Hastings has his eccentricities. A somewhat tenuous-sounding connection bet- ween the bravery shown jumping fences in pursuit of foxes and the requirements of the battlefield sends him off on a harrumph about ‘socialists’ trying to ban hunting. And surely it’s an exaggeration to see a reform of military decorations, however ill-conceived, as numbering ‘among the most notable follies’ of the Major years. There is a streak in Hastings of the playing-fields-of-Eton school of military philosophy. One of his highest praise words is ‘gentlemen’. ‘Little’ men, both in terms of stature and status, are noticed if not always expressly deplored.
Members of the rural working class who served alongside Frederic Manning in the trenches are identified as ‘peasants’. The foster family of the American paratrooper commander ‘Slim Jim’ Gavin is pegged as ‘assuredly Irish’ on the grounds that the husband is a ‘weak-natured coalminer’ and the wife ‘a drunken virago who took in boarders and beat her stepson’. You sense that the author has views, too, on the national characteristics of Johnny Gurkha, Johnny Frenchman and Johnny Vietnamese.
It was said of Tennyson that he had a brain like a great big old farmhouse clock. So it is with Hastings. There’s no bounce or swerve in his delivery, no ambivalence or nuance: opinions are stated firmly and with big, bold swings of the pendulum. His virtues are clarity and decisiveness — greatly to be admired when it comes to making clear, for the lay reader, roughly what is going on in the fiendishly complex and bloody engagements he describes. He seldom loses you.
Tick-tock. The format of each essay is the same. He introduces the hero of the chapter, and turns up the particular sorts of martial distinctions that make him worthy of our attention. A page or so in, he starts up with where and when his warrior was born and the professions of his parents. A brisk summation of the early career follows, then the meat of the adventures. Finally, a rather schoolmasterly conclusion in which the virtues described in the introduction are substantially recapped. Tick-tock.
It is quite appropriate, I think, that the format all these essays follows is that of the newspaper obituary. Like Auden’s strong, brave, man-slaying Achilles, few of Hast- ings’ warriors were to live long. Guy Gibson, the hero of the Dambusters raid, died in a plane crash before the war ended. He was flying a mission he need never have flown, in a type of plane he barely knew, and in the perilous manner his ego insisted on. A navigator died with him. ‘The only identifiable fragment of Gibson,’ writes Hastings, ‘was a laundry mark on a sock.’
Comments
There are currently no comments for this article.