‘This,’ announces Max Hast- ings at the outset, ‘is an old-fashioned book.’ So it is, and it is none the worse for it. As a schoolboy, Hastings thrilled to a 1920s’ anthology called Stirring Deeds of the Great War. His own book, a Brief Lives-style collection of essays on 14 of the most colourful or daring figures in (roughly) modern warfare, offers many of the pleasures those deeds must once have stirred, now overlaid with a more considered, war historian’s interest in what drives the very few people who turn out to be exceptionally brave in harm’s way.
It is an old-fashioned book in other respects too. It expresses a nostalgia for the days, before the development of deadly modern technologies, when the business of war entailed huge risks and could proportionately reward individual bravery. Its heroes — 13 men and one woman, from the Napoleonic wars to Israel’s 1973 tank war on the Golan Heights — were from an age when war was more personal. Hastings’ concern here is, essentially, close-quarters combat: the aerial dogfight, the cavalry charge, the infantry battle in the trenches, the bayonet against the assegai at Rorke’s Drift. Some of the stories — though all, as he freely confesses, have been told elsewhere — are corking. Amazing are the factual details of the misery the soldier endures: cold, exhaustion, disease, fear, and in the days when weapons were still a bit rubbish, constant non-fatal wounding.
Thus the report of a ‘well-shot corps’ of Rifles in the Peninsular war:
Beckwith with a cork leg — Pemberton and Manners with a shot each in the knees, making them as stiff as the other’s tree one — Loftus Gray with a gash in the lip and minus a portion of one heel which made him march to the tune of dot and go one — Smith with a shot in the ankle — Eeles minus a thumb — Johnston, in addition to other shot-holes, a stiff elbow, which deprived him of the power of disturbing his friends as scratcher of Scotch reels upon the violin — Percival with a shot through his lungs — Hope with a grapeshot lacerated leg and — George Simmonds with his riddled body held together by a pair of stays, for his was no holiday waist.
The tone of that is as important as its content. What do these people have in common? Only the minority of them, as the author points out, could be recommended as social companions. Specific characteristics overlap in many cases: fierce personal ambition, mendacity on the record, a monomaniacal interest in honour and decoration, the sort of deep anger that in the second world war found its outlet in the quality ‘Bomber’ Harris cherished as ‘Hun-hatred’, an inflationary appetite for sensation. Also, the devil’s own luck. Taken in the round, to a non-combatant these add up to the impression that, whether they were naughty or nice, all of these people were, in some profound way, more than a bit nuts.
The Vietnam warrior John Paul Vann personally fits that description. He started idealistic, became bravely and piercingly sceptical, then lost it and turned into a character from Apocalypse Now. That may touch on a point made in Hastings’ portrait of Frederic Murray, the Australian intellectual who served as a private in the first world war. There is an almost unbridgeable gulf between civilian and professional soldier, a gulf that was thrown into relief in the wars of the 20th century with the emergence of the ‘citizen soldier’. The civilian entering war basically wants to get out alive and return home. For the professional, war, however horrible, is the theatre in which he bids for career advancement and in which his life is, essentially, validated. ‘Gong-chasing’ is a common charge against Hastings’ heroes. So too, in many of these studies, is that crypto-suicidal cast of mind described by Lermontov in A Hero of Our Times. But Hastings distinguishes and admires also — against the ‘futility of war’ school — the idea that professional soldiering is something in which duty and determination count.
Another point that Hastings makes is that being very good at killing people is useful in wars but is otherwise a limited skill. One of the mistakes, he says, frequently made is to promote very good field warriors to command. Some inspired their men, but several also made rash or vain- glorious decisions that would lead comrades needlessly to their deaths. Some of the saddest stories here are of warriors who survived wars only to find themselves completely stranded in civilian life. Because propaganda needs inspiring myths, people who were brilliant at war, and needed it, were taken out of the field to keep them alive. The infantryman Audie Murphy was America’s most decorated wartime soldier. His solo assaults on German positions with grenades and sten-gun are from the pages of Commando comic. He reached his pinnacle young, and returned to the States hopelessly messed up and with nothing to do but play himself, badly, in a film of his memoirs and a string of third-rate cowboy flicks. Hastings quotes a British winner of the VC: ‘A man is trained for the task that might win him a VC. He is not trained to cope with what follows.’
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.’
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