes to the mainland to take part in feminist demonstrations. She tells her mother it’s all the fault of the older generation and it’s up to the young people to fix the world. As all young people do. But, as a feminist and a radical, she refuses to have a grandchild for Pelagia to the latter’s sorrow.

Drosoula dies quietly in her chair and is buried next to Dr Iannis and Pelagia suddenly realises she is alone. But in the event Antonia does get pregnant and have a little baby boy. Pelagia dandles it and calls it Iannis so often that that becomes its name. Alexi is a rich bourgeois now, builds an apartment block on the hillside where the old village used to be, rebuilds Drosoula’s taverna, hires a competent chef, takes 50% of the profit.

70. Excavation

Iannis grows to be a beautiful 6-year-old who helps out at the taverna and is cooed over by foreign matrons. Alexi becomes a property tycoon, building evermore apartment blocks with swimming pools and tennis courts. Antonia opens a tourist emporium full of tat in Argostali and then in half a dozen other towns. They become rich.

The boy Iannis engages in competitions to pee as high as possible against the wall at the back of the taverna and his dreams are full of plump tourist matrons pressing him their squishy bosoms.

When he’s ten, Pelagia hires Spiridon, a talented bouzouki player from Corfu, whose dexterity reminds her of the one true love of her life. iannis dreams of becoming a kamakia or ‘harpoon’, slang for the handsome young men who hang about the airport on mopeds and make a living having passionate week-long affairs with single women who’ve flown to Greece looking for ‘romance’ (p.407).

Anyway, Iannis conceives the ambition of playing the bouzouki not least because, by the end of every evening, Spiridon has his arms round the prettiest girls in the restaurant and is being showered with roses. Spiridon says his arms are too short to play it, he should start with a mandolin, so he begs his mum and dad for a mandolin but they keep forgetting to get one on their umpteen trips abroad, so instead he pesters granny Pelagia, who says there’s one buried in the ruins of her old house.

Which is why Iannis is dispatched with Spiridon to dig it up and hence the title of this chapter. In digging through the rubble they discover all kinds of relics which mean something to the reader – a wartime photo of Corelli and Weber, a family photo album starting with Dr Iannis’s wedding, a jar with a shrivelled pea in it (the pea which kick starts the whole narrative).

In the middle of this digging a huge old man appears in the ruined doorway. It is old Velisarios, come to see if they are looters. In his hand he holds a red rose and it’s only now that we learn that it is he who has left a rose on Carlo’s grave every year in October and, it is strongly implied, that he too was gay and recognised and respected a kindred spirit.

Anyway, it’s this huge strong Velisarios who opens up the trapdoor to the historic cachette under the old house where, of course, they find all its treasures perfectly preserved – the manuscripts of Carlo’s letters, Iannis’s history, Weber’s wind-up gramophone with records, the clasp knife she gave her father, the blanket she crocheted throughout Corelli’s stay, and, in side a box inside cloth covers, the most beautiful mandolin Spiridon has ever seen.

71. Antonia Sings Again

Reunited with all these evocative objects, Pelagia cries for weeks, and then shows the photo album in particular to Iannis, boring him with stories of all the old people in them.

And Spiro teaches Iannis how to play the mandolin.

72. An Unexpected Lesson (reappearance of Corelli)

Cut to 1993. Iannis is 15. He likes to go up to the old ruined house to practice the mandolin. One day an old grey-haired man approaches him. It is, of course, Antonio Corelli. He politely points out that the boy is fingering the mandolin in slightly the wrong way which is hampering his technique. When he takes the mandolin to show him how, he suddenly realises it is his old one. Everything comes flooding out and he tells the enthralled teenager how he is the man his mother was going to marry, how he was saved by the giant buried in the back garden and how the four strings missing from the mandolin when they first found it… are in his chest, holding his ribs together, he never had them removed.

73. Restitution (Corelli and Pelagia reunited)

This final chapter opens comically, with Pelagia, confronted by Corelli in the middle of her taverna, going mad with rage, overturning tables, throwing plates and pans at him, then prodding him with the broom handle as she furiously accuses him. All these years she thought he was dead and yet he was alive and living the life of Reilly.

So now we have the Big Reveal, the explanation of the last 50 years of their lives (1943 to 1993). It was Corelli who Pelagia saw at the end of the road in chapter 64, in 1946. He had come back to see her. But what he saw was her nursing a baby and put 2 and 2 together and made 53, wildly assuming that she was married with a child. In his confusion he ran and jumped over a wall so that when she ran after him she saw an empty street.

He came back every year around the same time but always saw her with the baby and made the same mistake. Pelagia asks the obvious question, why did he never meet her and ask her? Because he didn’t want to ruin what he thought was her new, happily married life by stirring up old ghosts. So like a gentleman he did the restrained thing and backed off. Although he did return every year, so her impression of seeing the mysterious dark man was real.

In the meantime he took her parting advice, left the army and became a fireman. Plenty of time to practice and compose and eventually he wrote classical pieces which became a success, three concertos, one of them with Pelagia’s March as its central theme.

He became a successful concert performer and was in demand around the world. Hence the postcards. They were from him. Why in Greek? Because when the full truth of the Fascist regime’s evils came out he was ashamed to be an Italian and emigrated to Greece. He’s been a Greek citizen for 25 years.

Much more chat and memories then he shyly gives her a Walkman and a tape of his 1954 concerto and leaves, to meet up later. She fumbles with the Walkman but once she works out how to work it, is amazed at how immediate and total the musical experience is, right in the centre of her head. And then she hears Pelagia’s March which he used to hum, subject to all kinds of developments, played by different instruments and then makes out the rat-a-tat-tat of machineguns, and the rumbling of drums which embodies the earthquake, my God, the whole narrative is captured in musical form.

That evening he brings her a goat. He went to the trouble of taking a taxi to the top of Mount Aenos where he was swindled by Alekos, and had to pay the taxi driver a double fare to bring it all the way down the mountain. It’s restitution for the one she loved which was stolen in chapter 44. She says she’ll name it Apodosis which is Greek for ‘restitution’. She amusingly humiliates Corelli when he tells her she should get good milk out of it, maybe sell yoghurt in the restaurant and she points between its back legs at the big pink scrotum!

That evening he returns with a modern motorbike and suggests they roar off up into the hills to see if they can find the old shed where they used to hide away and kiss and cuddle, which they called their Casa Nostra. Pelagia says it’s a preposterous idea and agrees. As they roar up into the hills Pelagia is pleased and terrified and holds on tight.

And in the final image of the novel, they are overtaken by a scooter carrying not one but three young woman, wearing skimpy dresses showing their shapely breasts, long hair flowing in the wind, one driving, one doing her eye make-up, one nonchalantly reading a paper. An image of carefree youth and optimism. Corelli thinks that when he comes to map out his next concerto all he will have to do is remember this moment to conjure up the spirit of Greece.

THE END.

The unsaid as a central theme

Writing out the sentence describing Dr Iannis’s death in the Ionian earthquake, and how he had for years prepared some noble and profound last words which, in the event, he had no chance to utter before being crushed to death, made me realise that this is a minor but significant thread in the book – the frustration of the unsaid.

On several occasions Corelli has big speeches ready to deliver to Pelagia, only for her temper or mood to sweep the conversation away.

Similarly, Dr Iannis likes to prepare grand speeches with which he will demolish the communist beliefs of Kokolios or the monarchism of Stamatis, and yet life (and Lemoni) keep interrupting him so that they are never delivered.

Mandras has so much to say to Pelagia on his two returns, from the Albanian front and then from life with the communist partisans, and yet both times his hopes of expressing what he feels are dashed and he ends up attacking her in a raging fury.

But the theme has its best embodiment in the entire life of Carlo Guercio, who overflows with love for Francesco and then for Corelli, which he can never ever, in real life, express.

Related, is the scene of Pelagia and Corelli’s last day together before he takes the illicit boat back to Italy, in which they have plenty of time and yet, somehow, mysteriously, don’t get to express a fraction of their feelings.

And maybe also related is Dr Iannis’s eternal frustration with his History of Cephallonia – no matter how much he writes he somehow never gets to express what he wants to say.

It’s as if it’s a buried moral of the story, that no matter how eloquent the writing and the words, the most important part, somehow, still, is left unexpressed. Something which is expressed nearly at the end of the text when Pelagia shows young Iannis all the photos from her life and he is suddenly struck by how little survives of our lives and loves, thinking:

How can a present not be present? How did it come about that all that remained of so much life was little squares of stained paper with pictures on it? (p.416)

Hummel’s concerto for mandolin

Greek words

  • agapeton – sweetheart
  • iatre – ‘Doctor’
  • koritsimou – my girl
  • kyria – respectful title for a female, ‘kyria Pelagia’
  • mangas – men, chaps
  • papakis – diminutive form of address to a father
  • patir – form of address to a priest, same as ‘Father’

Credit

Captain Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis de Bernières was published by Secker and Warburg in 1994. References are to the 1995 Minerva paperback edition.

Modern Greek reviews

Second World War reviews

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Posted by Simon on April 26, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/04/26/captain-corellis-mandolin-louis-de-bernieres/

SAS: Rogue Heroes by Ben Macintyre (2016)

Courage, like death, seldom appears where it is expected.
(One of Ben Macintyre’s reflections in ‘SAS: Rogue Heroes’, page 178)

This is the official history of the Special Air Service (SAS) during the Second World War, from its inception in July 1941 to its disbandment in October 1945.

Among all the other textual paraphernalia there’s a two-page ‘select’ bibliography which includes no fewer than 25 other books which had already been written about the SAS when this one was published (2016) and I bet more have been published since. So it’s a very popular and well-trodden subject. Indeed, Macintyre writes that as the Second World War reached an end, and the British press discovered the SAS:

The hints of roguish derring-do, combined with a distinct lack of hard detail, created a hunger for SAS stories that has never abated. (p.273)

What distinguishes this book from its competitors is its official status and therefore the access Macintyre was given to a mass of material including: the regimental diary (the SAS War Diary), personal accounts, top secret reports, memos, private diaries, letters, memoirs, maps, never-before-released archival material and hundreds of photos. The result is a 310-page Penguin paperback which is presumably as close to the definitive account as we’re likely to get.

The narrative is surrounded by textual apparatus, including a Foreword by the Right Honourable Viscount Slim, patron of the SAS Association; seven good, clear maps; a list of all the SAS operations during the war; a regimental roll of honour; a chapter giving the post-war careers of the book’s leading figures; numerous photos; the bibliography and an index.

Overshadowing all this is the fact that the book was made into a big-budget BBC drama series, broadcast in 6 episodes at the end of 2022, well reviewed in the press and watched by millions. I bought the book after watching the series, probably like tens if not hundreds of thousands of others. So it’s not only a popular history of then, the Second World War, but very much an artefact of our times, of now.

Part 1. War in the Desert

‘SAS: Rogue Heroes’ is immensely readable, clearly, authoritatively, grippingly written, a perfectly calibrated entertainment. I couldn’t put it down and read it in two highly enjoyable evenings. No wonder it was a Sunday Times bestseller.

You can read the basic facts on the SAS Wikipedia article and countless other web pages. My blog posts are always too long because I summarise everything; this time I’m just going to give the most striking, dramatic or funny elements in note form:

David Stirling

The SAS was founded by Sir Archibald David Stirling who came from a grand, landed Scottish aristocratic family. His family connections helped at key moments drum up support from Scottish grandees high up in the British Army: ‘This was an age when family and class connections counted for much’ (p.23). And:

Stirling was possessed of a profound self-belief, the sort of confidence that comes from high birth and boundless opportunity. (p.10)

Apparently, the decisive moment in Stirling’s life was when he was rejected from a Paris art school for being no good. He became determined to prove himself some other way (pages 9 and 91).

Stirling prided himself on being a renegade, a rebel against traditional army discipline and authority, an opinion vouchsafed by everyone who knew him plus all subsequent biographers. After completing officer training his report summarised him as ‘irresponsible and unremarkable.’

In return he powerfully disliked army discipline and hierarchy, calling military bureaucracy ‘a freemasonry of mediocrity’ and ‘layer upon layer of fossilised shit’ (p.22).

Surprisingly (or maybe not) everyone who worked with him said he was quietly spoken, respectful of his men, got to know them all, rarely raised his voice or lost his temper. He presented comrades in the group with challenges or missions and somehow made them feel like it was their duty to do it.

He was also very against boasting and swank which he described as being ‘pomposo’ (p.126).

Alternative tactics

Traditionalists still thought of wars in terms of huge armies clashing across defined fronts. Stirling conceived of a small agile force working behind enemy lines to sabotage enemy resources.

This was war on the hoof, invented ad hoc, unpredictable, highly effective and often chaotic. (p.172)

This ended up working dramatically well in the North African desert where civilisation amounts to a thin strip along the roads by the coast, inland from which stretch truly vast areas of desert, many of which were unexplored and unmapped in the 1940s.

I was staggered to learn that the Libyan desert covers half a million square miles, nearly half the area as India (1.269 miles²) (p.58).

Stirling badly damaged his back on his first parachute jump, losing consciousness and, when he awoke, unable to walk. Doctors thought he’d be crippled for life. Slowly feeling returned but later he suffered from blinding migraines.

Operation Squatter

Notoriously, the first SAS ‘mission’, Operation Squatter, on 16 November 1941, was a catastrophic blunder. The aim was to parachute at night behind German lines in the Libyan desert, infiltrate five enemy airfields on foot, plants explosives on as many German and Italian airplanes as possible, then head south to a rendezvous with the jeeps of the Long Range Desert Group (LRDG) deep in the desert.

But a fierce storm blew up just as the planes were due to depart. At that point, and then again when they were over the drop zone and due to jump, Stirling was warned to abort, but he took the pig-headed decision to proceed. 1) One of the aircraft carrying the SAS men was shot down – all 15 soldiers and the crew were killed. 2) The pilots were flying absolutely blind in a howling desert storm, had no idea where they were and told the soldiers to jump blind. 3) Some members of the remaining four teams were killed when they landed badly or were dragged across rocky, thorn-bush-full landscape by their chutes. Half a dozen were so badly injured they were left with pistols and told to fend for themselves. At least one shot himself there and then. Three of the teams couldn’t find the packs of ammunition, food and explosives that were dropped with them so were rendered useless. One by one they stumbled south to the rendezvous point. The mission failed to destroy a single enemy aircraft and of the 65 SAS men who set off only 21 made it back (p.55).

It was such a traumatic incident that Macintyre covers it twice, once in the brief prologue to the entire book, designed to drum up excitement (pages 1 and 2), then in an entire chapter (chapter 4, pages 47 to 56) which makes very grim reading.

Amazing that the powers that be let Stirling continue with his experiment. After this fiasco the only way was up.

Paddy Mayne

Top international rugby player. Notorious drunk with a terrible temper. Only close friend he had was Eoin MacGonigal with whom he forged a close, possibly homoerotic, bond, but who was killed during Operation Squatter. Mayne was never the same. Six months later Mayne took leave to go look for MacGonigal’s grave in the desert (p.116). Mayne was a core member of the early group but he and Stirling were never close.

Mayne seemed to take pleasure in slaughter: ‘Fighting was in his blood: he thrived on it.’ (p.115)

The attack on Tamet airfield, designed to knock out Axis planes, but when Paddy heard sounds of merriment from the pilots hut he and two others kicked the door open and opened up with machine guns massacring all the Germans and Italians within. Just one of many such incidents.

Jock Lewes

The exact opposite of Mayne, John Steele ‘Jock’ Lewes was a strict disciplined Englishman. Macintyre says he toured Nazi Germany in the late 1930s and even fell in love with a German woman, but when she introduced him to hard core fascists the scales fell from his eyes and he behave ever afterwards like a man angry at having been fooled.

Lewes was a key player in the formation of the unit with whom Stirling developed the idea of a special force which could be parachuted behind enemy lines and after seeing action in the defence of Tobruk, he joined the unit as Stirling’s second in command.

He was involved in the design of the unit’s badge and motto and was an inveterate tinker, designing the ‘Lewes bomb’ which could be attached to enemy planes or vehicles with an inbuilt timer. To cite his Wikipedia page:

To destroy Axis vehicles, members of the SAS surreptitiously attached small explosive charges. Lewes noticed the respective weaknesses of conventional blast and incendiaries, as well as their failure to destroy vehicles in some cases. He improvised a new, combined charge out of plastic explosive, diesel and thermite. The Lewes bomb was used throughout the Second World War.

He was killed by enemy airplane fire after leading an attack on Nofilia aerodrome, on 30 December 1941 aged 28 (p.79). Stirling later stated that Lewes had a better right to be the founder of the SAS than he did. Lewes’s death in the TV series is very upsetting and feels like the end of an era. It’s only by reading this book that you realise the entire North Africa era was just the first part of a much, much longer story.

Amateurishness

Throughout the book there’s a tension between the initial amateurishness of the group Stirling assembled and its home-made training regimes (for example, his bonkers idea that jumping out the back of a jeep travelling at 30 miles per hour was good training for making a parachute jump) and the tremendous commitment of everyone in the group to their leader and their methods.

Unlike most officers, who thought in linear terms, and care about promotion, medals and the steady progression of the battlefront, Stirling approached warfare sideways and from an amateur perspective. (p.99)

Fitzroy Maclean

Also from a grand family, Fitzroy Hew Royle Maclean, 1st Baronet, (1911 to 1996), unlike Stirling, was a scholar and an intellectual (p.83). When war broke out he transferred to the army from a successful career in the diplomatic service. He was with the SAS for about a year, in 1942, taking part in numerous raids, including the farcical attack on Benghazi. Later that year he was transferred to the Middle East as part of the Persia and Iraq Command before, in 1943, Churchill chose him to lead a liaison mission to Tito’s partisans in Yugoslavia in 1943. After the war he served as a Conservative MP and recorded his extraordinary career in the classic book ‘Eastern Approaches’. Maclean is routinely cited as a possible inspiration for Ian Fleming’s creation of the character of James Bond. He is quoted delivering a classic English attitude to foreigners (uncharacteristically philistine for a man fluent in numerous languages):

‘I have always found that in dealing with foreigners whose language one does not speak, it is best to shout.’ (p.105)

The motto

He describes the debate about designing a badge for the unit and choosing a motto. ‘Who dares wins’ motto beat alternative suggestions ‘Strike and destroy’ (too blunt) and ‘Ascend to descend’ (obscure) (p.85).

The French

Surprisingly ‘French troops would play a vital role in the evolution of the SAS’ (p.87). This remark is à propos the arrival of 52 Free French paratroopers under the command of Colonel Georges Bergé and it is, indeed, surprising to learn the extent to which Free French troops were involved in SAS operations.

The farcical raid on Benghazi

Featuring Maclean and Randolph Churchill. Chapter 9, pages 97 to 110, a) from a base in the Jebel mountain range and b) using the ‘Blitz Buggy’. This was a Ford V8 station wagon with a top speed of 70 mph containing two rows of 3 seats, with the roof and windows removed and painted Wehrmacht grey. (p.94).

On the evening of 21 May 1942 the Blitz Buggy, containing Stirling, Maclean, Randolph Churchill (Winston’s son) and three others bluffed their way past German then Italian guards and into Benghazi where they hid out in a ruined house while planning to row dinghies out to ships in the harbour and attach limpet mines. Everything went wrong starting with the fact that the drive across the desert and up and down gullies etc damaged the rods or something in the buggy which led to it making a howling racket wherever it went. Their night-time attempt to blow up the ships is fouled by heavy guards and the fact that the two inflatable dinghies they brought along both have punctures (and the pumping equipment makes an incredibly loud racket). They nearly get caught umpteen times and are forced to hole up in the ruined flat all day, twitching with nerves as enemy patrols pass by neighbours interfere and, at one point, a drunken Italian blunders in, only to run off at the sight of filthy bearded men with guns. Eventually they drive back out of town in the racketing Blitz Buggy after a very intense 24 hours. The whole thing is like a comic movie and makes for a tense but hilarious scene in the TV series.

In fact Randolph Churchill wrote a highly dramatic ten-page account of the day to his father, Winston, precisely the kind of buccaneering adventure designed to appeal to the wartime PM, and which helped bolster his support for Stirling and the SAS (p.110).

Car crash

It’s typical of Stirling, who really was reckless, not just in military sense, that the four days later, safely back behind British lines, Stirling was driving the Blitz Buggy far too fast, took a corner at speed and, to avoid an oncoming lorry, swerved and ended up rolling the vehicle resulting in: the death of Arthur Merton the distinguished war correspondent; Maclean suffering a broken arm, collarbone and fractured skull; Randolph Churchill receiving three crushed vertebrae; and Sergeant Rose having his arm broken in three places. Maclean quipped that:

‘David Stirling’s driving was the most dangerous thing in World War Two.’ (p.109)

I know he’s a great hero and everything, but quite regularly Stirling comes over as a reckless idiot, the death toll in Operation Squatter and incidents like this providing a powerful indictment.

Captain George Jellicoe

George Patrick John Rushworth Jellicoe, 2nd Earl Jellicoe (1918 to 2007) sailed out to the Middle East with Layforce, met Stirling in the bar at Shepheard’s hotel in April 1942, and signed up for the SAS (p.120). He joined the raiding party of 13 June 1942 which attacked fortifications at Heraklion on Crete. It was led by Colonel Georges Bergé. Disguised as Cretan peasants they cut through the perimeter barbed wire surrounding Heraklion airfield and planted bombs on the fleet of parked Junkers 88 bombers. As they started exploding, the team escaped back to the perimeter fence in the confusion.

Bergé paused after half an hour and announced that they would all be awarded the Croix de Guerre for the night’s work. He then led the party south. Or rather north, because in the excitement he had been reading the map upside down. (p.121)

We get a lot of detail about Jellicoe’s time with the SAS but the most memorable remark is his comic comment on the Free French:

‘They were very, very free; and very, very French.’ (p.124)

An independent force

By June 1942 what had started as L Detachment had raided all the important German and Italian airfields within 300 miles of the forward area. It had long ago dropped the idea of parachuting behind enemy lines and instead had worked closely with the Long Range Desert Group which, basically, drove them to within walking distance of targets, dropped them off, then hung around for a day or two to pick up the returning survivors of each attack.

But during this period it had itself got to know and understand all kinds of desert terrain and benefited from the inspired navigating skills of Mike Sadler.

With its own transport base and navigators, and the ability to attack at will from a forward base, L Detachment was fast becoming what Stirling had always intended it to be: a small, independent army, capable of fighting a different sort of war. (p.132)

Stirling discovers from intercepted messages that the Germans are calling him ‘the Phantom Major’ (p.138).

Sidi Haneish

The extraordinary story of the massed jeep attack on Sidi Haneish airfield. Eighteen jeeps drove 50 miles across the desert from their hideout in Bir el Quseir and then overran the airfield, driving along the main runway in two columns, each jeep armed with Vickers K machine guns, incredibly powerful weapons originally designed for RAF aircraft, causing incredible destruction (pages 139 to 142).

Dinner with Winston Churchill

On pages 153 to 156 Macintyre describes Stirling, back in Cairo, washed and scrubbed and attending dinner with Winston Churchill, with Field Marshall Jan Smuts and General Alexander, C-in-C of the African front. Churchill was, predictably, bowled over by Stirling’s enthusiasm and asked him to write a memo laying out aims of the SAS, a document which still survives.

Stirling asked the three eminent leaders, Churchill, Smuts and Alexander, to sign a piece of paper as a souvenir. Later, with typical chutzpah he typed above it ‘Please give the bearer of this note every possible assistance’ and use it shamelessly to cajole quartermasters into supplying immense amounts of new equipment (p.156).

Expansion

In September 1942 the SAS was recognised in the official British Order of Battle. It was expanded to include 29 officers and 572 other ranks. It was divided into four squadrons, one under Stirling, one under Paddy Mayne, one devoted to the French forces, and a newly commissioned Special Boat Service put under George Jellico (p.167).

At the age of 26 Stirling had become the first man to create his own new regiment since the Boer War. (p.167)

At the end of 1942 a second SAS regiment came into being, commanded by Stirling’s brother, Bill (p.179).

Battle of El Alamein November 1942

The final actions of the SAS in North Africa took place within the much larger event of the (second) Battle of El Alamein, October to 1942. The Germans had advanced inside the borders of British Egypt, and to within forty miles of Alexandria. Not only Egypt was at stake but the country contained the Suez Canal which was the lifeline to the entire British presence in the Far East, as well as controlling access to the oil fields of Persia, also vital for the Allied war effort.

Over two months the new commander of British Forces Lieutenant-General Bernard Montgomery led the Eighth Army to a victory which was the beginning of the end of the Western Desert Campaign. Victory eliminated the Axis threat to Egypt, the Suez Canal and the Middle Eastern and Persian oil fields. It revived the morale of the Allies, and coincided with the Allied invasion of French North Africa far to the West, thus trapping Rommel’s Afrika Corps in a classic pincer movement.

Stirling is captured

Stirling was desperate to make a contribution to this vast effort. On 16 January a force of 14 men in five jeeps set off from their base in the Tunisian desert aiming to link up with the fast-moving First Army near the coast. The Germans had, of course, for some time been aware of a roving force of saboteurs operating behind their lines and Rommel had ordered sweeps and searches to be made of desert areas close to his main forces. And so it was that, at a rest stop in a ravine en route to the coast, Stirling and his force were surrounded and arrested by a much larger German force. (In fact three of the group managed to escape in the initial confusion and trekked west through the desert to meet up, more dead than alive, with American forces advancing from the West, which I mentioned above.)

But for Stirling the war was over. He was sent to bases in Africa, then Italy, interrogated at all of them. He made some notable escapes but always managed to be recaptured until he was eventually sent to the impregnable fortress of Colditz near Leipzig in East Germany.

Because his capture happened at more or less that same time that the Desert War came to an end (with Allied victory) it coincided in a significant change in the personnel and purpose of the SAS. Macintyre has an elegiac page remembering the members who died during the desert campaign, before turning to the fact that the regiment was now to have a new leader, the dedicated stone-cold killer Paddy Mayne, and was now to operate entirely in occupied Europe.

Part 2. War in Europe

As I mentioned, I bought the book after watching the hugely enjoyable BBC TV series. which, I now realise, only dramatised part one of the book, the Desert War section, pages 1 to 189. It turns out that pages 193 to 310 describe the completely different environment the unit faced fighting in Europe, first up through Italy, then playing their part in the D-Day landings and the push across France, then fighting in Germany itself. All this leads up to the surprising fact that it was SAS men, some of whom we met way back in the early part of the desert campaign, who were the first to enter the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in April 1945 which tends to cast a grim nihilistic shadow over everything which preceded it.

As I mentioned, the thing about the army, especially in wartime, is that it continually chops and changes and rearranges its units to suit changing needs. Thus, at the end of the desert war, in 1943, 1SAS was split into two parts, a Special Boat Squadron (SBS) under Jellico and a Special Raiding Squadron under Mayne. 2SAS continued in existence under the command of Stirling’s brother, Bill. I imagine for an author like Macintyre the main challenge is which activities of which unit to include.

Sicily

July 1943 Mayne’s SRS was tasked with knocking out defences on beaches on Sicily, ahead of the main allied invasion. In the event:

The Italians surrendered with indecent haste. ‘They gave up very easily,’ said [Johnny] Wiseman. (p.197)

During the assault they had had to paddle their dinghies past Allied paratroopers who were intended to land behind enemy lines but whose gliders got blown off course, crashed in the sea, and now they were drowning. Hard man Reg Seekings describes how they had to paddle straight past them, as stopping to pick them up would wreck their own mission, upon which lives depended.

Seeking emerges, in the second half of the book, as a barely controlled psychopath and hard man. He becomes the Spirit of Killing.

Seekings stormed the machine gun post, hurled in a grenade and then killed the occupants with a revolver as they staggered out, one after the other. ‘I enjoyed the killing. I was scared but I would have gone into action every day if I could.’ (p.197, and cf the massacre on page 293)

If war with Russia comes, then we will want lots of Reg Seekings.

Italy

The assault on Bagnara, a port on the Italian mainland. Then they’re tasked with taking Termoli on the opposite, northern coast of Italy. The Germans were pulling out when an SRS force of 207 men landed and seized the town. The German C-in-C, Field Marshall Kesselring was furious and ordered a counter-attack. Enemy spotters guided artillery fire into the town. There was a direct hit on a lorry loading up with 17 men and bags of grenades. After a huge explosion, not a single body was left intact, with heads and legs and other body parts strewn around the street. Seekings had just walked away from the lorry, Wiseman had just jumped down from the cab, and so both survived but were badly traumatised. An Italian family had been at a doorway watching. the mother and father were both killed instantly but then Seekings saw the little boy running round screaming with a his intestines hanging out of a bad stomach wound, so Seekings grabbed him and shot him dead on the spot. Yes, we want the Reg Seekings on our side.

Hitler’s commando order

On 18 October 1942 the German High Command had issued the ‘Commando Order’ which stated that any Allied soldiers captured in Europe and Africa should be summarily executed without trial, even if in proper uniforms or if they attempted to surrender. Any commandos or similar unit not in proper uniforms should be executed on the spot (p.208).

Three points:

1) This meant men in units like the SAS fought harder to avoid falling into enemy hands, and then made every effort to escape (and Macintyre describes some mind boggling escapes). Many others were caught and executed according to the Order (the execution of Sergeant Bill Foster and Corporal James Shortall, page 210).

2) It indicated a general darkening of the war. In the desert the unit had felt like it was having tally-ho adventures, a freewheeling band of buccaneers. In Europe the fighting got a lot dirtier, darker and more sadistic (p.205).

3) This last relates to the way the SAS found itself being used more and more as a commando i.e. an extension of the proper army, going ahead to defuse enemy defences, and not the band of pirates Stirling conceived of, operating for long stretches behind enemy lines to distract and demoralise the enemy. The tension between the two roles waxed and waned over the next two years (pages 201, 209).

An estimated 250 Allied servicemen, including downed airmen, perished under Hitler’s Commando Order. (p.311)

France (pages 212 to 274)

D-Day was 6 June 1944. The SAS had grown. 1SAS and 2SAS, combined with two French SAS regiments, a Belgian contingent and a signals squadron brought the total of the SAS Brigade to 2,500, commanded by a new, regular brigadier.

When Bill Stirling learned that a lot of these SAS forces were to be parachuted in ahead of the landings to act as shock troops ahead of the main attack he was furious; this was the climax of ‘ordinary’ military thinking and completely against the spirit of the SAS, so he resigned, an act which ‘signalled the end of the Stirling brothers’ leadership of the SAS’ (p.215).

The maquis

The following chapters depict the many adventures of the many different units of the SAS parachuted in to work with, lead and train, the French Resistance, or maquis as it was more commonly referred to.

Main learnings:

1) The maquis contained a surprising number of fighters from other nations, above all Russians, prisoners of the Germans who had somehow escaped and headed west.

2) There was a continual risk of treachery and betrayal; quite a few SAS-led hideaways in forests and mountains were betrayed to the Germans, who surrounded, captured and then, as per the Commando Order, executed everyone.

3) Some of this was because the maquis was riddled with internal politics, in fact the maquis was the continuation by other means of normal French politics and that politics was riddled with extremist factions who hated each other, notably the die-hard communists at one end of the spectrum and right-wing Catholic nationalists at the other. These were the dire political and social divisions which undermined the French republic throughout the 1930s, weakened France’s resistance to the initial German invasion, and would return to dog French politics even after the war. As Reg Seekings put it, the maquis were:

‘really political parties who had run away into the woods.’ (p.228)

And as Macintyre comments:

By 1944, the conflict in rural France had taken on many of the aspects of a civil war, with all the treachery and cruelty which that entails. (p.229)

4) Lack of proper military training or discipline often hampered the maquis’ usefulness.

The French resisters were fickle allies, riven by internecine disputes that often turned deadly. ‘The blood feud between the maquis was terrible,’ wrote [Johnny] Cooper. Fraser McLuskey considered even the most competent French fighters to be liabilities: ‘Co-operation with them in military operations is in most cases inadvisable and in many cases highly dangerous.’ Spies, real and imagined, were everywhere, and as the German occupation was rolled back the score-settling intensified. (p.240)

The book includes eye witness descriptions from our boys of watching the resistance hold quick kangaroo courts and then execute civilians accused of ‘collaboration’, often on no evidence apart from gossip and malice. For all these reasons the straight-down-the-line British SAS often found them difficult allies to work with. See my review of:

There was another aspect to all the SAS operations in occupied France which was German reprisals; almost every SAS-led attack on rail lines or fuel dumps or tank camps was met a few days later by the Germans’ wholesale slaughtering of entire nearby villages, farmsteads and so on, for example the rape, murder and burning the Germans inflicted on the village of Vermot (p.236).

The parachute padre

1SAS received its first chaplain, the Reverend Fraser McLuskey, who came to be known as ‘the parachute padre’ (p.230). This figure slowly grows in importance, getting to know the men, listening in private to their fears and concerns, holding (quite) services in their forest or mountain hideouts, helping improve morale and cement bonds.

Paris

Head of the SAS Paddy Mayne and seasoned navigator Mike Sadler arrived in liberated Paris on 25 August 1944.

It’s a recurring theme of this period that SAS groups entering towns were surrounded by deliriously happy civilians and especially young women throwing flowers and kisses but that, occasionally, enemy snipers or forces had remained behind, opened up firing, and then all these civilians got in the way of effective armed response.

SAS killings

Macintyre makes much of the illegality and immorality of the Hitler Commando order and yet, as the France chapters proceed, the objective reader notices quite a few times when SAS men have gone on the record, either in writings or interviews, as shooting dead surrendering opponents, for example this, from Roy Farran. During the Battle for Crete of 1941, his squadron encountered a group of surrendering soldiers:

‘Five parachutists came out of the olive trees with their hands up. I was not in any mood to be taken in by German tricks. I ordered the gunner to fire.’ (p.253)

Operations were now so continual that Macintyre includes a diary of Farran’s: 4 September destroyed two staff cars and a ten-ton troop carrier; 5 September ambushed a motorcycle convoy killing 6; 6 September surrounded by girls with flowers so not able to properly engage a German staff car making a getaway; 7 September attacked by 600 German troops, counter-attacked killing the German colonel and second in command – every day like that, for months.

SAS headquarters were moved to Hylands House near Chelmsford in Essex.

The Vosges

the campaign in the Vosges mountains led by Captain Henry Carey Druce of 2SAS, who went by the nom de guerre of ‘Colonel Maximum’. There’s no point detailing their actions which are too long and complicated, but they, like almost everything in the book, read like scenes from the most action-packed war movies.

North Italy

Back to Italy and a detailed account of Operation Tombola to shoot up German headquarters in the town of Albinea.

Into Germany

SAS forces followed the main Allied advance into Germany. the key learning here is that, in the desert and in France the Germans had been operating in neutral or opposition territory where the SAS or resistance could move freely to the indifference or active support of the native populations, could find good hideouts and strike at will.

When they entered Germany the tables were turned. Now the entire civilian population was against them, now the Germans were on home soil, now it was the Allies who drove along the main roads in large convoys and were vulnerable to sudden ambushes by small, mobile enemy units. Plus, of course, the fanaticism of the real die-hard Nazis.

The SS seemed ‘happy to die’ and the SAS often seemed happy to oblige them. (p.289)

The other thing was the child soldiers. In its dying months Hitler’s regime press-ganged tens of thousands of boys under 18 into uniform and forced to fight. You might think these children, some only 14 or 13, pitiable victims, but the accounts here show that many of them were as much if not more fanatical than their often demoralised elders (p.292). Macintyre gives accounts of children shooting not just machine guns but Panzerfaust single-shot man-portable anti-tank weapons at them. And the SAS responding in kind. An anonymous SAS soldier is quoted as saying:

‘If you shot one little bastard the others would all start crying.’ (p.292)

Big question: Did the Nazis pioneer the use of indoctrinated child soldiers (which I have recently been reading about in Africa, Sierra Leone and Uganda)? Did Germans invent the phenomenon?

Operation Howard

Worth mentioning this incident, on 10 April 1945, near the village of Börger, where a unit of SAS driving in jeeps came under fierce attack from a wood and where Paddy Mayne – still alive and still leading from the front – displayed unbelievable courage in leading the attack on the ambushers (pages 296 to 300). By this stage in the narrative Mayne has emerged as a beyond larger-than-life figure, as a force of nature, a whirlwind of cold-eyed death and destruction wrought on the enemy. He was nominated for the Victoria Cross (VC) but in the end received another bar to his Distinguished Service Order.

Macintyre contrasts Mayne’s action with that of a Dane, Major Anders Lassen, who in April 1944 led an SAS action against the Greek island of Santorini and was the only non-Commonwealth soldier in the Second World War to be awarded a VC.

Bergen-Belsen

The war narrative climaxes with the SAS unit which came across Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in April 1945, described in chapter 23, pages 303 to 306. It seems like something from a movie that among the unit which discovered it were individuals we’ve come to know very well throughout their previous operations and escapades, including Johnny Cooper, the Reverend Fraser McLuskey, the hard case Reg Seekings, and officer in charge Major John Tonkin. Amazing that they all survived this long.

Among the horror and evil of the Nazi death camp, the most telling moment is when the SAS officer in charge, Tonkin, ordered the camp guards and officer not to be shot on the spot. God knows they’d killed enough Germans in the preceding years. Instead:

Calmly and quietly, Tonkin chose to demonstrate what civilisation meant. (p.305)

Eight months later the commandant and warden of women prisoners were tried, convicted and hanged in Hamelin prison. He doesn’t mention what happened to the guards.

Colditz

On the same day that Belsen was liberated, so was Colditz Castle where Stirling had spent two long years as a prisoner of war. Two days earlier the camp commandant had received orders to ship the entire population of POWS East. Suspecting they would be used as bargaining chips or simply murdered, the senior British officer refused. Stirling was back in England by 17 April. Next day he broke out of the psychiatric evaluation camp where he was being held, headed for London, hit a nightclub and by 2 in the morning was having his ‘first roger for years’ (p.308).

But fighting continued up to the final German surrender on 8 May 1945. On 1 October the combined SAS forces paraded for the last time at Hyland House and were then officially disbanded.

War Crimes Investigation Team

There’s an odd coda which is that after the fighting ended, the head of 2SAS Brian Franks, sent Major Eric ‘Bill’ Barkworth to find the burial places of all SAS men listed as lost during the war and to track down all the German officers responsible for their murders as a result of the Commando Order. Macintyre calls it the last operation of the wartime SAS and describes it, along with the trials and punishments it led to, in fascinating detail pages 311 to 315.

The SAS idea spreads

Initially, after the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, the Army chief of staff thought we were entering an entirely new era of warfare and so disbanded the SAS. However, just two years later they realised that a host of small conflicts had sprung up around the world, not least in Britain’s efforts to hang onto its empire, and so the SAS was re-established in January 1947.

Not only that but the idea of a small armed force of soldiers trained in survival behind the lines and sabotage spread to Allie countries and was replicated in Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and, after some delay, in America, taking the form of what became known as Delta Force. Right at the end of this splendid book Macintyre give a quick summary of the unit’s rationale:

In tactics and intentions, American and British special forces still follow the principles pioneered by the SAS in the desert more than seventy years ago: attacking the most valuable strategic targets without warning and then melting way again, forcing the enemy to remain on constant, debilitating alert. (p.317)

Afterlives

This wonderfully researched, brilliantly written, absolutely riveting book comes to a logical conclusion with six pages on the post-war lives and careers of the main characters we’ve got to know well during the main narrative, including David Stirling, the man who really emerges as the embodiment of SAS values Paddy Mayne, and others such as Roy Farran, Mike Sadler, Jim Almond, Reg Seekings and Johnny Cooper, the reverend Fraser McLuskey, John Tonkin and Bill Fraser. Not all these lives had happy endings, a kind of muted indication of the long-term psychological damage caused by the terrible scenes they’d witnessed and sometimes dreadful things they’d done.

I liked it that Reg Seekings for many years ran a pub in Cambridgeshire. There’s one landlord you wouldn’t want to have an argument with about chucking out time.

Many of them, like Reg and Stirling, went on to serve or lead forces in various parts of the British Empire, against communists, insurgents and nationalist forces, but that is another, and morally far more complicated story.

Within the context of this book and this war these men really were amazing heroes, models of unbelievable bravery and daring. And this book is an outstanding tribute to them.

Unexpected comedy

Macintyre has some nice comic timing and phrasing. Stories which made me laugh include the Churchill faked request form, plus:

1) When Dr Malcolm Pleydell was assigned as medical officer to the group, he expected to find a bunch of cold-eyed killers. Instead Stirling showed him round the camp like the host of a village garden party, explaining that the distant bangs were because some of the group were about to go out ‘on a party’ i.e. attacks on coastal defences, and were just practicing the explosives.

Pleydell had been expecting a man of blood and steel, a ruthless trained killer; instead he was made to feel as if he had just joined a particularly jolly beachfront house party, with bombs. (p.113)

2) Of the storming of Italian defences on Sicily, Macintyre writes:

A Cambridge graduate and former spectacles salesman, [Johnny] Wideman lost his false teeth but won a Military Cross that day. (p.197)

3) A lot later, in August 1944 in occupied France, Henry Druce was leading a group of SAS hooked up with a large party of French Resistance (which in fact included renegade Russian soldiers). The Resistance was generally referred to as the maquis, referencing the tough scrubland found in the south of France which made for good hiding places. The problem with the maquis was their lack of discipline, their poor training, and their fierce internal squabbles. Anyway, they light flares for an RAF drop of ammunition and food but, with typical indiscipline, members of the maquis rip the canisters of supplies open before Druce and the Brits can gather and guard them. Some of the French, starved from long months in hiding, ripped open the provisions in the canisters and started gorging themselves.

‘One Frenchman died of over-eating,’ Druce recorded. Another of the maquis extracted what he took to be a hunk of soft cheese from one of the containers and devoured it only to discover that it was plastic explosive, which contains arsenic. He then ‘died noisily’. (p.265)

4) At the end of 1944, operating in north Italy, SAS forces are joined by Captain Bob Walker-Brown, the son of a Scottish surgeon who had joined the SAS after tunnelling out of an Italian POW camp, crawling through the main sewer then walking to Allied lines.

He had an enormous moustache, a bluff sense of humour, an upper-class accent so fruity that the men barely understood his commands, and a habit of saying ‘what what’ after every sentence, thus earning himself the nickname ‘Captain What What’. (p.279)

So there is, throughout the book, a thread of very English humour, Macintyre entering into the spirit of self-deprecating humour and understatement evinced by so many of these soldiers, both at the time and in later memoirs and interviews.

A non-British account?

Once the SAS started working alongside the Americans, after D-Day, I began to wonder what the Yanks made of the determinedly upper-class, stiff-upper-lip, committed but often ramshackle and amateurish shenanigans of the Brits described in this book.

Most of the books about the SAS and its leading figures are written by Brits who share their private school and Oxbridge background (Macintyre attended a private school, then Cambridge) and so buy into their values, assumptions and banter – so they tend to be eulogies which draw you into that world.

I wonder if an account exists written by a complete outsider, say an American, which doesn’t buy into the self-reinforcing mythology surrounding this group, and gives a more objective and possibly critical account of their actual military achievement?

Credit

SAS: Rogue Heroes by Ben Macintyre was published by Viking in 2016. References are to the 2022 TV tie-in Penguin paperback edition.

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Writing In A War edited by Ronald Blythe (1982)

This is a good, chunky selection of British writing from the Second World War, poems and stories and essays either written and published during the actual conflict or memoirs of wartime experiences published a little later. It consists of 400 densely-printed pages in the Penguin paperback, and features work from some 56 authors: 18 prose writers and 37 poets.

Poets (37)

Dylan Thomas, Edith Sitwell, Henry Reed, Edith Scovell, Henry Treece, Herbert Cory, C. Day-Lewis, Terence Tiller, George Barker, John Pudney, Charles Causley, Roy Fuller, Roy Campbell, Alun Lewis, W.J. Turner, W.R. Rodgers, Sidney Keyes, Mervyn Peake, Robert Graves, Rayner Heppenstall, Keith Douglas, R.N. Currey, Alan Rook, Fancis Scarfe, Timothy Corsellis, Kathleen Raine, F.T. Prince, Louis MacNeice, W.H. Auden, William Empson, Stevie Smith, Vernon Watkins, David Gascoyne, Paul Dehn, T.S. Eliot, G.S. Fraser, Stephen Spender, W.J. Turner.

Short stories (9)

Elizabeth Bowen, William Sansom, William Chappell, Fred Urquhart, James Hanley, J. Maclaren-Ross, V.S. Pritchett, Glyn Jones, Elizabeth Berridge.

Factual memoirs/reportage (5)

  • Bryher – recalls her impressions of Blitz London upon her return to it from Switzerland
  • John Sommerfield – description of his squadron travelling through North-East India to the front line against the Japs in Burma
  • Richard Hillary – description of learning to fly a spitfire
  • Keith Douglas – how he disobeyed orders to rejoin his tank regiment in the desert west of Cairo
  • Denton Welch – a very home front story of being taken to meet the eccentric painter Walter Sickert

Essays (3)

By George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, Virginia Woolf.

Structure

The pieces are divided into seven themed sections, being:

  • The City
  • The Sky
  • The Sea
  • Declarations
  • The Patient Khaki Beast (i.e the soldier)
  • Confessions and Conclusions
  • The Dark

Introduction

In his introduction the book’s editor, Ronald Blythe, explains that the 1930s was the decade of grand declarations, literary cliques and widespread left-wing or even communist confidence that the British establishment was about to be swept away in a wonderfully liberating revolution (traits I noted in my review of Robin Skelton’s Poetry of the Thirties).

The Spanish Civil War

However, a great deal of that fervour to change the world drained away during the three gruelling, disillusioning years of the Spanish Civil War (see my review of the Penguin Book of Spanish Civil War Verse) in which several of the youngest, keenest English poets were killed and those who survived were thoroughly disillusioned, above all by the revelation of Stalin’s willingness to betray the revolutionary cause in order to further Russia’s national agenda.

(Stalin didn’t want there to be a successful communist revolution in Spain because he thought it would alarm and alienate the governments of France and Britain, which he needed to keep sweet as potential allies against the obviously growing threat from Nazi Germany. Therefore Stalin did not want there to be a successful revolution in Spain. It took British communist volunteers in Spain a long time to grasp the Realpolitik of the situation and when it did, disillusion was total.)

And then the outbreak of the Second World War happened so quickly. The nationalist leader General Franco declared the Spanish Civil War over on 1 April 1939. The Nazi-Soviet Pact was signed four and a half months later, on 23 August 1939, and one week later, on 1 September, Hitler invaded Poland.

The people of Europe, and their writers, artists and intellectuals, were thrown into six long years of chaos, bloodshed and holocaust. The world had never before seen destruction and mass murder on such a scale.

Retreat to the personal

Against this background of political disillusion (on the Left), a widespread feeling that the entire political class had let them down, and the universal sense of forces too vast to comprehend tearing the world apart, the writers who flourished during the Second World War retreated back to the personal.

If there was a common theme found across many of the writers during the Second World War, it was the notion that the entire world was being darkened by vast totalitarian movements devoted to wiping out the personal life, to exterminating the individual. Therefore, the greatest protest against the forces of darkness was to assert the importance of individual thoughts and feelings. As so often, W.H. Auden managed to summarise the mood perfectly in his famous poem, September 1 1939.

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

But Auden had left Britain for America in January 1939, and so was hors du combat. The writers left in Blighty, men and women, either too old to serve or conscripted into the forces, all had to find their own ways of expressing themselves and showing their affirming flames.

So what you have in this book is a wide range of personal reactions to the disaster the world found itself in, writings which are hard to generalise about because they are often so distinctive, not to say idiosyncratic: from the obliquely poetic short story of Elizabeth Bowen, to the intensely religious verse of Edith Sitwell, from the brisk no-nonsense memoir of Bryher to the visionary description of a torpedoed ship going down by James Hanley, from John Sommerfield’s larky description of a long journey by train, paddleboat, train and lorry to the front line in Burma to William Sansom’s brilliant accounts of being a firefighter in Blitzed London, the collection is characterised by its variety of location and event and style.

The collection itself is obviously divided into two distinct forms, verse and prose, with prose further sub-divided into fiction and factual.

Poetry

Having lived through the experimental Modernism and free verse of the 1920s, and the reversion to much more traditional forms with regular stanzas and regular rhyme schemes of the 1930s, poets of the 1940s felt free to pick and choose from either approach as suited their purpose.

So there’s quite a variety of verse forms, but I think I’m right in saying not much of it feels new. Not formally. But in terms of content, there is much that feels new, and I think can be divided into two broad categories, the realistic and the fantastical.

The New Apocalypse and Neo-Romanticism

The war saw an intensification of an aesthetic strand which had existed throughout the 1930s, an interest in the English countryside reimagined as a place of spirits and gods and paganism and Christianity interpreted in its wildest, most apocalyptic shapes. This trend had overlapped with some of the spirit of 1930s Surrealism and had been a reaction against the lucid, rational and political concerns of the dominant school of Thirties poetry.

In the fateful year, 1939, the best writings from this tradition were brought together in a volume titled The New Apocalypse with the result that a ‘movement’ of sorts was named after the book. To quote Wikipedia:

The New Apocalypse (1939)… was edited by J. F. Hendry (1912 to 1986) and Henry Treece. There followed the further anthologies The White Horseman (1941) and Crown and Sickle (1944).

The New Apocalyptics reacted against the political and social realism of the 1930s with its loving descriptions of factories and arterial roads and motorcycles and electricity pylons, and the belief that human nature was rational and could be rationally appealed to by rational argument. The name itself referenced D. H. Lawrence’s posthumous collection, Apocalypse (1931) and the poets in this tradition turned their backs on the Modern World and plunging into a heady stew of surrealism, myth, and expressionism. And then, of course, the world war broke out and quickly outdid their wildest imaginings of destruction, extreme situations and death.

George Barker

In this volume the Apocalyptics are represented by poems by Henry Treece and George Barker. Blythe includes in his book a very useful 21-page section called ‘Notes on Contributors’ which gives potted biographies and select reading lists for all his authors, and spends half a page explaining Barker’s motivation: the preface to the Apocalypse volume spoke of ‘word explosions’, of their poetry’s ‘air of something desperately snatched from dream or woven around a chime of words, are the results of disintegration, not in ourselves, but in society…’ (G.S. Fraser, another founder member of the New Apocalyptics, quoted page 376).

But to be blunt, I dislike the examples of Barker’s poetry given here. If this is the best, I’m not impressed.

From Sacred Elegy by George Barker

From this window where the North Atlantic
Takes the crow in my mind home in a short line
Over the kissing fish in the wave, and the mine
Where the sailor clasps his death as mermaid like
Sex of a knife in the depth, from this window
Watching I see the farewelling seasons fall
Ever between us like rain. And the lachrymal
Memory, trailing its skirts, walks like a widow
Across those seas looking for home. O my Dido
Heart! Sail, sail the ships ever away from us all.

The phrasing and some of the obscurity which derives from it seems wilful. ‘Farewelling’ sounds like a schoolboy attempt to be interesting. The kissing fish in the wave seems pitifully inadequate to describe the Atlantic Ocean. The reference to Dido at the end kills it for me; falling back on classical references only highlights the main text’s weakness. Possibly, if you are predisposed to an anti-rational, pagan view of the world, this might ring your bell. But reading it in 2024, it felt strained and dated.

Henry Treece

Henry Treece is much more direct and therefore attractive:

From In The Beginning Was The Bird by Henry Treece

In the beginning was the bird,
A spume of feathers on the face of time,
Man’s model for destruction, God’s defence…

Though the third line is notably weaker than the first two (because over the top, grandiloquent, too much). And the word ‘spume’ instantly recalls W.B. Yeats’s much more powerful use of the same word in his wonderful poem Among Schoolchildren:

Plato thought nature but a spume that plays
Upon a ghostly paradigm of things;
Solider Aristotle played the taws
Upon the bottom of a king of kings…

Blythe’s note on Treece tells us that he went on to write an enormous number of books for children or young adults, often about the Dark Ages i.e. Arthur’s Britain, the Romans, the Vikings and so on. You can already feel that in this charming and simple poem.

Lincolnshire Bomber Station by Henry Treece

Across the road the homesick Romans made
The ground-mist thickens to a milky shroud;
Through flat, damp fields call sheep, mourning their dead
In cracked and timeless voices, unutterably sad,
Suffering for all the world, in Lincolnshire.

And I wonder how the Romans liked it here;
Flat fields, no sun, the muddy misty dawn,
And always, above all, the mad rain dripping down,
Rusting sword and helmet, wetting the feet
And soaking to the bone, down to the very heart . . .

It’s a big idea, which I don’t have the scholarship to verify, but I wonder whether the 1940s Neo-Romantic urge to write about the mysterious countryside, pagan beliefs, spirits and so on, after the war went into children’s fiction, went into all those novels about Roman Britain, by authors like Henry Treece or Rosemary Sutcliffe, which I read as a boy in the 1960s.

Dylan Thomas

Some critics tried to lump George Barker and Dylan Thomas together as founders or exponents of a broader literary movement called ‘Neo-Romanticism’. This label works better in the world of art and painting than in literature. In painting there was a definite turning away from the urban towards nostalgic, if highly stylised, sometimes nightmarish, depictions of the English countryside, but a countryside under stress, prey to visions and strange atmospheres. Not Constable’s England at all. (Neo-Romanticism in art.)

But although critics tried to rope him into these movement, Thomas wasn’t interested. Dylan Thomas was just 24 when the war broke out and Blythe amusingly tells us that he took it as a personal affront, a calculated attempt by the world to blunt his promising career. Nevertheless, he produced some fiery, clanging verse responses to the war. Blythe acutely points out that in several of his most famous wartime poems (Ceremony After A Fire Raid and A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London) Thomas ignores the statistics, the general headlines, and – as per Blythe’s thesis – zeroes in on the particular, in each case on one particular victim of the Blitz.

From A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London

Never until the mankind making
Bird beast and flower
Fathering and all humbling darkness
Tells with silence the last light breaking
And the still hour
Is come of the sea tumbling in harness

And I must enter again the round
Zion of the water bead
And the synagogue of the ear of corn
Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound
Or sow my salt seed
In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn

The majesty and burning of the child’s death…

Here is Thomas reading it himself:

This is in a different class from the Barker. Nobody could compete with these ringing declarations. Thomas seemed to have tapped deep into the wellspring of some pagan power, tapped ‘the force that through the green fuse drives the flower’.

Edith Sitwell

Thomas may be associated with New Romanticism but he is sui generis, one of a kind, his grandiloquent poetry buttressed by the amazingly sonorous power of his readings. But out in the same paddock as Barker and Thomas were the more brittle but just as apocalyptic visions of Edith Sitwell. As Blythe points out, Sitwell’s wartime verse had travelled a long way since ‘the rhyming tomfoolery’ of the 1920s and the best of it uses Christian imagery to achieve a genuine sense of tragedy.

From Still Falls the Rain (The Raids, 1940: Night and Dawn)

Still falls the Rain –
Dark as the world of man, black as our loss –
Blind as the nineteen hundred and forty nails upon the Cross.

Still falls the Rain
With a sound like the pulse of the heart that is changed to the hammer beat
In the Potter’s Field, and the sound of the impious feet

On the Tomb:
Still falls the Rain
In the Field of Blood where the small hopes breed and the human brain
Nurtures its greed, that worm with the brow of Cain.

Still falls the Rain
At the feet of the Starved Man hung upon the Cross,
Christ that each day, each night, nails there, have mercy on us…

Here she is reading it:

T.S. Eliot

The godfather of Modernist poetry was T.S. Eliot and the war saw him complete the epic undertaking of the Four Quartets, four long meditations on death and history and society, underpinned by his complex and sophisticated understanding of Christian faith. They are Burnt Norton (1936), East Coker (1940) The Dry Salvages (1941) and Little Gidding (1942).

These poems are unlike anything before or since in their complexity of structure and interlinking themes and images. To briefly summarise, each one is set in a specific rural location (hence the names) and then uses a physical description of this location and its historical associations to weave a complex web of ideas about time, history, reality and religion.

The Quartets are among the absolutely top masterpieces of twentieth century poetry in English and Blythe makes the super-sensible decision to quote the fourth and final one, Little Gidding, in its entirety. Here is the second part of section 2, a sustained homage to Eliot’s hero, Dante, in which he envisions himself walking through the glass-strewn streets of London after an air-raid and encountering a mysterious stranger, much as Dante walked through hell encountering strange figures in the flickering half-light of the underworld.

From Little Gidding by T.S. Eliot

In the uncertain hour before the morning
Near the ending of interminable night
At the recurrent end of the unending
After the dark dove with the flickering tongue
Had passed below the horizon of his homing
While the dead leaves still rattled on like tin
Over the asphalt where no other sound was
Between three districts whence the smoke arose
I met one walking, loitering and hurried
As if blown towards me like the metal leaves
Before the urban dawn wind unresisting…

Magnificent. Simple language, simple syntax, but a weird and brooding atmosphere leading up to the spooky final line…

Little Gidding online

Soldier poets

Away from the grandeurs of the London literary scene and its professional writers was the completely different category of soldiers, sailors and airman who wrote poetry and prose. The three most famous British soldier-poets of the Second World War are Keith Douglas (1920 to 1944), Alun Lewis (1915 to 1944) and Sidney Keyes (1922 to 1943). See how young they all died (24, 29, 21).

I have to say straight away that my favourite poet of the Second World War is Keith Douglas. It might not be a totally true generalisation, but it seems, working through this selection, that the further away you were from the fighting, the more gorgeous, visionary and surreal your writing became (Sitwell, Raine, Barker, Thomas), whereas the closer you were to the fighting, the more precise, detailed (and sometimes banal and everyday) the writing became, as soldiers, sailors and airman tried to nail down precisely what it felt like – to fly a Spitfire (Richard Hillary), to be aboard a torpedoed ship (James Henley), to be stuck in an infantry camp behind the lines during long hours of rainy boredom (Alun Lewis).

In this respect – in terms of clear, convincing description of what it’s like – Richard Hillary’s prose memoir of training as a Spitfire pilot, and Keith Douglas’s memoir of the war in the desert leading up to the Battle of El Alamein, are the standout pieces.

But it is striking that Douglas is the only author featured in this selection as both a poet and a prose writer. Something about his mentalité made him write memorably in both forms. For me, it’s his precision, his ability to get to the point. This doesn’t mean his poetry is prosey. It is as full of metaphor and vision as much other poetry. It’s just that the metaphor and imagery are subsumed, in his best poems, into a kind of laser-like accuracy.

From How to Kill by Keith Douglas

Under the parabola of a ball,
a child turning into a man,
I looked into the air too long.
The ball fell in my hand, it sang
in the closed fist: Open Open
Behold a gift designed to kill.

Now in my dial of glass appears
the soldier who is going to die.
He smiles, and moves about in ways
his mother knows, habits of his.
The wires touch his face: I cry
NOW. Death, like a familiar, hears

and look, has made a man of dust
of a man of flesh. This sorcery
I do. Being damned, I am amused
to see the centre of love diffused
and the wave of love travel into vacancy.
How easy it is to make a ghost…

There’s plenty of simile, rhetoric and artifice about this but somehow it also has a shining clarity. It certainly lacks any sentiment or bullshit, just what it feels like to aim and shoot another human being.

It’s assisted by the preciseness of the half rhyme (also known as ‘imperfect rhyme’, ‘slant rhyme’, ‘near rhyme’ or ‘oblique rhyme’). Thus ball/kill; man/-pen; long/sang. As you read or hear it you sense that there’s a formal structure, a half-rhyme scheme, and yet the absence of exact rhymes prevents it from being predictable, makes it much closer to speech, like the speech of a man talking to you.

Of course it isn’t, and in fact lines like ‘This sorcery/I do’ has an Elizabethan feel to the syntactical reversal of the ordinary everyday phrase (‘I do this sorcery’) and the vocabulary likewise.

The subtle half rhymes, the use of unexpected sentence structures, the ultra-modern subject matter and yet the knowing echoes of much older verse (are there echoes of Dr Faustus in ‘Being damned, I am amused’?) makes for an utterly brilliant read, rich in resonances and enjoyments.

Prose descriptions

Prose is more suited to descriptions of action. Thus two of the most vivid pieces are heart-in-the-mouth descriptions and/or stories of being a fireman during the Blitz by William Sansom. In both you are really right there as the vast flaming wall of a warehouse shivers and then topples towards him and his firefighting crew.

I liked John Sommerfield’s description of being part of a squadron which has to undertake an epic journey across North-East India by train and paddleboat and train again to get to the ravaged frontline with the Japanese in Burma.

What a lot of writers from the period share is a tremendous clarity of style and thought. Thus Richard Hillary comes across as very self-absorbed but he describes with wonderful clarity the experience of flying a Spitfire. Keith Douglas conveys with similar clarity the experience of being a tank commander in the excerpt from his memoir of war in the desert, Alamein to Zem Zem.

The memoir of London during the Blitz written by Bryher (pen-name of Annie Winifred Ellerman) is snobbish and self-serving (she keeps on about how she warned everyone about the Nazis since 1933 but would they listen? No, the fools) but also displays great clarity of description in her encounters with shop assistants or soldiers during the Blitz.

Essays

George Orwell

Rather as T.S. Eliot towers over the poets by virtue of the depth and breadth of his vision, in respect of clarity of thinking and prose style George Orwell towers over all the other prose writers. His essay in defence of P.G. Wodehouse (who foolishly and naively made a handful of radio broadcasts for the Nazis in 1940) is a masterpiece of clarity and honesty, and insights.

Orwell makes it clear he’s got hold of as many of Wodehouse’s writings as possible as well as the transcripts of his German broadcasts, and tried to clarify the events surrounding them i.e. he has done as much homework as possible. And then he proceeds to make a convincing case, based on the arguments that:

  • Wodehouse had no idea how his broadcasts would be interpreted
  • he had absolutely no political sense
  • he had been interned by the Germans for a year and so had missed the intensification of the conflict during 1940
  • that the fuss being kicked up about him was really a ruse by the media-owning classes (e.g. Lord Rothermere, owner of the Daily Mail) to distract attention away from their own much more seriously pro-Hitler, appeasement attitudes

But it’s not only the clarity of the argument but the many insights it throws up along the way which make it still such an interesting read. For example, Orwell shows how both American and German critics in different ways had completely misunderstood Wodehouse. They thought he was a merciless satirist of the English upper classes. Orwell shows how Wodehouse was a dyed-in-the-wool, public school member of those classes and that all his tomfoolery comes from inside the worldview and is full, ultimately, of love and respect for it.

Arthur Koestler

I’ve reviewed Koestler’s two most famous books, the novels Darkness at Noon (1940) and Arrival and Departure (1943). They contain much vivid detail but are a bit ‘muddy’ in their thinking by which I mean the logic of the arguments, specially in Darkness, are harder to remember than the plight of the central character (an old Russian Bolshevik in prison having been arrested as part of Stalin’s purges).

The Koestler piece here is his short essay The Yogi and the Commissar (1945) which gave its title to a collection of essays published at the end of the war. It goes some way to explaining why Koestler turned into such an old bore, publishing some 25 volumes of essays and explorations in the coming decades and becoming steadily more irrelevant.

Koestler proposes a ‘spectrum of philosophies’ which stretch from ‘the Commissar’ at the materialist, scientific end of the spectrum to ‘the Yogi’ at the spiritual, metaphysical end. The Commissar wants to change the individual from outside, the Yogi wants to change the individual from within. This is precisely the kind of clever-sounding intellectual conceit which has bugger-all relevance to the real world and gives rise to a surprising amount of high-sounding verbiage in such a short space. It sounds fine but everything it deals with – Fascism, Communism, Democracy, Art, Science – it does so in a shallow, superficial way. I found it unreadable and consider it the only actively bad piece in the book.

Short stories

Elizabeth Bowen

Broadly speaking, the closer they stick to the subject, the more effective the prose works tends to be. Not always, though. The selection kicks off, not with any scene of battle, but with a ghostly and evocative description of a young couple walking round London in the Blackout after a bombing raid has departed. The young woman explains to her soldier boyfriend that she makes sense of it all, the Blitz, the chaos, by imagining the city is the fantasy city of Kôr, mentioned in Henry Rider Haggard’s adventure novel, She.

After this arrestingly atmospheric opening scene the story shifts to the domestic embarrassment of the young lady having to take her boyfriend back to the poky, cramped flat she shares with a girlfriend, and everyone’s general embarrassment and inconvenience. Yet the story is full of sly insights and perceptions just on the edge of consciousness, a subtle poetry of the periphery.

At half past ten, in obedience to the rule of the house, Callie was obliged to turn off the wireless, whereupon silence out of the stepless street began seeping into the silent room.

It took me a moment to realise that ‘stepless’ means empty of people and therefore with no sounds of stepping, of people walking. It’s a tasty sentence and the story is full of just such odd obliquities. It made me want to read more Elizabeth Bowen.

Fred Urquhart

There are other striking experiments. Fred Urquhart (‘described by one critic as the foremost Scottish short story writer of the twentieth century’) is represented by a story about potato pickers in a part of deeply rural Scotland which I didn’t catch because I barely understood the intense dialect he has his characters talking in. It is a war story because it is set during the war and the tattie pickers observe planes flying overhead, which all leads up to the climax when a German bomber crashes and blows up a few miles away.

James Hanley

Far more experimental is James Hanley’s piece, Sailor’s Song, an account of a torpedoed ship going down and a handful of men surviving by clinging to a raft which ought to be grittily realistic but is actually done in the style of Walt Whitman, with both the Ship and the Sea singing, describing their song and the human characters referred to with a kind of Biblical anonymity.

Glyn Jones

A different tone is presented by Welsh short story writer Glyn Jones’s story, Bowan, Moragan and Williams, which is a larky portrait of a boy and his family and friends and friends’ families in a tight-knit Welsh community, where everyone is odd and eccentric. I particularly liked the friend’s relative who is so nervous of other people that he speaks in an increasingly shrill voice and jams the napkin ring into his eye socket as if it is a jeweller’s eyeglass. The war is peripheral to this gallery of likeable eccentrics.

Elizabeth Berridge

Not so the very short story by Elizabeth Berridge in which a woman’s flat in the city is burgled and smashed up (when she’s not there), but she’s been living for some time in a retirement home with a snug community of friends and, after going with the police to examine the wreckage, she enjoys embellishing the description on the train back to the retirement home, relishing the opportunity to make her friends’ flesh creep with this appalling example of society going to the dogs… Only to arrive at the home that night and discover it wildly on fire, having been bombed and all her friends killed. The starkness of the facts and the protagonist’s inability to process what has happened are beautifully captured.

Summary

Except for a handful of poems by the obvious gods – Auden, Eliot, Thomas, Douglas – the short stories are, on the whole, more varied and powerful than any of the poems. This last story by Berridge, stands symbol for the countless millions of people who, although physically unharmed, had their lives ruined and their minds scarred by the appalling, meaningless violence of war.

Credit

Writing In A War edited by Ronald Blythe was first published in 1966. References are to the revised 1982 Penguin paperback edition.

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The Last King of Scotland by Giles Foden (1998)

‘I should have known’, that is the phrase of my life, its summing up, its consummate acknowledgement.
(The narrator of The Last King of Scotland, Nicholas Garrigan, looking back over the sorry series of events depicted in the book, page 119)

Giles Foden

Giles Foden was born in 1967. When he was 5 his parents moved from Warwickshire to Malawi and he spent a lot of his early years in Africa, although he was sent back to Britain to be educated at public school (the very posh Malvern College) then Cambridge.

Foden has written six novels but is still best known for this one, his first novel, which won a clutch of prizes (the Whitbread First Novel Award, a Somerset Maugham Award, a Betty Trask Award and the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize). It gained a significantly greater prominence when it was made into a powerful movie, in 2006, starring Forest Whitaker and James McAvoy, himself just about to be propelled to superstar status in the X-Men movies.

The Last King: premise

The premise of the novel is simple: it’s a first-person narrative told by young Scottish doctor, Nicholas Garrigan, who goes to Uganda in 1971 on secondment from the British government’s Overseas Development Agency, to see something of the world and, through a chance encounter, is selected by the country’s new military dictator, Idi Amin, to become his personal physician.

Over the next 200 pages Garrigan witnesses Amin’s descent into psychopathic dictatorship, the ethnic killings, the arrests and tortures, mysterious disappearances, the expulsion of Uganda’s Asian community, the humiliation of the white community, the rising body count – he witnesses much of this in person, up close and personal, yet fails to intervene, at various key moments, to save friends and colleagues from horrendous fates, becoming more and more morally compromised and implicated in the process.

The reader accompanies Garrigan as he is dragged deeper into an inferno of violence, cruelty, torture, murder and terror until the narrative feels like it’s inhabiting a different kind of reality, one of endless melodrama and horror, war, destruction, evisceration, terrorism, random killings. The narrative turns into a gruelling nightmare.

It’s a solid book at 345 pages but I found it easy and pleasurable to read (at least to begin with) because of the narrative voice Foden creates. Garrigan’s narrative has a relaxed candid manner conveying an appealingly easygoing but observant, slangy but perceptive worldview. Basically, it’s enjoyable being in his company for a couple of days. (Compare and contrast with H.E. Bates’s classic ‘Fair Stood The Wind for France’ which I just finished reading and found a metallic, alienating, cold and heartless ordeal. By contrast, Garrigan is fun, chill and interesting.) Here’s what I mean by casual tone and easy-to-read style:

On the way back, after we’d poured Ivor into his bungalow, Sara invited me in for a whisky. Her place was even more sparsely furnished than mine: not much more than a desk, a chair and a sofa. And a bed, I supposed, though I didn’t get to see that. (p.100)

Apart from ‘sparsely’ it’s pretty much how someone would speak. Sometimes Garrigan’s tone can be consciously entertaining:

She turned a knob and a wave of white noise came out. On top of it or behind it, or wherever things happen in radio world, was an eerie electronic neighing, going up and down jaggedly, and a deep squelchy voice choppily declaiming in a foreign language some repetitive sounding set of orders or other permutation of words and numbers. Altogether, it was as if the football results were being read by one of the prophets. In a snowstorm. On a runaway horse. (p.101)

One of the ways the book challenges the reader is the way this easygoing attitude and approach, which we are encouraged to identify with from the beginning, turns out to be hopelessly inadequate for coping with the increasingly fraught situations Garrigan finds himself in.

Part 1

The narrative starts with a frame. Garrigan explains that he is back in Scotland, safe and sound, looking back over his mad time in Uganda as physician to Idi Amin and is determined to write a history of this period of ‘blood, misery and foolishness’ despite the fact that he seems to be the subject of scandal and criticism, for he tells us the newspapers ‘continue to execrate me’ (p.19). What for? We don’t know, it’s a teaser for what will emerge in the main narrative.

Very briefly Garrigan describes his boyhood and upbringing in the Scottish suburb of Fossiemuir, West Fife, his years as a student doctor. His father, George (p.41) was a stern presbyterian minister: ‘religion covered our family like a fine soot’ (p.19). But after just a few pages we’re on to him graduating as a doctor, to escape his parochial background and see the world, taking the civil service exam.

The narrative slows down to give more detail about his flight to Kampala, meeting the Embassy people (Nigel Stone and the eccentric Major Weir, intelligence officer, who builds model helicopters). He stays at the rundown Speke Hotel while he gets used to the heat, the street life, the food. Meets fellow guest Freddy Swanepoel.

He is posted to assist a Dr Alan Merritt at his hospital in the West Ugandan town of Mbarara. He takes an overcrowded minibus or matatu there, helped and advised by friendly local Boniface ‘Bonny’ Malumba (p.49). Soldiers stop the bus at a makeshift roadblock to demand bribes. When a Kenyan diplomat refuses to pay, the soldiers smash him in the face with a gun. After they’ve gotten off Nicholas goes to help him and is surprised when the Kenyan is very angry, saying ‘where were you when I needed you to stand up for me?’ (p.153) Why does this passage exist? Is it intended to be an early indicator of Nicholas’s cowardice or, to be more fair and accurate, his not knowing what to do in confrontation situations?

So he arrives at Mbarara, some kids guide him out to the medical compound, and we are introduced to Dr Merrit, his tutting wife Joyce (who calls her husband ‘Spiny’) and the servant Nestor. More importantly to the sprawling ‘hospital’ with its primitive facilities. Garrigan gives us an overview of the kinds of patients and diseases they’re called on to treat, which is very interesting (machete wounds, elephantiasis, vaginal fistulas in women caused by giving birth at home in primitive conditions, malaria etc pages 74 to 77).

Earlier Garrigan told us he arrived in Uganda on Sunday 24 January 1971 (p.21). The precise date is important because Amin carried out his military coup, overthrowing the government of President Milton Obote, the very next day, on 25 January 1971.

Why did Amin overthrow Obote? Because he learned that Obote was planning to arrest him for misappropriating army funds and, more generally, threatened the army’s lucrative corruption. In the words of Wikipedia:

The 1971 coup is often cited as an example of ‘class action by the military’, wherein the Uganda Army acted against ‘an increasingly socialist regime whose egalitarian domestic politics posed more and more of a threat to the military’s economic privileges.’

Of course none of this is clear to any of the characters because it’s only just happened, although Dr Merritt gives Harrigan the view of a jaundiced old hand:

‘It’s very simple. This place – chaos, you just have to expect the worst. You think it’s a matter of it having to get worse for it to get better, but actually it just gets worse and worse. Take this new business with Amin. I hear they’re all happy as sandboys right now up in Kampala, but it’ll end in tears, I promise you.’ (p.60)

This little remark obviously plants a seed of expectation of the horrors that will come later. Prolepsis or the anticipation of something that comes later in a story.

Garrigan is introduced to Sara Zach, on secondment from a hospital in Israel, to two Cuban surgeons, and to a ravaged Englishman, Ivor Seabrook, with the ‘destroyed features of the long-term tropical alcoholic’ (p.71) and closet homosexual who seduces the various serving boys. He is taken on field trips by Merritt’s assistant, William Waziri, vaccination and anti-mosquito spraying (pages 79 to 80) on one occasion being stopped at another army roadblock by drunk soldiers demanding a bribe (p.81). Africa.

Altogether this first hundred pages or so give a vivid, fascinating and totally believable picture of an outback medical practice in rural Uganda, packed with fascinating details? How on earth did Foden find out all this stuff?

The new president, Idi Amin, comes to Mbarara to make a speech to an excited crowd. Garrigan records his incoherent thoughts about God, the crowd lap it up, Sara makes notes and hustles them off, scared of being attacked because they’re white.

Cut to a year later, so must be 1972, and he mentions June as the month, when he’s getting used to conditions and has, rather inevitably, started an affair with the tough, no-nonsense, attractive Israeli doctor, Sara, descriptions of picnics in the foothills of the Ruwenzoris mountain range, making love, spotting exotic flowers and birds.

There’s an attack on the barracks in town. The doctors learn that troops were sent from the north and massacred all the Langi and Acholi soldiers, supposedly because they’re from a different tribe than Amin (p.106). Some Americans came snooping round, supposedly journalists, and are themselves killed and buried.

A few months later there’s a mortar attack on the barracks which misses and kills a lot of civilians. Merritt and Sara tend to them. Garrigan’s friend Bonny, and his mother and father, are among the dead.

Garrigan and Sara take in Bonny’s kid brother, Gugu, but he is mute and never speaks again. Eventually his extended family come to collect him. His relationship with Sara breaks down: Garrigan is prone to psychoanalysing everything and comes to realise he and Sara liked having Gugu with them because it created a family feel, gave them both security. With Gugu gone Sara moved back to her own bungalow. The radio reports weirder and weirder speeches by Amin.

Garrigan describes Operation Mafuta Mingi, the name Amin gives to his campaign to intimidate and eventually expel the entire Asian population of Uganda, around 50,000 people. Garrigan watches them being rounded up, their belongings impounded, bullied by soldiers, then driven to the airport deprived of all their belongings.

He records the effects of the expulsion: shops closed because many of them operated on lines of credit from India which terminated overnight. Basic items like salt, matches, sugar or soap became scarce. The army slaughtered a dairy herd for beef and so milk disappeared. This happened in August 1972. Sara had been increasingly distant and one day in October she simply leaves, without telling anyone (p.119). It’s because Amin had also been making speeches attacking the Israelis in Uganda, mostly working on development projects, about 600 of them and so, overnight, they left.

A few weeks later Garrigan has his first personal contact with Amin, being fetched by soldiers because the great leader had driven his Maserati into a cow and sprained his wrist. Garrigan is bowled over by his primeval physical presence. Amin has a soldier pour them brandy which, on the hot day, makes Garrigan light-headed.

And so it is that a letter arrives from health minister Wasswa requesting that Garrigan becomes Amin’s private physician. By this time he’s fed up of the Mbarara hospital which reminds him of the sad affair with Sara so he’s happy to go.

Ominousness

As it progresses the text drops references to Garrigan’s current position, contrasting the time of writing (now) with the events he’s writing about (then) and emphasising how something has made him re-evaluate everything. The technique adds an air of ominousness, the sense that something dreadful happened in the interim:

  • I realise now that… (p.116)
  • Or so I thought back then… (p.118)
  • Bewildered in Uganda, and not for the last time… (p.128)
  • Looking back, it seems crazy… (p.144)

Part 2 (p.131)

Part 2 opens with a recap of Amin’s birth, boyhood, young manhood, rise in the colonial army, rise in the post-independence army of President Obote, his involvement in smuggling from Congo, his overthrow of Obote in January 1971.

The strange thing about this section is that it seems to be told in a completely different narrative voice from part one. It is mannered and strange in a style so different from the laid-back casualness of part one that I thought it must signal the arrival of a completely new narrator.

I have been able to find out little of the history by which Amin is come to us. After all, who knows where any of us is come from, who could go to the cause?

This unusual phrasing, and the present tense, persist throughout this chapter (chapter 16), throwing me completely off-kilter, wondering if it was a different person talking, or a different type of text, like maybe the transcript of a recording. But no, chapter 17 returns to the normal voice of Garrigan, now installed in Kampala as Idi Amin’s personal physician and with very little to do. Odd.

Anyway, back in the narrative, every encounter with Amin is hair-raising. He is a big man, he dominates his courtiers who laugh with him, applaud his every word, out of obvious terror. He is painted as deeply stupid and illiterate but loving the sound of his own voice, capable of speaking at great length.

For it is true, also, out of my nature, I love to rule! (p.148)

Garrigan is mesmerised and hypnotised by Amin, like the rest of his retinue. The narrative continues to emphasise Garrigan’s gaucheness and insecurity – worry about what he looks like, what he says, how others perceive him, rising to stammering terror when faced with Amin. He is, after all, only a few years out of university. The book is a study in callowness.

After the weird opening chapter part 2 settles down into a series of brilliantly imagined scenes: Amin phones Garrigan to tell him his son is ill, come over immediately; Garrigan hurries over to discover the boy has put a piece of Lego up his nose, pulls it out and anti-bacs the nose (p.153). The wife is delighted and Amin sends him a Toyota van as reward (admittedly, still painted with the logo of the Asian fashion shop it was confiscated from).

As doctor to the Prez, Garrigan is now living in a bungalow in the State House compound, near Entebbe, a suburb of Kampala. He attends to Amin at the so-called ‘Command Post’, in fact a large suburban villa, or Nakasero Lodge where he spent most of his time (p.155), then at Cape Town, a property on Lake Victoria he awarded himself (p.165).

Garrigan works at the city’s main hospital, Mulago, filling us in on the kinds of patients you get in a big city compared to the countryside (car accidents), working alongside a fellow Scot, senior surgeon Colin Paterson, makes friends with a local surgeon, Peter Mbalu-Mukasa (p.157). The hospital is big enough to have foreign teams, from China, Algeria, Vietnam, Russia, and to be carrying out serious medical research. How did Foden get to know so much about tropical medicine? And not just knowledge but a feel for all the spin-offs and insights of doctoring:

Hospitals are like people, they grow, they develop, they learn. And they decay too, and die. (p.163)

He and Mbalu-Mukasa cruise the bars of Kampala and bump into the meaty, dodgy South African Freddy Swanepoel, Garrigan permanently afraid that Swanepoel’s outspokenness about the regime will get him into trouble.

Right from the start Amin had a bonkers fondness for Scotland, having spent some of his military training in Britain there, but it becomes ever more surreal, him outfitting regiments in kilts and making them learn the bagpipes; making booming speeches about how the Scots were like the Ugandans in having suffered from English imperialism. Now Amin invites Paterson and Garrigan for tea and tells them he is going to punish the English community in Uganda for its imperialism. As a local had told him back in Mbarara, ‘First wahindi, then muzungu’ (p.172). He forces some Brits to carry him in a litter through the streets, others to kneel and take an oath of fealty.

Stone, from the Embassy, invites Garrigan for a chat and works the conversation round to asking Garrigan to take advantage of his position to administer Amin with calmatives, tranquilisers, to try and bring him to his senses.

Merritt, his boss at the Mbarara hospital is kicked out, visits Garrigan on the way, says he if he’d stayed at the hospital it might have saved it. He is not the last to blame Garrigan for cowardice or failing to do the right thing.

In another demonstration of his gaucheness Garrigan takes Marina Perkins, wife of the British Ambassador, Robert Perkins, who he’s been chatting up at the swimming pool, on a fishing trip. All goes well till he makes a move to kiss her at which she is shocked and horrified, sits bolt upright and insists he take her home (p.177). He has completely misjudged the situation.

The famous scene (well, a centrepiece of the movie) in which Garrigan is summoned at night to Amin in his bedroom (carefully described) because he is in great stomach pain which, after extensive examination, Garrigan determines to be wind, and helps Amin into a position where he can release a great fart, thus relieving the pain, and overjoying the dictator.

Amin takes Garrigan into his confidence and talks about the burdens of office. He makes a feeble attempt to ask Amin to stop the army killing people which Amin swats aside.

Brief review: he tells us he was in Uganda for eight years in all, two in Mbarara, six in Kampala (p.191). A general overview in which he describes their many meetings, tea and conversation, naively thinking he’s getting to know him. The narrative begins to feel like summaries of a series of episodes:

There’s an attempt to assassinate Amin at an army review, which fails but kills the driver of his jeep. (In fact Amin survived eight attempted coups.)

In 1972 Amin gets married, to wife number four, and the text gives a detailed description of the ceremony and pen portraits of the previous three (chapter 24).

Amin phones Garrigan at all times for confidential chats and to let off steam. In public press conferences he announces he is training to be an astronaut. Also that he is assembling a pan-African army to attack South Africa. An excuse to quote (presumably actual) press meetings and outrageous quotes.

Amin sends inappropriate letters to world leaders, for example Mrs Thatcher on her election as leader of the Conservative Party (February 1975). He publicly states that Hitler had the right idea about the Jews. he did a deal with Colonel Gaddafi and Libyan businesses and soldiers become seen on the streets of Kampala. A lot later, after he’s escaped, in the novel’s aftertime, his sister Moira asks him why he stayed on so long, and let himself be portrayed as being close to such a lunatic. Garrigan can barely understand it himself. He was hypnotised. He’d fallen under Amin’s spell. He knew he was a monster but sometimes thought he loved him. Psychology of a dictator’s minions.

The closer I got to him, the fewer my illusions about him – and still I stayed, more fascinated than frightened. (p.213) (cf his ‘reluctance to get the hell out of there,’ p.222)

One stormy night his friend from the Kampala hospital, Peter Mbalu-Mukasa, turns up. Tells him he’s been having an affair with Amin’s second wife, Kay, and has got her pregnant. Since Amin hasn’t been having sex with her, he’ll know she’s been unfaithful and murder her and any lover he can track down. The man is understandably terrified and asks Garrigan if he can perform an illegal abortion on Kay. Garrigan lets himself be driven to Mbalu-Mukasa’s apartment, encounters the terrified moaning woman, but realises he can’t do it. Not only is he also terrified of being discovered, but he’s never actually performed an abortion and will likely make a mess of it. With all kinds of excuses, he refuses, backs out, and makes his way home.

It’s the last time he sees either. Rumour had it that Mbalu-Mukasa botched the abortion, Kay died of blood loss, and Mbalu-Mukasa committed suicide (August 1974). Worse, Garrigan was invited by the mortuary assistant who shows him Kay’s body and how all four limbs and the head had been detached from it, then clumsily sown back on.

In a bar Garrigan is appalled to see fat oafish Freddy Swanepoel putting his paw on the knee of the trim woman who rejected him, Marina. Chagrin. Worse, at their next meeting Amin tells him Nicholas knows all about his attempts to seduce Marina, about her affair with Swanepoel, and his poor opinion of the South African pilot, who he thinks is a spy.

Stone calls Garrigan back to the Embassy. He makes clear that the Ambassador is just a front man, it’s he, Stone, who pulls the strings. He shows Garrigan a series of photos of Amin taking part in executions and torture. Hundreds of people are dying every day. Stone accuses Garrigan of being complicit in this mass murder. Then he asks Garrigan to murder Amin. Use whatever is necessary, poison, adrenalin or inject air into his heart, whatever it takes. Garrigan refuses, a) because he’s a doctor but b) because, on some level, he likes the man:

There was, I conceded it to myself again, something in me that actually liked the man, monster though he was. (p.231)

To his amazement, Stone tells him the authorities have placed £50,000 in his bank account, with more to come when he achieves the murder. Garrigan turns him down. Next week Amin expels Stone, Perkins, the entire British Embassy.

Then Garrigan’s bungalow is burgled and his journal disappears, the one he’s been keeping notes in on all the events and all his opinions. He gets a midnight call from Amin to go see him immediately. Amin pulls a gun and terrifies a sweating Garrigan who grovels on the floor. Amin tells him that Weir, from the Embassy, told him about Stone’s request that Garrigan murder Amin! Then Amin summarises the contents of Garrigan’s journal and is disappointed at his lack of loyalty.

Then, in a scene which crosses the line from mundane reality into horror, Amin opens a secret door (in his bookshelves) and takes Garrigan deep into the cells and torture chambers which are just a short walk away, along dim concrete passages.

Here he is shown his colleague from the Mbarara days, William Waziri who used to take him on medical tours of local villages. He is pinned down, tied and gagged. Amin says he is associated with enemy guerrillas. Garrigan is forced to watch as soldiers press him to the floor, one stepping on his head, as they use a kitchen knife to saw open his throat, and Waziri’s eyes meet Garrigan’s as they do it.

Garrigan passes out and regains consciousness to discover he, also, is in a prison cell where he stays for a day, being insulted by the jailer who comes to deliver the disgusting food. Obviously all the worst thoughts in the world go through his mind, maybe he’ll be there forever, or be tortured or murdered. In fact, only a day later the door opens and the health minister, Wasswa, is there with clean clothes. He hustles Garrigan along the corridor, telling him he’s lucky to be alive. From the cells they pass along the corridor where prisoners shout at him to help them. Garrigan hesitates but Wasswa tells him there is nothing he can do. Along some more corridors and then through a concealed entrance and, bizarrely, back into Amin’s bedroom where the dictator is resplendent in an electric-blue safari suit and greets him like an old friend.

Amin tells Garrigan he has to renounce his British citizenship and become a Ugandan citizen. Then orders him to come back soon. Amin disapproves of Garrigan’s journal because it is informal and unofficial but approves the fact that he’s a writer. And so he orders Garrigan to come back so that Amin can dictate to him his Life and Achievements.

Next day Garrigan drives straight to the airport to discover Fate is against him. It is July 1976 and terrorists have hijacked a civil airliner and rerouted it to Libya, then Uganda.

Which is why Garrigan is an eye witness to the hostage crisis, and to the arrival of Amin at the airport where he congratulates himself on persuading the terrorists to release the non-Jewish hostages. The captain of the plane refuses to leave without the 40-something Jewish hostages who are being held in a separate room. There is an implied contrast between the professionalism and responsibility of this plane captain, and Garrigan’s shuffling out of all his responsibilities.

That night he is amazed to get a phone call from his Israeli lover Sara, the one who left without saying goodbye. She now reveals she’s a Colonel of the Israeli Defence Force and insists that he describes the layout of the airport at Entebbe, where the hostages are, how many terrorists are guarding them etc. She is obviously laying the groundwork for the famous Israeli raid which frees the hostages.

(The present: slowly we have been drip-fed details about where Garrigan is writing all this. We learn it is in the bothy (‘a basic shelter, usually left unlocked and available for anyone to use free of charge’) left to him by a great-uncle [Uncle Eamonn, p.336], on a remote Scottish island. It’s from the peace and quiet here, that he is looking back, and trying to patch together, these last horrific months. Pages 249, 256, 263, 266)

As the Ugandan economy collapses, conditions at the Mulago hospital collapse with it. Garrigan continues to work, he considers he has no alternative. One day, during one of their tape recording sessions, Amin gives him a package contained a stuffed mounted lion’s head to deliver to a small plane at Entebbe airport, to the chairman of Rafiki Aviation who will be waiting for it. Garrigan nervously does so, handing it over to this man who gets into a small plane piloted by Freddy Swanepoel, and off it flies. Garrigan later finds out that the plane exploded and crashed for unknown reasons. He’s pretty sure there was a bomb in the package he gave.

It’s only 6 months later that he plucks up the guts to ask Amin about the package. By now their recording sessions have become well established. Garrigan comes close to witnessing examples of Amin’s cannibalism (p.260). Once or twice he has opportunities to kill Amin, one in particular when he is in reach of his holster and pistol. Something always holds him back.

Garrigan has of course been thinking about fleeing the country for years but doesn’t see how he can, now that the airport is tightly watched. His plans are paralleled by Amin’s increasing rhetoric about war with neighbouring Tanzania.

The escape attempt

Garrigan finally packs his necessaries in the van and heads off for the southern border, hoping to cross south into Rwanda via some remote mountain road. Unfortunately he runs into an army checkpoint. When he begins reversing, an army Land Rover comes charging towards him. Mad with panic he drives back the way he came and then wildly off into a road through the jungle which comes to a dead end at a deserted cabin. He leaps out of his van but has no idea what to do till he sees the cabin is slightly raised and wriggles under it. From here he watches the Land Rover arrive, the soldiers inspect the empty cabin, loose off some gunfire, then drive off with the Land Rover and his van, leaving him stranded.

He’s just wondering what to do when a huge snake rears up and bites him in the calf. He stumbles into the jungle and passes out. He comes round in a native village where the villagers have been feeding him and nursing his wound. Lying sick and delirious in a native hut he reflects on the long series of decisions which have brought him, an uptight, callow Scotsman, a ‘casket of emotional defects and diffident, inward-turning passions’ to this catastrophic situation (p.275). When he’s recovered a man indicates that he should follow him along a jungle track.

Obviously Garrigan hopes this will come out at some highway where he can hitch a lift back to civilisation. Instead it’s a further step in the descent into barbarism. they come to a road alright, where there’s a huge pile of corpses, twenty feet high, many still showing the gunshot wounds that killed them.

Feeling like he’ll vomit, Garrigan goes blundering down the road and soon, to his amazement, realises he’s in the vicinity of Mbarara. He carries on to discover a great crowd of locals. Pushing through he sees soldiers beating a figure tied to a chair. Pushed towards the front of the crowd, Garrigan finds the soldier turning and swinging his rifle butt into Garrigan’s ribs. To his absolute horror he realises it’s Gugu, the orphan boy he and Sara took in all those years ago. Now he has become a sadistic boy soldier in Amin’s deadly army.

But even as the boy stands above him, gun pointing towards him, there’s an explosion, presumably from artillery fire, and he sees the boy blown backwards, his chest opening in a splurge of blood.

The Tanzanian invasion

This summary has gone on long enough already. Long story short, Garrigan is rescued by / comes into the custody of Colonel Armstrong Kuchasa of the Tanzanian Defence Forces. In response to a feeble mini invasion of their land by Amin, Tanzania has repulsed the Ugandans and is no only invading, but on a mission to overthrow Amin.

Garrigan is bundled into an armoured personnel carrier (APC) and accompanies the Tanzanian Army, seeing action, coming under fire, seeing soldiers killed around him, protected and fed by the Colonel once he’s understood that Garrigan is a trained doctor, who he gets to tend to his wounded.

So Garrigan accompanies the Tanzanian army all the way to Kampala and is eye witness to its capture (and to the vignette of the destruction of the Volkswagen fleeing from the Embassy quarter across a golf course, which was carrying Dr Gottfried Lessing, East German ambassador and husband of Doris Lessing.)

He is with Tanzanian soldiers when they enter and ransack Amin’s formal residences. He realises he won’t be safe in the streets and makes it across town to the Mulago Hospital. Here it is chaos with the surgeons giving emergency care to all-comers. The head of surgery, Dr Paterson, barely contains his anger at him: ‘How very nice of you to join us, Nick’ (p.299). He, like everyone else, simply thought Garrigan had run away with Amin. Once again he seems to have done utterly the wrong thing at the wrong time. He scrubs up and helps out.

Later, out in the streets he sees rioting followed by looting, alongside bizarre victory marches. He follows the flow of the crowd towards one of Amin’s residences at Nakasero.

Amin redux

The novel builds up to a really weird climax. Garrigan follows the local mob into Amin’s residence, noting how everything has been smashed and looted, following them up to Amin’s bedroom where all portables have been pinched and his big waterbed exploded. But nobody knows about or has opened the secret doorway in the bookcase. So Garrigan does.

And once again, as in a horror movie, relives the experience of walking down the dank concrete corridor. And then, just as in a horror movie, he sees Amin. Standing in one of the chambers which controlled the electricity supply to the torture instruments. Amin is addressing a surreal monologue to a severed head on a plate. Only as he moves around does Garrigan realise with horror that it is the severed head of the Archbishop of Uganda, the same diminutive churchman we met conducting Amin’s fourth marriage way back earlier in the text. The horror.

And then Amin addresses Garrigan. He’s seen him hiding. They have a bizarre dialogue, Amin as relaxed and confident as ever. Amin is made to implicate all the western countries who helped train his army, and train and equip his dreaded security police, the State Research Bureau (p.312).

Finally, unbelievably, Amin asks Garrigan a favour. Turns out that one of the maze of tunnels from his residences comes out at a landmark on the way to the airport. There he has a plane waiting for him. Could Garrigan go to the landmark and collect him and drive him to the airport? Amin comes and stands over him and Garrigan experiences a dizziness and a complexity of emotions which is like drugs or arousal or love – and agrees.

In the event it takes him so long in the general chaos to get hold of a vehicle that he gets to the landmark and waits and waits but Amin never appears. Eventually he drives on in the vague direction of the compound and his bungalow, passes a lake, stops, notices a number of boats moored at the quay, gets down into one, kickstarts the motor and heads off north, casual as that.

It takes 6 or 7 hours, chuntering away all night till he arrives at a quayside in Kenya and quickly makes himself known to the police.

In fact his travails are far from over as a curt Foreign Office official informs him that a) he no longer has British citizenship so might easily be turned away from Britain b) he is universally thought to have been one of Amin’s closest henchmen, so is very unpopular in the press c) he might be charged for murder for his part in planting an explosive device on that small plane that blew up.

Stone forces him to sign a document swearing to be silent about all activities of the British government in Uganda i.e. the offer of payment to murder Amin, but other things as well. In return for signing these non-disclosure agreements, Stone says he will be reassigned his British citizenship.

Lastly, Garrigan has to go through the ordeal of being interviewed by a handful of chosen journalists in a hotel at Heathrow under the supervision of a PR ‘handler’ named Ed Howarth, who is there to ensure the interviews are a one-off event and that Garrigan says nothing which will compromise the British government – an illuminating process for Garrigan and the reader.

Then he is free to go and catches a train north to Scotland, then travels by hire car, then ferry, over to this little island where…he has been holed up in the bothy writing this long account and trying to exorcise his demons.

At the very very end of the narrative the phone rings in the little cottage and…he hears Amin’s voice, friendly and coaxing as ever, tutting about his treatment in the papers and telling him how much he is enjoying his quiet retirement in Saudi Arabia. Is this real? Can this be happening? Will he never be able to escape from dreams and phantasms of the monster? Either way, Garrigan puts the phone down and that’s the end of the narrative.

Summary

Amazing

This is a mind-bogglingly brilliant achievement, an awesome historical novel which not only recreates life in Uganda and Kampala with superhuman accuracy and vividness, but is also a searing insight into the twisted mentality of a psychopathic dictator and, above all, into the psychology of an educated Westerner who lets himself be manipulated into becoming complicit and acquiescent in horrifying atrocities. A terrifying but profound novel which leaves you reverberating with horror for weeks afterward.

Zelig

The main criticism of the novel would be that at some stage, maybe from the incident of Kay’s botched abortion, Garrigan begins to feel like a Zelig character who keeps popping up at key moments during Amin’s career: the death of Kay, then the Entebbe hostage situation, and then the Tanzanian invasion, Garrigan increasingly happens to be at the right place at the right time, with mounting improbability.

I think credibility snaps when he finds himself on the receiving end of Gugu’s rifle butt. That’s just one coincidence too far. From that point onwards Garrigan becomes less like a character and more like a cipher with which to dramatise a checklist of incidents during the invasion. And that realisation feeds backwards, making you think the same about the Entebbe terrorist situation, and other incidents, too.

Maybe it sort of has to be like this – in order to have a dramatic fiction Foden has to make Garrigan part of all these real historic events – but in doing so the story leaves behind plausible realism and becomes something else: first, in the torture cells beneath Amin’s residence, into a genuinely hair-raising horror story; and then follows the delirious sequence of his Land Rover escape, his bite by a snake, his recovery in a native village, his being taken to a huge pile of corpses, and then stumbling across Gugu beating a prisoner to death and, at that very moment, an artillery attack blowing Gugu to pieces etc. By this time the whole thing has become more of a hallucination than a narrative, piling agony on agony, one vivid hyper-violent scene after another, until the reader’s imagination is shredded.

Comparison with William Boyd

William Boyd is another Englishman brought up in Africa by ex-pat parents, sent to a pukka public school then Oxbridge, who also became a novelist tackling African themes. His first novel, ‘A Good Man in Africa’, is about another Englishman completely out of his depth in a dire African country, who drinks too much, makes a fool of himself with women, and completely fails to understand what’s going on around him, leading up to a violent climax in riots and a coup.

So these are two books about useless Brits caught up in violent events in Africa, the difference obviously being that in Boyd’s books it’s played for laughs (‘A Good Man’ is a very funny farce) while in Foden’s the same basic subject is played for tragedy and horror.

Given the grim times we live in, I’d recommend people read the Boyd for its many hilarious scenes and smiling memories although, at the very end, it too has a bitter denouement.

Wikipedia on Idi Amin

The opening summary of Idi Amin’s Wikipedia article:

Idi Amin Dada Oumee (c. 1925 to 16 August 2003) was a Ugandan military officer and politician who served as the third president of Uganda from 1971 to 1979. He ruled as a military dictator and is considered one of the most brutal despots in modern world history…Amin’s rule was characterised by rampant human rights abuses, including political repression, ethnic persecution, extrajudicial killings, as well as nepotism, corruption, and gross economic mismanagement. International observers and human rights groups estimate that between 100,000 and 500,000 people were killed under his regime.

Foden takes a middle estimate, that Amin’s regime killed 300,000 Ugandans (p.133).

Africa words

muzunga – white people

musawo – a doctor

Chapter 9, pages 84 to 90, gives an extended explanation of various Swahili terms

the wananchi – ordinary citizens

Credit

The Last King of Scotland by Giles Foden was published by Faber Books in 1998. References are to the 1999 Faber paperback edition.

Giles Foden reviews

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by Simon on December 18, 2023  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on December 18, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/12/18/the-last-king-of-scotland-giles-foden/

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