All posts tagged D-Day

Unconditional Surrender by Evelyn Waugh (1961)

‘Even good men thought their private honour would be satisfied by war. They could assert their manhood by killing and being killed. They would accept hardships in recompense for having been selfish and lazy. Danger justified privilege. I knew Italians–not very many perhaps–who felt this. Were there none in England?’
‘God forgive me,’ said Guy. ‘I was one of them.’
(Mme. Kanyi talking to Guy Crouchback in Unconditional Surrender, page 232)

The second novel in Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy followed on from the first with hardly a break, commencing on the afternoon of the same day the previous one ended. Here things are very different. At the end of the previous book, the ‘hero’ of the trilogy, Guy Crouchback, had arrived back in England eight weeks after hearing of the German invasion of Russia, on 22 June 1941, so roughly 22 August 1941. Unconditional Surrender only really gets going in August 1943, two years later i.e. there is a big gap, the central years of the war.

The book is divided into five sections or parts:

PROLOGUE. Locust Years
BOOK ONE. State Sword
BOOK TWO. Fin de Ligne
BOOK THREE. The Death Wish
EPILOGUE. Festival of Britain

1. Prologue: Locust Years

This brief introduction reviews Guy’s recaps the previous 2 years, describing Guy’s lack of direction when he got back from Crete in 1941, touching base with his father at his seaside hotel. He ends up helping to assemble and train a new generation of officers and men for the Royal Corps of Halberdiers. But in August 1943 he is told he is too old to accompany them abroad. More precisely, the new CO was his superior in Freetown back in 1940 and remembers the unfortunate incident of Guy giving a very sick colleague, Apthorpe, a bottle of whiskey with which he proceeded to drink himself to death. Further clarifying the timelines, Guy takes some leave and is at Matchet with his father when Italy surrenders on September 8 1943. Jumbo Trotter visits the barracks later the same month and fins Guy miserable so tells him to move in with him in London, while they find a new role for him. At his London club, Bellamy’s, he bumps into Tommy Blackhouse, a commanding officer in the commandos, about to leave for Italy, but Guy burned his bridges when he turned down an offer to join them two years earlier, preferring to return to the Halberdiers. He’s really screwed up his choices. But it is Tommy who suggests he might find a post in HOO HQ.

2. Book One: State Sword

HOO HQ Brompton

Anyway, as the narrative proper opens Guy is rising 40. In fact early on he has his 40th birthday, 29 October 1943, the day after Waugh’s own birthday.

Guy has come to rest in one of the many departments belonging to Hazardous Offensive Operations Headquarters (HOO HQ) which has grown and spread since we first met it in 1940. Now it occupies multiple buildings in central and west London. Guy finds himself with a cramped office:

in the Venetian-Gothic brick edifice of the Royal Victorian Institute, a museum nobly planned but little frequented in the parish of Brompton.

A cramped space he shares, surreally, with ‘a plaster reconstruction of a megalosaurus’. His job appears to be to receive memos and reports from other departments, sign or stamp or comment on them, before shuffling them along to other departments. Guy goes for a stroll round the building, which is a peg to introduce several other minor characters and for Waugh to describe the way a number of them are out and out communists. The alliance with Soviet Russia has allowed this political view to both spread and be more openly espoused and discussed, and not just among the ‘working classes’. He imagines one particular lofty bureaucrat, Sir Ralph Brompton, the diplomatic adviser to HOO HQ who promotes alliances and support for communist forces everywhere, picturing Guy being put up against a wall and shot, in the best Soviet manner (p.29)

His stroll round the premises leads up to a conversation with Mr. Oates, who has recently installed an Electronic Personnel Selector, an early example of a computer and, as in a stage comedy or sitcom, he demonstrates its purpose in finding the right personnel for new jobs by discovering that there is a vacancy for a man with experience of Italy and some experience of the commandos – for Guy, in fact (p.31).

The sword of Stalingrad

Waugh novels are always multi-stranded or at least contain a number of characters and storylines. The central symbol of this book is the Sword of Stalingrad, a huge sword commissioned by the King himself and to be sent to Stalingrad in Russia as a symbol of solidarity with our Russian allies and testament to their fortitude in the brutal 6-month long siege. Silver, gold, rock-crystal and enamel had gone to its embellishment and throughout the novel it is placed on a fake altar in Westminster Cathedral where long queues of proles queue for a sight of it.

This sword, in Guy’s view a spurious product of press relations and alliance with an immoral beast is contrasted with the noble and pure sword of Sir Roger of Waybroke, an Englishman who travelled on crusade but never made it to the Holy Land, was shipwrecked on the Italian coast, fought and fell for the local count who buried him in the local church of the little island, Santa Dulcina delle Rocce, where Guy spent the 1930s. Over the years Guy developed a religious/superstitious attachment to the knight and attributed to him the finest feelings of nobility and chivalry. At the start of the first novel in the trilogy, Men at Arms, before he leaves Santa Dulcina delle Rocce Guy touches the stone effigy of the knight and his sword, asking Sir Roger to pray for him and his embattled kingdom (i.e. Britain).

So the symbolism of the two swords, one ancient, venerable and noble, the other a modern, factitious and flashily popular fake, run through the text, symbolising the two sets of values, the two worldviews, the novel and Guy finds himself betwebelen, the dying old world and the new meritocratic one struggling to be born.

Ludovic

We are reintroduced to Ludovic, slippery, mysterious figure from book 2, who saved Guy when the two drifted across the Mediterranean in an open boat after the disastrous fall of Crete. We learn that he appears to have been picked up by the Sir Ralph Brompton we met a few pages earlier, way back in the 1930s, when he was a tall handsome junior officer in the Halberdiers. It is not stated but strongly implied that this was a homosexual affair, with the richer older man extracting Ludovic from his regiment and taking him abroad for five years to be his valet or secretary, depending on the situation, grooming and educating the lower class but handsome boy.

A decade has passed and Ludovic is a more imposing figure. He was given the Military Medical for conspicuous bravery for rescuing Guy and promoted. For a while the army couldn’t find a role for him but he was eventually put in charge of a training base in the country which teaches army and partisan groups to parachute, a job which gave him plenty of time to write and hone his literary skills. Despite all this, when in London, he still looks up old Sir Ralph for tea.

Everard Spruce

Sir Ralph is, of course, well connected, and tells Ludovic he has passed on the latter’s philosophical musings (which we saw Ludovic sketching out in the previous novel) on to the noted literary editor, Everard Spruce, editor of the fictional arts magazine Survival. This is a pretty obvious reference to the real-life noted editor Cyril Connolly and his arts magazine Horizon. Everard liked his Pensées and would like to meet him, though he thinks the title should be changed to something more modishly technical, like ‘In Transit’ (the sub-title, as it happens, of the second and final book of poems by Welsh war poet Alun Lewis).

(Waugh had already satirised Connolly and Horizon as Ambrose Silk and his magazine Ivory Tower in the 1942 novel, Put Out More Flags. Connolly was to devote the entire February 1948 issue of Horizon to Waugh’s novel, The Loved One, so he had a keen understanding of Waugh’s importance. It is interesting that Waugh describes Spruce/Connolly as ‘a man who cherished no ambitions for the future, believing, despite the title of his monthly review, that the human race was destined to dissolve in chaos’, interesting if true of Connolly. p.39. It may be also worth noting that, despite finding himself satirised in Waugh’s novels, Connolly still described the trilogy as ‘Unquestionably the finest novel to come out of the war’, top quote on the cover of all three Penguin editions.)

Ludovic walks from Sir Ralph’s rooms in Victoria to Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, where Spruce lives and works, tended on by four young bohemian secretaries, just in time for a posh party. He notices the flimsy blackout curtain, the manuscripts and mess everywhere, the posh guests. He notes and observes. What makes Ludovic so compelling is the way he is the coldest of cold fish, cold and aloof.

The Kilbannocks

We met Ian and Kerstie Kilbannock in the previous book, with their house in Eaton Terrace. Kerstie is now a cipher clerk, Ian has steadily worked his way up the pole of military press and PR. They have struggled but been sensible and make do.

Virginia Troy comes round, Guy’s ex-wife, who deserted him for Tommy Blackhouse, went on to have a string of affairs, married an American named Troy, has lived separated from him for ages. Now Troy reveals he’s had private detectives trailing her and is divorcing her on the grounds of infidelity. She will be left without a cent. For the first time in her life she’s panicking, She’s come round with all her possessions to ask Kerstie to help her go through them and decide what to pawn.

For the last few years she has been forced to support Trimmer, the ‘hero’ of a farcically incompetent ‘raid’ on the French mainland, as he tours the factories of England to boost morale, but is hopelessly in love with her. It’s Ian, as her employer at HOO HQ, who obliged her to ‘support’ Trimmer and the implication seems to be, obliged her to ‘keep him happy’ i.e. sleep with him (Trimmer).

The Loot

Waugh’s anti-Americanism came out so fiercely in the caricature of three slobbish American journalists at the end of Officers and Gentlemen. It recurs here:

London was full of American soldiers, tall, slouching, friendly, woefully homesick young men who seemed always to be in search of somewhere to sit down. In the summer they had filled the parks and sat on the pavements round the once august mansions which had been assigned to them. For their comfort there swarmed out of the slums and across the bridges multitudes of drab, ill-favoured adolescent girls and their aunts and mothers, never before seen in the squares of Mayfair and Belgravia. These they passionately and publicly embraced, in the blackout and at high noon, and rewarded with chewing-gum, razor-blades and other rare trade-goods from their PX stores.

‘Ill-favoured’ lol, that’s a nice phrase. And again when de Souza describes the experience of fighting in Italy:

‘And then in Italy there were Americans all over the place clamouring for doughnuts and Coca-Cola and ice cream.’ (p.95)

Anyway, towering above the general swarm of Yanks is a central and recurring figure, Lieutenant Padfield. The ‘Loot’ is a phenomenon, supernaturally present at every party, luncheon and dinner, knowing everyone in London, a finger in every pie. Incongruously, he goes to Everard Spruce’s party, turns up at Guy’s father’s funeral, and turns out to have been gathering evidence against Virginia for Mr Troy’s law firm.

Guy meets Ludovic

It is Guy’s fortieth birthday. He sallies forth to Bellamy’s where he meets Ian, just kicked out of his house for the evening by Kerstie who wants a girlie tete-a-tete with Virginia. Together with the Loot, Guy and Ian take a cab to Chelsea to Spruce’s party. Spruce had just gotten round to finding time to talk to Ludovic who he thinks is a very important New Writer. There is a droll bit of dialogue where Spruce thinks the lead images in Ludovic’s book of pensées (French for ‘thoughts’) are highly symbolic and/or derived from psychological sources, namely the theme of the drowned man and of the cave, while the reader of the trilogies knows that, in the last days of the ill-fated Crete campaign Ludovic holed up with other AWOL soldiers in safe caves, and then, in the local fishing boat which they got working in order to escape the advancing Germans, more than likely threw the 2 or 3 other sailors overboard in order to preserve himself and Guy. Spruce thinks these are deep symbolic images; whereas we know they are blunt facts.

‘And besides these there seemed to me two poetic themes which occur again and again. There is the Drowned Sailor motif–an echo of the Waste Land perhaps? Had you Eliot consciously in mind?’
‘Not Eliot,’ said Ludovic. ‘I don’t think he was called Eliot.’
‘Very interesting. And then there was the Cave image. You must have read a lot of Freudian psychology?’
‘Not a lot. There was nothing psychological about the cave.’

When Guy appears at Spruce’s party, Ludovic is almost paralysed with horror. The implication is that Ludovic did bump off the other men in the boat and is convinced Guy knows this and has tracked him down to confront him about it. Of course, Guy knows nothing and so is as puzzled as Spruce when Ludovic simply gets up and walks out of the party.

3. Book Two: Fin de Ligne

Virginia is pregnant

Virginia goes to a doctor who confirms she is pregnant. Must be by Trimmer. Yikes.

Guy is selected for parachute training

Guy goes for an interview about the job spat out by Mr Oates’s Electronic Personnel Selector. Something about parachuting into north Italy. He’ll need to go and do parachute training. Since the narrator has told us that Ludovic now manages a parachute training centre…

Guy’s father’s funeral

When Guy returns to the Transit Camp he finds a telegram from his sister telling him his father has died peacefully in his sleep. So he catches a train to Matchet with Box-Bender to attend the funeral whose Catholic elaborations are described in great detail. The county lord-lieutenant, a representative of the cardinal etc are in attendance and so, incongruously, is the Loot, who turns up everywhere. Angela and Guy are both astonished at the number of thank you letters their father has received; seems he quietly performed countless acts of charity, as well as giving a lot of his income to the needy.

Quantitative judgments don’t apply

The last time they’d met, Guy and his father had a little disagreement about the policy of the Popes concerning compromising with the values of the modern world. Guy argued that the popes should have stood aloof from all politics since Italian unification (1871). A few days later his father writes him a kindly letter explaining that, in his opinion, this is not how Catholicism works. It works in the world and through the world. It cannot disengage and hold itself in an ivory castle. Who knows how many souls came to the Church and so were saved because of successive Popes’ interventions:

Quantitative judgments don’t apply. If only one soul was saved, that is full compensation for any amount of loss of “face.”

This is a very important quote. Guy will repeat it to himself over and again as the novel progresses, regarding Virginia and in Yugoslavia.

The first abortionist

Kerstie prises the address of an illegal abortionist out of her very reluctant doctor, but when Virginia takes a taxi to the address it is bombed out. When she pops into nearby Claridge’s she finds the Loot, who tells her about attending Mr Crouchback’s funeral, and also the surprising news that he was quite well off. Planting a seed…

The voodoo abortionist

When Virginia tries a Black doctor who Kerstie’s cleaner recommends as an abortionist, there is broad farce when Virginia discovers he has been hired by HOO HQ to perform voodoo ceremonies in order to give the Nazi leaders bad dreams! He asks her whether she has brought the scorpions he’s requested as part of his ceremonies. No, replies Virginia. No, I haven’t brought scorpions.

The witch doctor sits alongside Dr Glendening-Rees, the forager sent to teach the commando how to eat seaweed and heather in Officers and Gentlemen, in Waugh’s gallery of military eccentrics.

Ludovic and the parachute training centre

It is November 1943 (p.117). Ludovic lives a quiet civilised life at his parachute training base in Essex (officially known as ‘Number 4 Special Training Centre’). Until he receives notification that none other than Guy Crouchback is among the next batch of trainees. He is horrified, convinced it is fate.

In the bus en route to the training centre, Guy bumps into an old hand from the Halberdiers, de Souza who becomes very confidential, saying a number of the 12 ‘candidates’ for the course probably know Sir Ralph Brompton. It’s becoming pretty obvious Brompton is more than a communist sympathiser, but maybe a Soviet spy.

Sustained and very evocative description of parachute training. Also a sustained running joke about Ludovic’s fantastically chilling effect on all around him. In fact, upon learning that Guy is coming for training he orders his staff to remove his name from all official documents, noticeboards, not to refer to him by name and to have his meals sent up to his room. De Souza notices this and makes a very funny running joke about their commanding officer having been overthrown in a coup and now being held hostage in his own room.

When it comes turn to do his first parachute jump Guy twists the same knee he injured all those years ago in the Halberdier barracks and is sent off to hospital whereupon Ludovic deigns to come down from his rooms and dine with the other 11 trainees, casting a wonderfully ghoulish coldness over the assembly. De Souza nicknames him Major Dracula. His number two seriously considers the possibility that his commanding officer has gone mad (mental illness and madness being, as we have so often observed, a recurrent theme in Waugh’s work). As de Souza puts it:

‘In my experience the more responsible posts in the army are largely filled by certifiable lunatics. They don’t cause any more trouble than the sane ones.’ (p.109)

Ludovic, like Apthorpe in the first book, only in a very different way, is a comic creation of genius. He consolidates his reputation for weirdness by insisting on buying a Pekinese dog. He clinches his second in command’s view that he’s gone mad when he exits the dinner singing the music hall song:

Jumbo rescues Guy who moves in with Uncle Peregrine

Guy hates it in the RAF hospital where the officers are rude and lackadaisical and which is bombarded all day long with the throbbing and wailing of jazz music from the wireless. He gets de Souza to pass on a message to Jumbo Trotter who promptly comes down to rescue him and take him back to his digs. However, Guy becomes depressed, so depressed that he takes up the offer of his uncle, his father’s brother, the notorious bore Peregrine Crouchback, to move in with him in his house in Bourne Mansions, Carlisle Place. It is the time of the Tehran Conference 28 November to 1 December 1943.

Virginia pops in on Guy. She takes to popping in every day, bringing cards and gin. She inveigles dear old Uncle Peregrine into taking her out for dinner and explains that she is thinking of becoming a Catholic so she can return to being married to Guy. She is quite candid about being skint, needing money and being tired of gallivanting around. Peregrine is a bit put out because, in his ancient innocence, he’d been rather thinking she’d been popping in to see him.

Then one day she tells him the truth. Asks if he loves her. Very unusually for Waugh, there is a reference to sex, when she runs her hand up his leg under his bedclothes (Guy is still restricted to bed because of his knee) and gets no response. In fact Guy instinctively shies away from her. No attraction at all. It is then she makes the Great Revelation of the novel and tells him she is pregnant, with Trimmer’s child.

To the astonishment of everyone in the know, namely Ian and Kerstie Kilbannock, Guy agrees on the spot to take her back, to get remarried in a civil ceremony (they were never parted, according to this theology). So Virginia and Ian, returning from Christmas 1943 discover Virginia has moved out of their house (where shes’ been staying, much to Ian’s mounting irritation) and moved straight into Uncle Peregine’s house, room next to Guy’s.

Kerstie goes straight round, Virginia is out, and she tells him point blank about Virginia’s baby by Trimmer and is flabbergasted that Guy knows. He tries to explain. For over a decade he was lived alone, depressed, morose, occasionally wishing there was one good deed he could do in the world, one good deed which was genuinely selfless, entirely about helping someone else. By helping Virginia in her time of need, and by becoming father to the child, he helps a vulnerable woman and a baby who would be fatherless.

Kerstie says wartorn Europe is full of helpless women and orphans. But Guy says he can’t help all of them. But he could help Virginia. He repeats the words of his father:

Quantitative judgments don’t apply. If only one soul was saved, that is full compensation for any amount of loss of “face.”

Remarrying Virginia and fathering the child are good deeds; loss of face before the whole world is secondary.

4. Book Three: The Death Wish

It is late February 1944 and Guy is flown in a Dakota plane via stopovers in Gibraltar and North Africa to Bari in Italy. Reports for duty to the Headquarters of the British Mission to the Anti-fascist Forces of National Liberation (Adriatic). He’s been dispatched here because a) Ludovic lied about his success in parachute training in order to get ride of him (as we saw, Guy failed to complete the course due to a knee injury); and b) because in the bowels of HOO HQ Sir Ralph and colleagues think Guy will make a good clean cover for what they’re really up to i.e. aiding the communist partisans.

Having signed in and met the Brigadier and the keen information officer Joe Cattermole, he is filled in about the Yugoslavs or ‘Jugs’ as the Brits call them. Keen to take all the help they can from the British, but their true leaders are the Russians, pan-Slavism. The partisans offer a permanent irritation to the Germans, who periodically carry out sweeps into the mountains. But the Germans’ central aim is to keep communications with Greece open. Earlier in the war they were going to use this as a jumping off point for the Middle East, for Palestine or Egypt. Now, with the tide strongly against them, they need Yugoslavia open so when the time is right they can withdraw their Greek army out and up into mainland Europe.

Guy us kept hanging round. He socialises with the Brigadier who has a WAAF mistress, he lunches and dines out, though the food is as thin and grim as back in England. He meets the bloody Loot who, improbably enough, is being paid to recruit a full orchestra and revive Italian opera, with the aim of winning over Italian hearts and minds. It’s proving difficult to find any singers.

In March 1943 Guy is informed he is to be parachuted into Croatia. He visits a church to make a last confession. He surprises us by confessing that he wants to die. It’s important to catch all the nuances of this surprising declaration to so I quote at length:

Guy had no preparations to make for this journey except to prepare himself. He walked to the old town, where he found a dilapidated romanesque church where a priest was hearing confessions. Guy waited, took his turn and at length said: “Father, I wish to die.’
‘Yes. How many times?’
‘Almost all the time.’
The obscure figure behind the grill leant nearer. ‘What was it you wished to do?’
‘To die.’
‘Yes. You have attempted suicide?’
‘No.’
‘Of what, then, are you accusing yourself? To wish to die is quite usual today. It may even be a very good disposition. You do not accuse yourself of despair?’
‘No, Father; presumption. I am not fit to die.’
‘There is no sin there. This is a mere scruple. Make an act of contrition for all the unrepented sins of your past life.’ (p.170)

Guy’s title is Military Liaison Officer, his job is to report on the military situation from the British Mission at a place called Begoy. Also to transcribe, encypher and send to Allied HQ in Italy the partisans’ often exorbitant and detailed requirements. He is grudgingly accepted by the ‘Jugs’. He is given a Serb ‘translator’ who speaks English with a brutal Noo Yawk accent and is, of course, a spy.

Time passes. One day the translator tells him a group of Jews is outside. A deputation ask him for help to travel to Italy. He explains that only the wounded and soldiers are flown out on the daily plane, it is not for civilians. They go away disgruntled. A month later he is asked to report on displaced persons in his area (UNRRA stands for United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration):

U.N.R.R.A. research team requires particulars displaced persons. Report any your district. This phrase, which was to be among the keywords of the decade, was as yet unfamiliar.
‘What are “displaced persons”?’ he asked the Squadron Leader.
‘Aren’t we all?’ (p.179)

Guy goes to see the hundred or so Jewish refugees who are living in absolute squalor. His visit annoys the partisan authorities who call him to a meeting more like an interrogation and tell him it is not his place to interfere in internal matters of what will become their country. Guy explains he was only following direct orders from UNRRA and gets cross.

That night he gets a telegram saying Virginia has given birth to a son. The Crouchback line will be continued. It is 4 June 1944, the day Allied forces enter Rome.

Waning force

Waugh describes a general sense of power moving away from many of the London characters. On the eve of Operation Overlord pretty much everything HOO HQ ever cooked up seems redundant. General Whale has creates of old files burned. Ian Kilbannock tries to get a posting to follow the troops to Normandy: first-hand D-Day experience will be like gold dust in a post-war career.

Ludovic and Brideshead Revisited

Ludovic has been writing a novel and sending the instalments off to a typist in Scotland to type up the manuscript. It has a plot of Shakespearian improbability and is told in over-the-top prose. Waugh tells us half a dozen other novelists were working in the same vein of over-written nostalgia:

Had he known it, half a dozen other English writers, averting themselves sickly from privations of war and apprehensions of the social consequences of the peace, were even then severally and secretly, unknown to one another, to Everard Spruce, to Coney and to Frankie, composing or preparing to compose books which would turn from drab alleys of the thirties into the odorous gardens of a recent past transformed and illuminated by disordered memory and imagination…Nor was it for all its glitter a cheerful book. Melancholy suffused all its pages and deepened towards the close. (p.188)

I wonder if Waugh is describing his own magnum opus, Brideshead Revisited, which he wrote in an intense burst of work from December 1943 to June 1944. In his preface to the 1963 edition Waugh himself described Brideshead in similar terms:

It was a bleak period of present privation and threatening disaster – the period of soya beans and Basic English – and in consequence the book is infused with a kind of gluttony, for food and wine, for the splendours of the recent past, and for rhetorical and ornamental language which now, with a full stomach, I find distasteful.

Ludovic titles his over-written melodrama The Death Wish. To Ian Kilbannock’s surprise, his exhausted superior General Whale one evening confides he is so tired he just wants to die (p.191). Virginia gives birth to her baby son and has a nurse and has people round to see it and it is christened into the Catholic faith, but she can’t bring herself to look at it, refers to it as ‘it’ rather than ‘he’.

Germany commences its operation of sending V1 rockets to land on London. Members of Bellamy’s are not so exuberant as during the Blitz at the start of Officers and Gentlemen. The war is obviously winding down and the best is behind them. Opportunities are closed. Their record is their record. They listen to each night’s series of random explosions glumly. Each night Virginia wonders if the next one she hears will be the one to kill her (p.191). She sends the baby with Angela down to her place in the country for safety.

Virginia’s death

Sure enough a doodlebug kills Virginia, landing on the house in Carlisle Place one morning at 10am, killing Peregrine and the housekeeper, too. Angela sends an air mail latter which Guy opens after the daily plane has touched down with supplies. There is a very moving passage where Guy remembers what happened when Virginia moved in with him after their simple registrar ceremony of remarriage i.e. they went to bed together. Over the next few weeks his knee healed but so did a big hole in his heart.

Without passion or sentiment but in a friendly, cosy way they had resumed the pleasures of marriage and in the weeks while his knee mended the deep old wound in Guy’s heart and pride healed also, as perhaps Virginia had intuitively known that it might do. January had been a month of content; a time of completion, not of initiation. When Guy was passed fit for active service and his move-order was issued, he had felt as though he were leaving a hospital where he had been skilfully treated, a place of grateful memory to which he had no particular wish to return. He did not mention Virginia’s death to Frank then or later. (p.196)

I found this very moving indeed, the complexity of adult, mature, married love, after a lifetime of unhappiness and tribulation. Like many other moments in the trilogy it seems to me to strike exactly the right note of melancholy healing and closure.

Catholic convert Eloise Plessington asks Angela Box-Bender if she can take little baby Gervase off her hands, he is her godson after all. Their conversation is a pretext for speculating that maybe, from a theological point of view, this was the perfect moment for Virginia to be killed, when she was happy and had done a noble deed, a moment of maximum grace.

Some Jews escape

Guy is less moved by Virginia’s death than the fact the UNRRA asked for 2 representatives of his displaced Jews to be sent back on the same flight. the partisans refuse to let the young, best educated couple leave because the husband is the only one who can keep the generator going which (intermittently) keeps the lights on in the little cluster of buildings they all inhabit. So Guy sends two other Jews off to Italy to plead the cause of their colleagues with the authorities.

De Souza

The same flight brings in Frank de Souza who Guy and we have known since the first book when they were new officers in the Halberdiers together. De Souza has been promoted and is now Guy’s superior officer. He puts Guy in the picture. The British have leaned on the Serb government in exile in London, complete with king, to accept a new set of ministers and advisers who are more friendly to the communists and the partisans and deprecate the Jug royalists, the Chetniks. Tito is going to meet Churchill. Basically de Souza is a representative of a government which is going to sell out the Yugoslav nation to the communists.

Guy visits the local priest to arrange a mass to be said for his dead wife. The communist partisans are deeply suspicious, arrest the priest, confiscate the food Guy gave him and de Souza gives him a dressing down. The key thing is not to offend the communist partisans. Guy is disgusted.

This whole sequence leads up to a showcase military operation put on to impress the Americans and persuade them of the British support for the partisans. The communists line up an attack on an isolated guardhouse, not manned by Germans or even by the Croatian fascist Ustaše but by the pretty hopeless Croatian home guard.

It is fitting that this fiasco is witnessed by Brigadier Ritchie-Hooke, now reduced to a shambling wreck of his former self, and by Ian Kilbannock, hyper ambitious to establish himself as a wide-ranging political commentator, along with the Loot, of course, and quite a throng of other military top brass (even someone from the Free French).

The plane crash

The plane Kilbannock, Ritchie-Hooke and his aide, the Loot and his tame British composer, the American general and his staff, a photographer and the Free Frenchman are flying in crashes in a field. It is very vividly described from the point of view of Ian who comes round to find himself lying hear the burning plane. The American general got most of them out. The crew were killed. Guy and staff from the British Mission and partisans arrive to help them onto stretchers and to a nearby sick bay.

The staged attack

The attack on the ‘enemy’ blockhouse, which is really more by way of being a small ancient castle, is, as you might expect, a fiasco. There are meant to be two brigades of partisans. One is on time the other is late, when the second one arrives the first opens fire on it. Precisely at 10am two RAF planes scream out of the blue and fire two missiles, the first pair completely missing the blockhouse, the second hitting the massive stone walls and barely scratching them. News arrives that a German patrol is on its way, at which point Waugh delivers a lovely comic exchange between the American general who’s been flown all this way to observe the indomitable partisans in action and his partisan translator:

‘A German armoured column has been warned and is on its way here.’
‘What do your men do about that?’
‘Before a German armoured column they disperse. That is the secret of our great and many victories.’ (p.221)

The partisans are sneaking away and de Souza announces lunch, when everyone sees an extraordinary spectacle. Revived by his close shave with death the night before, Ben Ritchie-Hooke advances across the bridge towards the solid little castle all alone except for the American photographer who tumbles around him like a dwarf in a medieval court. Ben assumes the partisans will be following his gallant charge but they have disappeared and he is shot down in a hail of Croat bullets. The German patrol which arrives a little later is mystified by this single-handed attack on a fortified position by a British major-general, attended in one account by a small boy, in another by a midget. War as farcical tragedy, tragic farce. Chatting with the General’s aide later, Guy learns he had, for some time, expressed a wish to die in battle. Like so many others, he, too, had a death wish.

The Jews

There’s a funeral service for the dead in the plane then things settle down. The Germans are withdrawing. The American general gives the go-ahead for the partisans to receive many more supplies. These are flown in on a daily basis. There’s little form Guy to do except watch. August turns into September 1944. Guy asks de Souza to send messages about the transport of the hundred Jews to Italy. Messages go back and forth.

At the end of September de Souza leaves. He explains that Tito has gone over to the Russians lock, stock and barrel. Winston had hoped to set up a coalition government in Belgrade comprising different ethnic groups and a political mix i.e. democrats and liberals. Not going to happen now: it’s going to be a Soviet dictatorship.

Things go quiet. The local priest is gone, who knows where, his house requisitioned by communists. Guy is followed everywhere by his translator-minder, who he likes to torment by going for long tramps through the wet countryside. On his 41st birthday, 29 October 1944, Guy receives the thrilling news that four Dakota planes will fly in to evacuate the Jews. The Jews are rounded up and marched to the landing field but a very thick fog prevents their despatch. Twice in the next couple of weeks the planes arrive but cannot land. Guy is obsessed. He prays to God to clear the fogs. God doesn’t listen, Then the first snows fall. There will be no more landings till the spring.

Then news comes of a special air drop of supplies solely for the Jews. But the partisan general in charge of the committee which liaises with the British Mission refuses to accept this and, when the supplies are parachuted in, confiscates them all.

Also in October 1944 Belgrade was liberated by the Soviet Red Army, Yugoslav Partisans, and the Bulgarian Army. With no explanation the Jews are suddenly given the supplies which had been impounded and for a week they appear in public wearing a bizarre array of English clothes and properly fed for the first time in a year. Then they disappear. The creepy young translator to the communist commissar explains that partisans and fighting forces complained that they had no boots or winter coats. The goods have been redistributed and the Jews moved to other accommodation.

A few days later Guy encounters the young Jewish woman who speaks Italian and, the first time he saw them, translated. She explains it was the peasants who complained about the largesse shown to the Jews and the partisans are dependent on the peasants for food. She explains the Jews have been moved to a former Nazi prison camp. Guy is horrified and says he will kick up a fuss when he is flown back to Italy. At which point this Jewess, Mme. Kanyi, delivers the moral of this part of the novel and maybe of the sequence as a whole:

‘There was a time when I thought that all I needed for happiness was to leave. Our people feel that. They must move away from evil. Some hope to find homes in Palestine. Most look no farther than Italy–just to cross the water, like crossing the Red Sea. Is there any place that is free from evil? It is too simple to say that only the Nazis wanted war. These Communists wanted it too. It was the only way in which they could come to power. Many of my people wanted it, to be revenged on the Germans, to hasten the creation of the national state. It seems to me there was a will to war, a death wish, everywhere. Even good men thought their private honour would be satisfied by war. They could assert their manhood by killing and being killed. They would accept hardships in recompense for having been selfish and lazy. Danger justified privilege. I knew Italians–not very many perhaps–who felt this. Were there none in England?’
‘God forgive me,’ said Guy. ‘I was one of them.’ (p.232)

The coast

Guy is ordered to leave Begoy. He drives through ruined villages to the coast at Split. He is ordered to Dubrovnik to liaise between a small British force which had landed under the impression it was among friends only to find itself impounded by the communist partisans.

In mid-February 1945 he is withdrawn along with the British party and finds himself in Bari a year after he arrived. There he learns that the Jews of Begoy were finally liberated when a private American sponsor paid for an expedition of trucks to drive from Italy to collect them, bribing the partisans to release them. When Guy visits them he finds them in yet another camp guarded by soldiers, albeit British. But Mme. Kanyi and her husband are not among them. Through an interpreter Guy learns they were taken off the truck by the partisans of Begoy.

The fellow traveller

Finally he gets some sense from an odious functionary named Gilpin who we first met at the parachute training centre where Guy overheard him whispering to de Souza, linking both to Sir Ralph Brompton and his set of communist agents. Now this self-satisfied lickspittle rattles off a list of typically inaccurate communist accusations – that she was the mistress of the British Liaison Officer (meaning him, Guy), that her husband sabotaged the power plant (when he was the only engineer who could keep it going), that she was caught in possession of counter-revolutionary propaganda (before leaving Guy had given her the Mission’s collection of American glossy magazines). It is a pack of lies which Gilpin goes on to compound when Gilpin goes on to say that Guy himself was almost had up on a disciplinary charge for consorting with her, but one of the other communist officers decided to let him off. He goes on to say that the couple were tried by a Peoples’ Court and ‘You may be sure that justice has been done.’

This is such a travesty of the truth, such an inversion of ‘justice’, such a betrayal of any ideas of a just war and honour, all delivered with an unctuous smile by a vile and vindictive little functionary that Guy clenches his fist to punch him. But what would be the point? It is the final absolute crushing of all Guy’s ideals of honour, charity and justice in this world.

5. Epilogue: Festival of Britain

The Festival if Britain took place in London starting in May 1951. In this novel it is the occasion for a party when Tommy Blackhouse, now a much-decorated general, assembles 15 old comrades for dinner at Bellamy’s. On the same evening Arthur Box-Bender is giving a party for his daughter’s 18th birthday, which is, the narrator emphasises, absolutely nothing like the glittering ‘coming out’ balls held for the young ladies of his generation. Disgusted by the manners and clothes of the younger generation, Box-Bender takes the first opportunity to get away from it and strolls down to St James’s Street and into Bellamy’s just as the raucous Blackhouse party comes tumbling out of its room. Typically quick drunken conversations allow Waugh very beautifully and neatly, as in an old fashioned novel, to tell us the post-war fates of his characters:

Tommy Blackhouse had returned to England in May. He was retiring from the army with many decorations, a new, pretty wife and the rank of major-general.
Ivor Claire had spent six months in Burma with the Chindits, had done well, collected a D.S.O. and an honourably incapacitating wound. He was often in Bellamy’s now. His brief period of disgrace was set aside and almost forgotten.
Trimmer had disappeared. All Tommy’s enquiries failed to find any trace of him. Some said he had jumped ship in South Africa. Nothing was known certainly.
Box-Bender lost his seat in parliament in the great Labour landslide of 1945.
Box-Bender was defeated by Gilpin, the revolting wretch who gloatingly told Guy about the execution of the Kanyis. He is now a Labour MP, not popular in the House but making his mark and had lately become an under-secretary.
Guy has sold the Castello Crouchback. To Ludovic of all people.
Ludovic’s long novel, The Death Wish, which we saw him working on, old nearly a million copies in America and they’ve just filmed it. He’s rich.
Improbably, but in a gesture towards poetic justice, it appears ‘the Loot’, Lieutenant Padfield, has become Ludovic’s fixer and general factotum.
Guy has married Domenica, daughter of Lady Plessington, a family friend and godmother to Gervase (Guy’s son by Virginia). He has taken back the property at Broome and is just about making a go of running the farm. In the end, after all his tribulations, things turn out well for Guy.

Summary

Taken individually all three novels are brilliant, combining comedy, complicated storylines, vivid characters and an extraordinary grasp of the complexities of military and social life during the war. Taken together, the Sword of Honour trilogy is surely one of the greatest achievements of English literature in the twentieth century.

The final sequence of events in which Guy agrees to marry Virginia and thus do the one good, selfless deed he had been seeking to do since the start of the war, in which she is then killed by a V rocket but the baby saved; and his long attempts to do right by the Jews in Croatia; all make for a very moving, sometimes overwhelming cocktail of emotions. It feels deep and rich and true to the complex mix of hopes and hard work and frustration and small victories which life is really like. The trilogy as a whole is an extraordinary achievement.

History of the language

New phrases

It’s a very minor point, but these books contain occasional references to phrases which have just entered the language at the moment he’s describing. Thus book one refers to ‘the already advertised spirit of Dunkirk’. The second half of book two is titled ‘In The Picture’, a phrase Waugh ironically describes thus:

Trimmer remained quiet while he was ‘put in the picture’. It was significant, Ian Kilbannock reflected while he listened to the exposition of GSO II (Planning) that this metaphoric use of ‘picture’ had come into vogue at the time when all the painters of the world had finally abandoned lucidity.

As this snippet suggests, Waugh is old bufferishly critical, disdainful or contemptuous of these new-fangled phrases, using antiseptic speech marks to handle them with. Same happens in this book, when the literary editor Spruce is said to receive ‘fan letters’ (p.42). When he refers to Guy taking the ‘tube railway’ (p.47) he sounds like a ridiculous old fuddy-duddy. Or when Virginia says:

‘I just feel I ought to have what Mr. Troy calls a ‘check-up.'”

He tells us the working class term ‘ducks’ had become prevalent during the Blitz. Here’s Mrs Bristow, Kerstie Kilbannock’s cleaner:

“Just off, ducks,” she said using a form of address that had become prevalent during the blitz.

In fact Waugh gives us more samples of the working class speech of the time than in the previous books:

‘Sorry, sir,’ said the [the Staff Captain’s batman] as he discovered the tousled figure. ‘Didn’t know you was here.’ (p.114)
‘Cor,’ he said, ‘just take a dekko at the little perisher.’ (p.115)

Americanisms

Having had occasional contact with the film world during the 1930s (and having, outside the timeline of the novel, been to Hollywood in 1947) Waugh has picked up plenty of Americanisms which he handles with distaste:

Stirred by the heavy North African wine, de Souza’s imagination rolled into action as though at a “story conference” of jaded script-writers. (p.111)

Other Americanisms are handled with care:

Here was something most unwelcome, put into my hands; something which I believe the Americans describe as ‘beyond the call of duty’; not the normal behaviour of an officer and a gentleman… (p.151)

And American food, creeping in everywhere:

A civilian waiter brought them their pink gins. Guy asked him in Italian for olives. He answered in English almost scornfully: “No olives for senior officers,” and brought American peanuts. (p.157)

It is sweet that he uses phrases like ‘motor bus’ and ‘wireless’. In this respect Waugh is a good example of the futility of thinking that if you use old-fashioned words and are openly contemptuous of new-fangled phrases, you can somehow prevent social change. No-one can prevent social change nor the steady evolution of the language. King Canute on the beach.

The wireless

It is interesting that Waugh detested the earliest signs of muzak. This occasionally crops up in the other novels, where he had shown a fuddy-duddy objection to the ‘wireless’ and, surprisingly for a member of the late 1920s Bright Young Things, an antipathy to jazz. It becomes more noticeable in this novel. Thus the ageing Guy shows a mild resentment of:

The new young officers were conscripts who liked to spend their leisure listening to jazz on the wireless.

And at the parachute training centre the incessant music from the ‘wireless’ infuriates the usually mild-mannered Guy:

‘Can’t you stop this infernal noise?’
‘What noise was that?’
‘The wireless.’
‘Oh, no. I couldn’t do that. It’s laid on special. Piped all through the camp. It isn’t all wireless anyway. Some of it’s records. You’ll soon find you get so you don’t notice it.’

It is characteristic of Waugh that he associates enjoyment of ‘wireless’ programmes to the uneducated lower classes, for example, Kerstie Kilbannock’s cleaner:

Kerstie did not sleep long, but when she came downstairs at noon, she found that the lure of Bellamy’s had proved stronger than Ian’s caution and that the house was empty save for Mrs. Bristow, who was crowning her morning’s labour with a cup of tea and a performance on the wireless of “Music While You Work.” (p.90)

Ian and Kerstie Kilbannock returned to London from Scotland on the night of Childermas. He went straight to his office, she home, where Mrs. Bristow was smoking a cigarette and listening to the wireless. (p.148)

Credit

Unconditional Surrender by Evelyn Waugh was published by Chapman and Hall in 1961. All references are to the 1983 Penguin paperback edition.

Evelyn Waugh reviews

Munich by Robert Harris (2017)

Both men fell silent, watching him, and Legat had a peculiar sense of – what was it, he wondered afterwards? – not of déjà vu exactly, but of inevitability: that he had always known Munich was not done with him; that however far he might travel from that place and time he was forever caught in its gravitational pull and would be dragged back towards it eventually. (p.188)

This is another Robert Harris historical thriller, set during the four nailbiting days of the Munich Crisis of September 1938.

In the Acknowledgements section at the end of the book Harris discloses that the crisis had been an obsession with him even before he collaborated on a BBC documentary about it, to mark the 50th anniversary, in 1988, and he hasn’t stopped being obsessed by it. The acknowledgements go on to list no fewer than 54 volumes of history, diaries and memoirs which were consulted in the writing of this book.

And this depth of research certainly shines out from every page right from the start. Even before the text proper begins, the book has an architect’s plan of the Führerbau in Munich where the climactic scenes of the book take place, because it was here that the four key European leaders – Neville Chamberlain, Prime Minister of Britain, Daladier, Premier of France, Mussolini, the Duce of Italy and Adolf Hitler, the Führer of Germany – met to resolve the crisis and here that the various backstairs shenanigans of Harris’s thriller take place.

The Munich Crisis

Hitler came to power in 1933 with promises to end reparations to the Allies (France, Britain, America) for Germany’s responsibility for World War One, and to repeal or turn back the provisions of the Versailles Treaty which had stripped Germany of some of her territory and people.

True to his word, Hitler reoccupied the Rhineland (until then a neutral zone) in March 1936. Two years later in March 1938, he sent German troops to annex Austria, thus creating a Greater Germany.

Next on the list were the ethnic Germans who lived in a strip of territory along the periphery of Czechoslovakia, a ‘new’ country which had only been created by Versailles in 1918. Hitler created a mounting sense of crisis through the summer of 1938 by making evermore feverish claims to the land, and then arranging incidents which ‘proved’ that the Czechs were attacking and victimising the ethnic Germans, blaming the Czechs for their aggression and bullying.

Now France had made formal legal obligations to guarantee Czechoslovakia’s safety, and Britain had pledged to come to France’s aid if she was attacked, so everyone in Europe could see how an assault in Czechoslovakia might lead France to mobilise, Britain to mobilise to defend here, the Poles and Russians to pile in, and it would be exactly how the Great War started – with a series of toppling dominoes plunging the continent into armageddon.

Determined to avoid this outcome at any cost, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain flew twice to Germany to meet Hitler, on the 15th and 22nd of September. On the second occasion he conceded that Hitler could have the Sudetenland with the full agreement of Britain and France – but Hitler moved the goalposts, now demanding the full dismemberment of Czechoslovakia and the redivision of its territory among Germany and Hungary and Poland (who also shared borders with Czechoslovakia and had mobilised their armies to seize what territory they could.)

On 26 September Hitler made a speech to a vast crowd at the Sportspalast in Berlin setting Czechoslovakia the deadline of 2pm on 28 September to cede the Sudetenland to Germany or face war. In secret, Hitler and the Wehrmacht had a fully-worked-out plan of invasion and expected to carry it out.

However, in a fast-moving sequence of events, Chamberlain sent a message via diplomatic channels to the Fascist leader of Italy, Mussolini, asking him to enter the negotiations and use his moderating influence on the Führer. Mussolini agreed, and sent a message to Hitler saying he was totally on his side but suggesting a 24 hour delay in the deadline in order to further study the problem.

Thus it came about that a conference was arranged in Munich, to be hosted by Hitler and attended by Mussolini, Chamberlain and the increasingly sidelined French premiere, Daladier.

And thus Chamberlain and his staff flew for a third time to Germany, this time to Munich, destination the Führerbau building, and here it was that over a series of closed-door meetings the four leaders and their staffs thrashed out an agreement.

It was signed by the four leaders the next day at 1.30pm. As one of Harris’s characters makes clear, the final agreement, although ostensibly submitted by the Italians, was in fact a German creation which they had given the Italians to present. The main terms were that the German army was to peacefully complete the occupation of the Sudetenland by 10 October, and an international commission would decide the future of other disputed areas.

One of the most famous aspects of the summit meeting was that the Czech leaders were physically there, but were prevented by Hitler’s orders from attending any of the actual negotiations. They were simply forced by France and Britain to accept all the terms and hand over their border area to Germany. Since this was where all their fortifications were built it left the rest of the country defenceless and, sure enough, the German army invaded and occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia just six months later, in March 1939.

Map of Czechoslovakia showing the Sudeten territory given to Germany in September 1938 in dark brown

All of Europe had held its breath in case the incident sparked the outbreak of another European war. Chamberlain is quoted in the book, in private and then in a famous speech to the House of Commons, saying how unbelievable it is that they all seemed to be galloping towards the apocalyptic disaster so many of them could still remember (the Great War). It was this attitude – avoiding war at all costs – that underpinned Chamberlain’s strategy. And so when he flew to Munich, and even more when he emerged with a face-saving treaty, scores of millions of people all across Europe greeted the avoidance of war with enormous relief, and Chamberlain was feted as a hero.

Of course, in hindsight, we can see that nothing was going to stop Hitler and his maniacal dreams of European domination, and Chamberlain’s policy of ‘appeasement’ grew to have an entirely negative connotation of weakness and cowardice, a policy failure which only ended up encouraging the dictator. And there were plenty of politicians and intellectuals at the time who thought Hitler needed to be stood up to, instead of cravenly given in to, and that Chamberlain had made a great mistake.

That said, there are other historians who point out that neither Britain nor France were militarily prepared for war in September 1938 and that the deal, whatever its precise morality, and despite the unforgiveable abandoning of the Czechs, did give both France but particularly Britain a crucial further year in which to re-arm and, in particular, build up an air force, the air force which went on to win the Battle of Britain in the summer of 1940. It was only by a sliver that we won the Battle of Britain, thus maintaining the island of Britain as a launchpad for what eventually came the D-Day invasions.

If war had broken out in 1938, Britain might have lost and been invaded (doubtful but possible), America would never have entered the war, and Europe might have become an impenetrable Nazi fortress. Chamberlain certainly didn’t achieve the ‘peace in our time’ which he so hoped for; but maybe he did secure a vital breathing space for democracy. Historians will discuss these and other possible variations for generations…

The thriller

Whatever the rights and wrongs of the real-life, historical diplomacy, it is these hectic days leading up to 30 September, which Harris describes in minute and fascinating detail, and from both sides.

Because the book is made up of alternating chapters, following the parallel experiences of two well-placed if junior civil service figures, one on the Nazi side, one in Chamberlain’s staff.

In London we follow the working routine and then increasingly hectic preparations for flying to the conference of Hugh Legat, Oxford-educated Third Secretary in Chamberlain’s staff, very much the bottom of an elaborate hierarchy of civil servants. Through his eyes we see the bureaucracy of Number Ten Downing Street in action, as Legat interacts with his civil service bosses and Chamberlain himself (and his wife), fetching and carrying papers, writing up notes to meetings and so on.

In all these passages you can sense the intense research Harris has put in to document with meticulous accurately the layout of the buildings, the furnishing of each room, who attended which meeting, what they looked like, their personal quirks and nicknames, what was said, etc, in immense detail.

On the German side, we meet Paul von Hartmann, a junior official in the Foreign Ministry, as he, too, goes about various bureaucratic tasks, again gradually giving us insider knowledge of every personage in the German government, with pen portraits of senior civil servants, military figures as well as glimpses of the Führer himself.

Why these two protagonists? Because Harris places them at the heart of the thriller plot he has woven into the real historical events. We now know that during the Munich Crisis a group of senior figures in the Nazi regime and army met to discuss overthrowing Hitler, if the crisis blew up into full-scale war. Hartmann is one of these conspirators and so, through his eyes, we witness one of their meetings and are party to various panic-stricken phone calls among them as the crisis escalates.

None of the conspirators were western liberals. They hated reparations just as much as Hitler, they wanted to unravel the Versailles treaty, they wanted a strong Greater Germany and they were in favour of annexing the Sudetenland. They just disagreed with Hitler’s approach. They thought his brinkmanship would plunge Germany into a war it wasn’t yet militarily ready to win. And so, if the talks failed and war was declared, they were prepared to overthrow the Nazi regime and assassinate Hitler.

To this end they steal secret documents which show that Hitler had planned not only the Sudeten Crisis, and the full-blown invasion of all Czechoslovakia, but has a deeper plan to invade eastwards in order to expand Germany’s Lebensraum. This ‘incriminating’ document is a memo of a meeting Hitler held with his chiefs of staff back in November 1937. It conclusively shows that the Sudetenland is not the end, but only the start of Hitler’s territorial ambitions.

The documents are handed to Hartmann by his lover in the Ministry, Frau Winter, who is part of the plot and stole it from a Ministry safe. At a meeting of the conspirators Hartmann realises he must pass this document on to the British delegation at the conference, and his fellow conspirators agree.

Thriller tropes

It’s at this point that you enter what could be called ‘thrillerland’ i.e a whole series of familiar thriller plotlines and tropes.

First tension is raised as Hartmann takes a train out to a Berlin suburb for the meeting of conspirators, convinced he is being followed or watched.
Later he makes a copy of a top secret Nazi document and then bumps into people who, he thinks, are watching him too closely, asking too many questions. Do they suspect?

It is, after all, Nazi Germany, which comes with a ready-made atmosphere of guilt and paranoia.

Hartmann then has to wangle his way into the delegation travelling with Hitler by train from Berlin to Munich for the conference. He manages to do this but at the price of raising the suspicions of his superior, an SS Sturmbahnfūhrer, Sauer, a senior figure in the delegation who from that point onwards keeps a very close watch on Hartmann. When Hartmann takes advantage of a short stop he phones his office in Berlin to make sure that Legat is on the British delegation. His paranoia forces him to find hiding places for both the document and the pistol he has brought with him, leading to heart-thumping moments when he returns to check his hiding places and see if they’re still there.

Why is Hartmann so concerned that Legat be on the British delegation. Because they had been friends once, when Hartmann was on a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford, where Legat was a student. Now he hopes to use Legat as a conduit to the British Prime Minister.

To this end, back in London and a few days earlier, Hartmann had used contacts in England to anonymously drop off less important but still secret Nazi documents at Legat’s flat in Westminster. Legat hears something coming through his letterbox but by the time he’s gone into the hall, the car with the deliverymen is long gone.

When Legat hands these documents into the authorities, he is called to the office of Foreign Office mandarin Sir Alexander Cadogan where he is introduced to a secret service colonel, Menzies. Menzies questions him and Legat reveals his friendship with Hartmann from their carefree Oxford days back at Balliol College in 1932. They had been very close friends and Legat had gone over to Munich that summer to go on a walking holiday with Hartmann in the mountains.

Menzies judges that Hartmann is obviously a member of the German ‘opposition’ (which British security have heard rumours about) and may wish to communicate with Legat in Munich. Therefore he gets Legat’s immediate superior, Cecil Syers (Chamberlain’s Private Secretary) bumped off the British delegation – much to his anger – and Legat replaces him. But with a mission – to be professional and discreet and do nothing to undermine this vital diplomatic mission – but to be alert to an approach from his old friend and to report back on its contents and intentions. Without wishing to, he has in effect been recruited as a spy.

Legat’s presence enables Harris to give the reader a first-hand account of the Chamberlain entire trip, from packing bags at Number 10, the taxi to Heston airport, the flight, the landing, the official greeting, taxis to the hotel, and then on to the Führerbau for the official reception and then meetings with Il Duce and Der Führer.

The descriptions of all these scenes reek of decades of in-depth research. Which kind of plane, the layout inside it, the sound of take-off, what refreshments were served – all of it is utterly believable but also smells a bit of the study, of the careful poring over dry old memoirs and diaries to recreate every aspect of the scene.

Those 54 books listed in the acknowledgments underpin the detailed descriptions of who was wearing what at the diplomatic reception party which precedes the actual talks, who Mussolini was talking to, what Goering was wearing, even down to the expression on Hitler’s face as he first walks down the grand staircase into the assembled diplomats.

All of it reeks of authenticity and former journalist who has done his research to a T, and all of it makes the book a fascinating account of events – right down to the way that Legat literally stumbles upon the Czech delegation (Foreign Office official Masarik and Czech Minister to Berlin Mastny) being kept in virtual house arrest by SS guards directly under Hitler’s orders – a fact he passes on to his own superiors who filter it up to the PM.

So all these descriptions make it feel like you are there. But as to the thriller plot… for once a Harris thriller failed to really catch light for me. It contains umpteen thriller tropes and moments – we share Hartmann’s stress and anxiety as he hides the incriminating document from the SS man who suspects him – and then tries to give this man the slip once everyone is at the Führerbau, the anonymous men who drop the document through Legat’s letterbox and make off in a car in the dark.

Similarly, from the moment Legat is given his spying mission by Colonel Menzies he certainly feels stiff and self-conscious. A big stumbling block comes when his superiors (not knowing about the mission Menzies has given him) instruct him to stay at the British delegations’s hotel and keep the phone line open to London to report developments, thus stymying his intention of going to the Führerbau and searching for Hartmann. Another uptick in the sense of tension.

But in the end Legat evades this order on a pretext, gets to the big Nazi building, almost immediately sees Hartmann, follows him down backstairs to the basement, out into the car park and then through local streets to a busy Bierkeller and out into the garden where they can talk in secret and that talk… is strangely inconsequential. As in, it doesn’t reveal any really big or new facts.

The crux of their conversation is this: Hartmann and his people want war to break out, so that they can recruit as many high-level German officials as possible to their plan to mount a coup and overthrow the irresponsible warmonger Hitler. This is why Hartmann hands Legat the Nazi memo dating from November 1937 which clearly states that Czechoslovakia is only the beginning of Hitler’s plans. It must be given to Chamberlain in order to make him realise that Hitler is a mad warmonger, and the final invasion of Czechoslovakia and much more will happen regardless of agreement in Munich. Chamberlain must see the memo in order to stiffen his resolve to stand up to Hitler, even if it prompts a crisis, even if it prompts war. Good. That is what the conspirators want. Or, as Hartmann puts it:

‘If Chamberlain refuses tonight to continue to negotiate under duress, then Hitler will invade Czechoslovakia tomorrow. And the moment he issues that order, everything will change, and we in the opposition, in the Army and elsewhere, will take care of Hitler.’

Chamberlain mustn’t sign a peace. If he signs a peace treaty then Hitler will be immensely popular inside Germany as the man who created a Greater Germany without firing a shot: all the waverers Hartmann and the conspirators hope to recruit will fall in line behind him. Hitler will become unstoppable. But, Legat points out, this is all hugely speculative:

Legat folded his arms and shook his head. ‘It is at this point that I’m afraid you lose me. You want my country to go to war to prevent three million Germans joining Germany, on the off chance that you and your friends can then get rid of Hitler?’ (p.297-98)

Which Hartmann has to concede, does sum up his position. And when it is stated like that, not only Hartmann and Legat realise how unlikely the position is… but so does the reader. This could never happen, the reader thinks, with the added dampener that the reader of course knows that it did not happen. At the heart of the book is a little cloak and dagger adventure among a handful of men, boiling down to these two old friends, which doesn’t amount to a hill of beans and doesn’t change anything.

So the old ‘friends’ have met, exchanged the document, and Hartmann has laid his proposition on the line. What happens in the final hundred pages?

Chamberlain refuses the Nazi memo

Both men return to their delegations and tasks which are described with documentary accuracy. But overnight Hartmann sees no sign of change in the British position and he suddenly decides to abandon diplomacy and care for his cover. He shoulders his way into the British delegation, confronts Legat and forces him to take him to Chamberlain’s room.

There Hartmann begs five minutes of Chamberlain’s time and presents him with the 1937 Nazi war plan. Chamberlain reads it and his reaction is interesting, in a way the most interesting part of the book. Chamberlain says it is entirely inappropriate for Hartmann to have pushed in like this; it breaks the chain of command on both sides, and it undermines the present negotiations; because Chamberlain is interested in the present, not what Hitler may or may not have said 6 months, or a year or five years ago. From the point of view of the professional negotiator, all that matters is what your opposite number says in the room, now. What he says and signs up to now supersedes all previous declarations. I thought that was an interesting insight into negotiating tactics as a whole.

Chamberlain reads the stolen memo but rejects it and its contents and asks Hartmann to leave, and then instructs Legat to burn it. It has no bearing on the present.

This is a very interesting scene in terms of being an education in how actual diplomacy and negotiation works, but it militates the entire basis of the thriller. the Big Secret is out. The Key Document has been shown to the Prime Minister. The Secret men and women risked their lives for, cloak and dagger letter drops in London took place for, which Legat was subbed onto the British Legation for and Hartmann played sweaty cat and mouse with his SS boss for – has finally been delivered and… nothing happens. Chamberlain says: I am ignoring it. Burn it.

Oh. OK. Hard not to feel the tension Harris has built up with all the backstairs meetings and SS searches suddenly leak away like the air from a punctured balloon.

Leyna

Throughout the narrative Legat has dropped occasional hints about a woman named Leyna, who made up the third element in his friendship with Hartmann. Only now, towards the end of the book, do we find out more.

A few hours after they’ve both been turfed out of Chamberlain’s office, Legat is fast asleep in his room at the hotel being used by the British, when there’s a knock and it’s Hartmann who tells him to get dressed. Hartmann takes him outside to car he’s (conveniently) borrowed and then drives Legat out of Munich into the countryside, to a village called Dachau and stops outside the barbed wire fence of the concentration camp there.

To my surprise, Legat is not impressed, and says officials in Britain know all about these camps, Stalin has as many if not more but they have to deal with him, too. Hartmann points out that within weeks, if the Nazis annex the Sudetenland, some Sudeten Germans, now free – communists and Jews and homosexuals – will be behind the wire being worked to death at Dachau. Yes, replies Legat, but then how many would survive the aerial bombing and street fighting which will occur if Chamberlain refuses a settlement and prompts war, which will end up with Czechoslovakia still being occupied and victims still being carted off by the SS.

This is an interesting debate but it has now lost the element of being a thriller. For me this felt like a purely cerebral, intellectual debate about what was at stake at Munich.

Anyway, it turns out this isn’t what Hartmann wanted to show him. Some Dachau guards notice the pair bickering in the car and turn the floodlights on them, so our guys beat a hasty retreat and Hartmann then drives Legat on for a further hour until they arrive at a remote mansion in the country with, Legat notices, the windows barred, no notices on the noticeboard in the cold hallway which smells of antiseptic.

Now we learn two things. Harris gives us a flashback to that summer of 1932, when, after walking in the woods, the three friends drove back into Munich and Leyna insisted on going to the apartment block where Hitler lived, surrounded by Nazi bodyguards.

As the would-be Führer (he was famous but had still not been made German Chancellor) leaves the building Leyna shouts loudly ‘NIECE-FUCKER’ at him. This was based on the rumours that Hitler had had an affair with his niece, Geli Raubel, who he forced to live with him in this apartment block and kept a maniacal watch over. In his absence, on 18 September 1931, Gaubl apparently shot herself dead with Hitler’s pistol. Was he having an affair with her? Was she pregnant with his child? Did she kill herself, or was it a put-up job by party apparatchiks who realised her existence threatened the Führer’s career. Whatever the truth (and historians argue about it to this day) there were enough lurid rumours around to allow Leyna to shout this insult at the future Führer as he emerged from his apartment, and to anger his SA guards, some of whom turn from protecting their boss and give chase to Leyna, Hartmann and Legat. The SA guards chase after our threesome who split up in a warren of alleyways.

Legat finds his way back to Hartmann and Leyna’s apartment. In the melee outside the apartment, someone had punched him in the eye and now it is swollen closed. Layna leans over Legat to apply a poultice, and he pulls her head down and kisses her. They make love. It wasn’t crystal clear to me earlier but now the text makes clear that Leyna was Hartmann’s girlfriend. So she has ‘betrayed’ him, and so has his best friend. Thus there is an emotional and sexual ‘betrayal’ at the heart of this plot which is about numerous betrayals, or betrayal on many levels: Hartmann betraying his Führer; Chamberlain betraying the Czechs, and now friend betraying friend. And so on.

This, frankly, felt a lot too ‘pat’ and convenient to me. Formulaic. It had the thumping inevitability of a cheap made-for-TV movie (which is how the book might well end up, since it has none of the really big action scenes required by a modern movie).

Now, in another development which seemed to me equally clichéd, it turns out that Leyna has ended up here in this mournful, isolated care home for the mentally defective. We now learn that: a) Hartmann found out about Leyna’s ‘betrayal’ and they split up b) she got more heavily into communist politics and married a communist who was subsequently killed in the Spanish Civil War, but c) she continued being an organiser of an underground communist newspaper till she was arrested by the Gestapo and badly beaten. Hartmann points out that Leyna was of Jewish heritage (which I don’t think anybody had mentioned earlier). With the result that the SS beat her unconscious, before or after carving a star of David into her back, and then threw her out of a third floor window. She survived in body, but was permanently brain damaged. Hartmann found out, and used his contacts to get her a place here in this out-of-the-way hospice.

This plot development, coming late on in the story, did three things for me:

1. It is a gross and characteristic example of the brutality of the Third Reich i.e. it has the effect of undermining all the diplomats fussing about precedence back in Munich. I think that is its intention, to show you the brutality behind the diplomatic veneer. But it has the unintended consequence, fictionally, imaginatively of making all the rest of the text, with its precise observations of diplomatic procedure, seem pale and irrelevant.

2. Indeed Hartmann picks up this idea, and makes an impassioned speech explaining that this is what he and Legat didn’t realise when they airily debated national Socialism back at Oxford, what their lofty Oxford education didn’t at all prepare them for: for the sheer bestial irrationality of the regime, its violence, which no diplomatic niceties can contain (‘This is what I have learned these past six years, as opposed to what is taught at Oxford: the power of unreason.’ p.374)

3. But I also couldn’t help the feminist in me rising up a bit and thinking – why does this point have to be made over the mute, unspeaking body of a tortured and disfigured woman – for Leyna is brain-damaged and recognises neither Hartmann nor Legat (p.373)?

Why is the central woman in their menage reduced to silence? Is it, in itself, a sort of feminist point, that the entire diplomatic circus, Hitler’s blusterings and Chamberlain’s prissy precisionism and French cowardice, all this describes the world of men, the men who would soon plunge the entire world into a war in which millions more totally innocent women and children would be murdered?

Back in Munich

Hartmann drives Legat back to his hotel in Munich as the last day of the Munich conference, and the novel, dawns.

Legat is shaving when he hears a noise in his bedroom and gets in just in time to see a man exiting by the door into the corridor. This scene reminded me of numerous Tintin books where the hero gives chase to the ‘strange man’ who turns a corner and disappears, leaving our hero to trudge back to his room half-dressed, bumping into a startled member of the delegation on the way.

Back in his room, Legat discovers that he has, of course, been burgled and that the incriminating Nazi memorandum from November 1937, the one which had been stolen and given to Hartmann to show to Chamberlain, who rejected it and told Legat to destroy – well, Legat like a fool hadn’t destroyed it, and he now discovers that whoever was searching his room found it. What an idiot he’s been. He has jeopardised his friend’s life – and all for nothing!

So Legat finishes dressing and goes along to the Prime Minister’s room where he just about persuades Chamberlain to let him (Legat) accompany Chamberlain to his last meeting with Hitler.

Chamberlain has had the bright idea of requesting a one-on-one meeting with Hitler in order to present him with the text of a speech he (Hitler) made a week earlier, in which he had pledged eternal friendship between Germany and Britain. Chamberlain has had his officials convert this speech into a pledge, a declaration, a binding document. He hopes to persuade Hitler to sign it and thus secure ‘peace in our time’.

And now, thanks to Harris’s clever interleaving of historical fact with spy fiction, Legat gets to witness this meeting at first hand, and so do we. We are given the entire scene in which a translator translates into German the couple of paragraphs in which Chamberlain has recast Hitler’s pledge of friendship between Britain and Germany and, to his slight surprise, Hitler signs it.

And now the delegation packs up, catches its taxis to the airport and flies home. It is only as they land that one of the pair of female typists who have accompanied the delegation, to type up the various notes and memos, corners Legat.

As Chamberlain gets out of the plane and holds an impromptu press conference, waving the little piece of paper with Hitler’s signature on it, this secretary tells Legat that she is also a recruit of British Security, tasked with keeping an eye on Legat. And that she had earlier broken into Legat’s bedroom, professionally searched it, found the incriminating memo and removed it; so that the burglar who Legat disturbed, and who ran off down the corridor, did not have the incriminating memo after all. Hartmann is in the clear.

And indeed in the last couple of pages we learn that Hartmann was not arrested by his hyper-suspicious boss, Sauer, and continued to serve the Nazi regime until he was involved in the 20 July 1944 bomb plot against Hitler, at which point he was arrested, interrogated and hanged.

Comment

This is a fascinating and deeply researched description of the Munich Crisis which opened my eyes about the details of the actual negotiations and the issues at stake. But despite early promise, the thriller element never caught fire for me. If you come to the book with the mindset that the whole future of Europe is at stake, then maybe you can make every one of the small tense incidents (secret documents, secret meetings) have a vast world-shattering importance.

But I came to it knowing what came afterwards (i.e. the entire conspiracy fails, is completely inconsequential) which continually poured cold water on attempts to get me excited. Even if both the protagonists had been arrested, tortured and bumped off, it wouldn’t ultimately have made any difference, not if you bear in mind what was about to follow i.e. the deaths of tens of millions of people.

For a thriller to work you have to believe the fate of the protagonists is of total, nailbiting importance. But nice enough though these two young chaps seemed to be, the book failed to make me care very much about them.

Shit and fuck

Part of this was because the characters just seemed too modern to me. They seemed contemporary, not creatures from what is becoming a remote past. Legat and Hartmann and many of the other characters completely lacked, for me, the old trappings, the genuinely old and remote mindset of that period – not only its embedded sexism and racism, but the entire imperial and class assumptions of their time and class. When you read fiction written at that time (late 1930s) you are continually pulled up sort by all kinds of period assumptions, about race and sex and class, not to mention that actual vocabulary and phraseology and turns of speech. The ruling class really did say ‘Top hole’, and ‘I say’, and ‘old chap’, and was drenched in expectations of privilege and deference.

None of this really came over in Harris’s book. Instead the characters came over as entirely up-to-date modern thriller protagonists. They think logically and clearly, with no emotion, like computers, uninfluenced by ideology or the beliefs of their era. Hartmann says he is a German nationalist, but nowhere in his conversations with Legat, or in his thoughts which we are privy to throughout the book, does any of that come across. He is a good German nationalist and yet his attitude to the Nazis’ anti-Semitism could come from a Guardian editorial.

There is little sense that these people belonged to a different time, with its own, now long-lost values and assumptions.

A small but symptomatic indication of this was Harris’s use of the words shit and fuck. His characters think ‘shit’ and ‘fuck’ in a way you would never find in, say Graham Greene or Evelyn Waugh writing in 1938. Hartmann sees roadsweepers and thinks not that they are shovelling up horse droppings, but cleaning horse ‘shit’.

When Hartmann is lying in the bed of his mistress, Frau Winter, he notes the photo of her husband on her cabinet and wonder if she fantasises, when they make love, that she is ‘still fucking Captain Winter’.

The half a dozen times Harris uses the word ‘fuck’ completed the process of making his characters sound like post-1960s, brutally explicit, modern-day thriller protagonists. The use of ‘shit’ and ‘fuck’, for me, not only upset the register of the narrative but begged the bigger question of whether he was at all inhabiting the minds of the people of the day – or simply ventriloquising them from an irredeemably 21st century perspective.

Without a doubt the book is a fascinating account of the nitty-gritty of the Munich meeting, of the nuts and bolts of key events and main players – but it failed for me a) as a thriller, because the Big Secret which is meant to underpin a thriller in fact is revealed a hundred pages before the end and turns out not to matter at all – and b) as a fictional attempt to enter the minds and mindsets of these long-dead people.

All the people felt like they were just waiting to be turned into the characters of another film adaptation, an adaptation in which all the good guys will have impeccably #metoo and politically correct attitudes about everything, who will be fighting for decency as we define it in 2019 – instead of being the much more difficult and potentially unlikeable characters you’d expect to meet from that period.

Munich is an effectively written account of the events, with a clever but ultimately disappointing thriller plot slipped in – but not a very good fictional guide or insight into the lost values and psychology of that remote and ever-more-distant era.

Robert Harris’s thrillers

1992 Fatherland – Berlin 1964. Germany won the Second World War. Xavier March is a cop in Berlin, capital of the huge German Empire. The discovery of a corpse in a lake leads him on an increasingly nail-biting investigation into the dark heart of the Nazi regime and its most infamous secret which, in this terrifying parallel universe, has been completely buried.

1995 Enigma – Bletchley Park 1943, where a motley collection of maths, computer and coding geniuses are trying to crack the Germans’ Enigma codes. The hero – weedy geek Tom Jericho – discovers that the gorgeous, sexy woman who seduced him and then as casually dumped him a month later, is in fact a spy, stealing top secret intercepts from the base for her Polish lover. Or is she?

1998 Archangel – Dr Christopher ‘Fluke’ Kelso, a populist historian of contemporary Russia, stumbles across one of the secrets of the century – that the great dictator Josef Stalin had a son, brought up by communist fanatics in the forests of the frozen north, who is now ready to return to claim his rightful position as the ‘Great Leader’ and restore Russia to her former glory.

2007 The Ghost – The unnamed narrator is a ghost writer called in to complete the memoirs of former UK Prime Minister Adam Lang (a thinly disguised portrait of Tony Blair) after the previous writer died mysteriously. Marooned with the politico and his staff in a remote mansion on the coast of New England, the ghost writer slowly uncovers a shattering conspiracy.

2011 The Fear Index A series of bizarre incidents plague American physics professor-turned-multi-billionaire hedge fund manager, Alex Hoffmann. Slowly it becomes clear they are all related to the launch of the latest version of his artificial intelligence program – VIXEL-4 – designed to identify and manage anxiety and fear on the financial markets, but which has gone significantly, bewilderingly, beyond its money-making remit.

2013 An Officer and a Spy A long, absorbing fictional recreation of the Dreyfus Affair which divided France at the end of the 19th century, seen from the point of view of a French army officer who played a key role in the prosecution of Alfred Dreyfus as a German spy, and then slowly, to his horror, uncovers the evidence which proves that Dreyfus was innocent all along, and his trial one of the great miscarriages of justice in history.

2016 Conclave

2017 Munich A young German civil servant tries to smuggle a key document showing Hitler’s true intentions to his opposite number during the fateful Munich Conference of September 1939, complicated by the fact that the pair were once friends who shared a mistress until she met a terrible fate at the hands of the Gestapo.

Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (5) by James M. McPherson (1987)

Stepping back from the detail, this reader’s general sense of the actual fighting of the American Civil War – having just finished this 860-page book about it – was that the slaughter steadily escalated, until tens of thousands were being killed and wounded at each brutal, bloody, slogged-out battle, causing death and injury on such a scale you’d have thought they’d be decisive.

And yet they weren’t. There was a terrible fatality or weakness about the commanding generals on both sides which prevented them from landing really knockout blows and allowed the war to drag on for years longer than necessary.

The reader gets very impatient with General George B. McClellan who was in charge of the north’s largest army, the Army of the Potomac. He was, by all accounts, an excellent organiser of armies and inspirer of men who, however, turned out to be pathologically reluctant to risk his shiny military machine in actual battle. And, on the rare occasions when he did engage and repel the Confederates, McClellan consistently failed to pursue and crush them, allowing them to retreat, lick their wounds, regroup, re-arm and come again. Eventually, President Lincoln became so impatient with McClellan’s fatal indecisiveness that he sacked him.

But, to the reader’s frustration, the same thing turns out to be true of his replacement, Major General George Meade, who commanded the northern army at the Battle of Gettysburg (July 1 to 3 1863), massacring the rebels as they tried to storm his men entrenched along Cemetery Hill.

But then, when Confederate General Robert E. Lee called off the rebel attack and withdrew, Meade refused the calls from his officers, and from Lincoln himself, to pursue and crush the exhausted southern survivors – thus ensuring that Lee could withdraw, regroup, and that the war went on for another two years!

Apparently, a contemporary satirist described the armies of the American Civil War as little more than armed mobs wandering over the Virginia countryside at random, occasionally bumping into each other, massacring each other, then wandering off again with no decisive result. For long periods of time this satire does seem to be true.

According to McPherson, the siege and capture of the rebel stronghold of Vicksburg, which took place at the same time as the enormous Battle of Gettysburg (May to July 1863), marked a turning point in the war – but quite clearly neither was a knockout blow, and the South continued to field armies for 24 more bloody months, two years of bludgeoning, desperate bloodletting, as bigger and bigger armies engaged for longer and longer, at the costs of tens of thousands of eviscerated mangled bodies, with an enormous loss of life and treasure.

Meanwhile, as the generals of both sides failed to win the war, the conflict was nonetheless a time of rapid social, economic and technological change.

Military innovation

The generals initially carried on implementing Napoleonic battle strategy i.e. close ranked men march forwards, protected by cavalry on the flanks, until they’re within range to charge and close the enemy with bayonets – at which point the enemy breaks and runs, hopefully.

However, this was the war during which the rifle replaced the smooth-bore musket. Rifling made a bullet fly further and more accurately. This meant rifle fire could now kill men at three or four times the distance i.e. infantry advancing in the old style were cut down like grass.

Suddenly the advantage was with well-entrenched defenders. This explains the carnage at the Battle of Antietam as attacking Union troops found themselves funnelled into a lane which led towards the Confederate positions, and were mown down in their thousands. Or the carnage at Fredericksburg, where Union troops walked towards a solid wall at the base of St Marye’s Heights lined with Confederates assembled in ranks who fired in sequence – it was like walking towards machine guns.

It’s in the last two hundred pages, from the year 1864, that the power of defensive trenches really comes into its own, with the enormous losses suffered by Union soldiers trying to take rebel trenches at Spotsylvania and Petersburg. Here the fighting anticipated the appalling attrition rates of the First World War.

Arguably the single biggest reason why the American Civil War was so long and so blood was the development of the rifle, and the advantage it gave defenders in any battle (page 477 and following pages).

The scale of the slaughter

Some of the slaughter was awe-inspiring. The massacre at Antietam Creek left 6,000 men dead and some 17,000 wounded – four times the total number suffered on the Normandy beaches on D-Day – more than all American casualties in the War of 1812, the Mexican War and the Spanish-American war combined.

Similarly, the three-day Battle of Gettysburg was an abattoir, with some 8,000 killed out of about 50,000 casualties. Even relatively minor encounters seemed to result in appalling rates of death and maiming. Some 620,000 men from both armies died in the civil war. It was a catastrophe.

Disease the biggest killer in most wars

But disease was an even bigger killer than rifles and artillery. For every soldier who died in battle, two died of disease. The biggest killers were intestinal complaints such as dysentery and diarrhoea, which alone claimed more men than did battle wounds. Other major killers were measles, smallpox, malaria and pneumonia.

The fundamental basis of modern medicine – the fact that microscopic bacteria spread infections – had not yet been discovered. Medicine was, as McPherson puts it, still in the Middle Ages. The result was that no-one appreciated the importance of sterile dressings, antiseptic surgery, and the vital importance of sanitation and hygiene.

The impact of disease was so severe that it disrupted or led to the cancellation of a number of military campaigns. (p.488)

The changing role of women

McPherson goes out of his way in several places to discuss the changing positions of women. This is especially true of his section on medicine and nursing during the war where, in a nutshell, certain strong-willed women followed the example of Florence Nightingale during the Crimean War and set up nursing homes and went into the field as nurses. These women nurses and organisers impressed the medical establishment, the army and the politicians, and made many men revise their opinion of women’s toughness.

Notable pioneers included Clara Barton and Mary-Anne Bickerdyke (page 483). In 1849 Elizabeth Blackwell became the first American woman to earn an MD.

The same went for factories and agriculture, specially in the North, where women were called in to replace men, and permanently expanded cultural norms about what women were capable of (pages 477 to 489).

Financial innovations

But arguably the most profound changes wrought by the Civil War – and certainly the most boring to read about – were the financial innovations it prompted.

To finance the war the northern government instituted the first ever federal income tax, on 5 August 1861. Taxes on other goods followed quickly under the Internal Revenue Act of 1862 which taxed ‘almost everything but the air northerners breathed’ (p.447) including liquor, tobacco and playing cards, carriages, yachts and billiard tables, taxes on newspaper adverts and patent medicines, licence taxes on virtually every profession, stamp taxes, taxes on the gross receipts of corporations, banks, insurance companies and the dividends or interest they paid investors.

The relationship of the American taxpayer to the government was never the same again.

This was accompanied by a Legal Tender Act of 1862 which issued, for the first time, a federal currency. Up to this point each of the states had had their own treasury and their own forms of payment. Now the Federal government set out to supersede all these with the green dollar bills it produced by the million. These soon became known as ‘greenbacks’ and endure to this day.

Having revolutionised the country’s monetary and tax structures, the 37th Congress (1861 to 1862) did the same for public land, higher education and railways.

McPherson shows how the economic dynamism of the north had been hampered and blocked for decades by southern states suspicious that every attempt to spread its free market, industrial culture was an attack on the South’s slave-based, agricultural economy.

Once the southern states seceded the Congress, now representing solely northern states, was set free to unleash its free market vision. A homestead act granted 160 acres of land to settlers who developed it for five years, underpinning the explosive expansion westwards.

A Vermont congressman developed a bill to make 30,000 acres of public land in each state available for the founding of further education, and especially agricultural colleges, establishing a network of institutions which ensured the most efficient exploitation of farmland by American farmers for generations to come.

And the Pacific Railroad Act granted land and money for a railway which eventually ran from Omaha to San Francisco. Much of the land dealing and speculation about the construction of this and later railways became notorious for corruption and sharp practices. But nonetheless the railways were built, connecting people, services and supplies across this vast continent.

Taken together these changes amounted to a ‘blueprint for modern America’, a:

new America of big business, heavy industry, and capital-intensive agriculture that surpassed Britain to become the foremost industrial nation by 1880 and became the world’s breadbasket for much of the twentieth century… (p.452)

The capitalists, labourers and farmers of the north and west superseded the plantation aristocracy of the South in the economic and political system, permanently remodelling America as a high-finance, industrialised, capitalist country.

Reconstruction

And this is the background to the idea of ‘Reconstruction’.

As in any war, the war aims of both sides changed over time. Initially most northern Democrats and many Republicans simply wanted the southern states to de-secede and return to the Union, more or less as they were.

But savvier radicals realised that there would have to be drastic changes in southern economy, culture and politics if the whole nation wasn’t simply to return to the permanently blocked political deadlocks of the decades which led up to the conflict.

Even slow-to-change Abe Lincoln realised that the South would have to be remade on the model of the industrialised, capitalist North. Having been devastated, economically, in terms of war dead, in terms of goods and assets destroyed, burned and bombed to bits, and having had the fundamental underpinning of its entire economic existence – slavery – abolished, the South would need to be entirely rebuilt from scratch.

This is what the term ‘Reconstruction’ came to mean and McPherson’s book comes to an abrupt stop just before it begins. His book ends with the end of the war, with the moving encounter between the old enemies as Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Union General Ulysses S. Grant on 9 April 1865, and then Confederate troops came in and surrendered their weapons to their Union victors.

A short epilogue fleetingly references the assassination of Abraham Lincoln on 15 April 1865, the vast funeral, the flight of Confederate president Jefferson Davis and half a dozen other events which quickly followed in the wake of peace – but that’s it as far as McPherson’s account is concerned.

The whole enormous story of what came next:

the attempts to reconstruct the South and their long-term impact, in terms of poverty and ongoing racial prejudice
the conquest of the West and the so-called Indian Wars
the astonishing industrial and financial rise of the North until America was on a par with the mightiest European powers

remains to be told in the next book in the series of the Penguin history of America.

Confederate General Robert E. Lee (left) signs the terms of surrender to Union General Ulyses S. Grant on 9 April 1865, as painted by Tom Lovell in 1964

Confederate General Robert E. Lee (left) signs the terms of surrender to Union General Ulysses S. Grant on 9 April 1865, as painted by Tom Lovell in 1964

Eyewitness: Hungarian Photography in the 20th Century @ the Royal Academy

‘It is not enough to have talent, you also have to be Hungarian.’
(Robert Capa)

This exhibition is being staged to coincide with Hungary holding the presidency of the European Union in 2011. It follows in detail the careers of five major twentieth century photographers born in Hungary, all of whom emigrated and found fame in the West, but brought with them a distinctively Hungarian sensibility.

The five are Brassaï, Robert Capa, André Kertész, László Moholy-Nagy, Martin Munkácsi, and the exhibition follows their careers, decade by decade, through the mid-twentieth century – but the exhibition also features many fascinating and striking works by their predecessors and contemporaries in Hungary in a dazzling display of over 200 striking, original and evocative works by over two dozen photographers.

Hungary 1914 to 1939

The exhibition is spread over seven rooms, the first two of which describe the culture of pre-Great War Hungary, the capital, Budapest, famous for its cafes, its booming journalism and for innovative pictorial editing. Newspapers and magazines made increasing use of photographs as the printing technology to reproduce original images a) improved b) spread.

In the late 1920s hand-held cameras using rolls of celluloid film rather than glass plates became more widely available, and allowed for the development of a new genre and profession, that of photo-journalist, able to capture newsworthy events quickly.

These early rooms include works by Angelo and József Pécsi, who incorporated techniques pioneered after the war associated with the art movement of New Objectivity: specifically, experimental lighting, cropping images, unexpected angles. Women photographers were welcomed, including Eva Besnyö. Kata Kálmán pioneered social-documentary photography. There are great photos by Károly Escher and Ferenc Haar.

All that said, Hungary was still – like much of Europe – an overwhelmingly agricultural society. One photographer in particular, Rudolf Balogh explored its rural landscapes and people. He was a leader of the Pictorialist movement, which used soft focus and special printing techniques to raise photography to the level of fine art.

Six Cattle, Hortobágy, 1930 by Rudolf Balogh

Fleeing fascism

The Great War led to the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Hungary became an independent country, as its nationalist wing had wished for much of the 19th century – but at the same time lost a huge amount of territory to the other new nations which were carved out in the Versailles settlement, for example the entirely new country of Czechoslovakia, and the now independent country of Poland.

In all it lost a staggering 72% of its territory and 64% of its population. Ethnic Hungarians fled from the territory incorporated in the other new nations. No longer was the country part of a huge, expansive and rich empire; now it was small and crowded and poor.

Unsurprisingly, this led to a right-wing populist backlash and, throughout the 1920s, the government became increasingly fascist, antisemitic and anti-intellectual. Those who could afford to, fled. These included all five of our photographers.

Moholy-Nagy moved to Germany in 1920 and became a pioneering teacher and designer at the Bauhaus, where he pioneered unconventional perspectives (looking down from the top of buildings, ideally at an angle) and camera-less photograms, where you place objects on photographic film, and turn on a light source, then turn it off – and when you develop the negative it has the shape and outline of whatever object or objects you placed on it. This lends itself to abstract and geometric shapes which fitted well with the Bauhaus aesthetic.

Radio Tower, Berlin 1928 by László Moholy-Nagy

Munkácsi (real name Marton Mermelstein) arrived in Berlin in 1928 where he found work with the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, a pioneer of modern photojournalistic layouts. He described photojournalism as:

seeing within a thousandth of a second the things that indifferent people blindly pass by

André Kertész arrived in Paris in 1925 it was said he was carrying only a camera and a Hungarian flute. He quickly found work at Vu magazine and held his first exhibition in 1927, showcasing his humour and, sometimes Surreal sense of composition.

Satiric Dancer (1926) by André Kertész

Brassaï (pseudonym of Gyula Halász) arrived in Paris in 1924. He was working as a journalist when André Kertész introduced him to photography which he took to like a duck to water. He quickly showed himself to have an acute eye, was taken up by the Parisian intelligentsia, and his name was made by his photographic book, Paris de nuit (1932). Henry Miller called him ‘the eye of Paris’. He spent the rest of his life in the city.

Original edition of Paris de Nuit, photos by Brassaï

New York

Martin Munkácsi arrived in New York in 1934 where he got a job with leading fashion magazine Harpers Bazaar. His experience as a sports photographer and his ability to capture dynamic movement revolutionised fashion photography. Commissioned to illustrate Harper’s ‘Palm Beach’ bathing suit editorial, Munkácsi had model Lucille Brokaw run toward the camera while he photographed. This was the first instance of a fashion model being photographed in motion.

The First Fashion Photo for Harper’s Bazaar (Lucile Brokaw) 1933 by Martin Munkacsi

He was soon at the top of a profession he had virtually invented, and his style went on to inspire up-and-coming photographers like Richard Avedon, Herb Ritts and Bruce Weber. Richard Avedon said of him:

He brought a taste for happiness and honesty and a love of women to what was, before him, a joyless, loveless, lying art. Today the world of what is called fashion is peopled with Munkácsi’s babies, his heirs.

Munkácsi’s influence in introducing ‘spontaneous’ outdoor, action photography into the stuffy world of fashion, and his influence on Avedon in particular, is made crystal clear in this juxtaposition.

Left: Martin Munkácsi (1934) Right: Homage to Munkácsi by Richard Avedon (1957)

When the Nazis closed down the Bauhaus, Moholy-Nagy fled, first to London, and then on to Chicago where he became Director of the New Bauhaus in 1937, although his job left him little time for photography.

Robert Capa, war photographer

Robert Capa (real name Endre Ernö Friedmann) moved to Paris in 1933. At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936, the editor of Vu magazine commissioned the 25-year-old Capa to go and photograph the conflict. His ability to get right to the front and capture moments of actual conflict made his reputation. When Picture Post published his Spanish photos, he was dubbed ‘the greatest war photographer in the world’. He would go on to photograph conflict in the Chinese war against Japan, in World War Two, specifically when he landed on Omaha Beach on D-Day, in the post-war Soviet Union, in Israel at its founding in 1948, and then in the IndoChina War where he was killed, stepping on a landmine, when he was only 40. Amazing life. Amazing legacy.

Robert Capa’s D-Day photos, 6 June 1944

In 1947 he was awarded the Freedom Medal, presented by Dwight Eisenhower. In the same year he set up the photography agency Magnum, along with fellow snappers Henri Cartier-Bresson, David Seymour and George Rodger.

Post-war

The final room traces Hungary’s sorry history from the 1940s to the 1980s. Under its military dictator, Admiral Horthy, Hungary entered the war on 26 June 1941 by declaring war on the Soviet Union, and six months later on the Allies. Once it became clear the Allies would win, Hungary tried to leave the war in 1943, and was occupied by German forces in March 1944, who installed a fascist Arrow Cross party in government and promptly started rounding up Hungary’s Jews and sending them to the death camps.

This was overthrown in 1944 by an interim government which declared war on Germany – now very much retreating before Soviet forces – and signed an armistice with the Allies in January 1945. In February 1946 Hungary was declared a republic, but two years later the Hungarian Workers Party was helped into power by the Soviet occupying forces, and imposed a copy of Stalin’s repressive communist regime.

After Stalin died in March 1953, a political thaw of sorts slowly spread through the eastern Bloc which led in October 1956 to a popular insurrection to overthrow the communist government, which the ‘liberal’ leader of the day, Imre Nagy, decided to support. Bad decision. Tanks from Russia and all the other communist bloc states invaded Hungary, crushed the insurrection.

Hungarian flag, with a hole where the communist emblem had been cut out – symbol of the 1956 revolution. Photographer unknown

Some 26,000 rebels were brought before the Hungarian courts, 22,000 were sentenced and imprisoned, 13,000 interned, and some 300 executed. These included Prime Minister Imre Nagy, executed after a secret trial in 1958. Approximately 200,000 fled Hungary as refugees.

The new, hard-line pro-Soviet communist government remained in power, supported by Russian tanks, until 1989.

The last couple of rooms show photographs of these dramatic events – war, revolution, insurrection, repression – and then document the decline of photography as an independent, experimental activity under harsh communist rule. Socialist Realism, heroic photos of happy peasants toiling in the fields, or workers smiling in steel factories, were what was required.

A little more individualism crept in during the 1970s, and then the trickle of information and styles from the West turned into a river with the advent of Mikhail Gorbachev as General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, and then a flood which, in 1989, was to tear down the barbed wire fencing the country off from the West, the overthrow of the communist authorities, free democratic elections, and the joining of the European Union.

Wedding by László Fejes (1965)

This photo by László Fejes won a World Press Photo prize in 1965 but the authorities disapproved because it showed all too clearly the bullet marks from the 1956 revolution, with the result that Fejes was banned from publishing photographs for years.

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Books & Boots

All posts tagged D-Day

Unconditional Surrender by Evelyn Waugh (1961)

1. Prologue: Locust Years

2. Book One: State Sword

HOO HQ Brompton

The sword of Stalingrad

Ludovic

Everard Spruce

The Kilbannocks

The Loot

Guy meets Ludovic

3. Book Two: Fin de Ligne

Virginia is pregnant

Guy is selected for parachute training

Guy’s father’s funeral

Quantitative judgments don’t apply

The first abortionist

The voodoo abortionist

Ludovic and the parachute training centre

Jumbo rescues Guy who moves in with Uncle Peregrine

4. Book Three: The Death Wish

Waning force

Ludovic and Brideshead Revisited

Virginia’s death

Some Jews escape

De Souza

The plane crash

The staged attack

The Jews

The coast

The fellow traveller

5. Epilogue: Festival of Britain

Summary

History of the language

New phrases

Americanisms

The wireless

Credit

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Munich by Robert Harris (2017)

The Munich Crisis

The thriller

Thriller tropes

Chamberlain refuses the Nazi memo

Leyna

Back in Munich

Comment

Shit and fuck

Related links

Robert Harris’s thrillers

Share this:

Like this:

Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (5) by James M. McPherson (1987)

Military innovation

The scale of the slaughter

Disease the biggest killer in most wars

The changing role of women

Financial innovations

Reconstruction

Other posts about American history

Origins

Seven Years War

War of Independence

Slavery

The civil war

Art

Share this:

Like this:

Eyewitness: Hungarian Photography in the 20th Century @ the Royal Academy

Hungary 1914 to 1939

Fleeing fascism

New York

Robert Capa, war photographer

Post-war

Related links

Press reviews