Tag: Second World War

The Song of the Dying Gunner AA1 by Charles Causley

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Oh mother my mouth is full of stars
As cartridges in the tray
My blood is a twin-branched scarlet tree
And it runs all runs away.

Oh ‘Cooks to the galley’ is sounded off
And the lads are down in the mess
But I lie down by the forrard gun
With a bullet in my breast.

Don’t send me a parcel at Christmas time
Of socks and nutty and wine
And don’t depend on a long weekend
By the Great Western Railway line.

Farewell, Aggie Weston, the Barracks at Guz,
Hang my tiddley suit on the door.
I’m sewn up neat in a canvas sheet
And I shan’t be home no more.

[HMS Glory, 1945]

This is an appropriate poem for Remembrance Day.

Charles Causley (1917– 2003) was a Cornishman, born and bred, and apart from his years in the navy during the second world war, spent most of his life working there as an English teacher, writing poetry in his spare time.

He was unusual among poets of the world wars in that he served in the ranks, rather than as an officer. The Song of the Dying Gunner AA1 appeared in his first collection in 1951 and a line from the poem gives the book its title, Farewell, Aggie Weston. The poem can be seen as a more modern version of Kipling’s Barrack Room Ballads. It is also an interesting contrast to Henry Newbolt’s heroic naval ballads.

The “AA 1” in the title tells us that the speaker is an anti-aircraft gunner, first class. In the last verse, “Aggie Weston” refers to the sailors’ hostels founded by Dame Agnes Weston, “Guz” was Plymouth and a “tiddley suit” was a seaman’s best uniform, kept for shore leave.

On Scratchbury Camp by Siegfried Sassoon

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Sassoon is famous as a poet of the first world war, but On Scratchbury Camp was written during the second world war, in 1942. Scratchbury Camp is an iron-age hill fort in Wiltshire and Sassoon lived nearby for much of his life. This is an altogether calmer and more reflective piece than the angry and bitter western front poems.

The poem captures the atmosphere of the Wiltshire downs on a June day. The distant past and the present are linked, as are human activity and the natural world. By describing the way in which the ancient fort seems to have been absorbed into the landscape, Sassoon is suggesting that one day the current war will be forgotten. The dreamy mood tells us that the older Sassoon is content to be an observer of this new war rather than a participant.

I think there is a certain resemblance to John Masefield’s poems of the southern English countryside here.

The linking of modern aeroplanes to the distant past of the landscape also reminds me of the opening of Powell and Pressburger’s 1944 film A Canterbury Tale.

On Scratchbury Camp by Siegfried Sassoon

Along the grave green downs, this idle afternoon,
Shadows of loitering silver clouds, becalmed in blue,
Bring, like unfoldment of a flower, the best of June.

Shadows outspread in spacious movement, always you
Have dappled the downs and valleys at this time of year,
While larks, ascending shrill, praised freedom as they flew.
Now, through that song, a fighter-squadron’s drone I hear
From Scratchbury Camp, whose turfed and cowslip’d rampart seems
More hill than history, ageless and oblivion-blurred.

I walk the fosse, once manned by bronze and flint-head spear;
On war’s imperious wing the shafted sun-ray gleams:
One with the warm sweet air of summer stoops the bird.

Cloud shadows, drifting slow like heedless daylight dreams,
Dwell and dissolve; uncircumstanced they pause and pass.
I watch them go. My horse, contented, crops the grass.

For Esmé, with Love and Squalor by J D Salinger

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There are two good reasons for writing about J D Salinger’s 1950 short story, For Esmé, with Love and Squalor. First, 6th June 2024 will be the eightieth anniversary of D-Day. And second, I recently heard a BBC radio programme about Salinger’s time as an American serviceman in England during the war, which forms the background to this story.

The story is in two distinct parts, or perhaps three, because a short introductory section makes it clear that the narrator is looking back from a happy and settled present day at events that took place sometime earlier.

A bored and lonely American soldier stationed in England in the run-up to D-Day is spending his day off wandering round the town in the rain. The church notice board catches his eye and he goes inside to watch the children’s choir practice. It strikes him that one particular young girl in the choir seems a bit different to the other children.

He meets the girl again later when she comes into the teashop with her governess and small brother. She detaches herself from the governess, comes over to the table where the narrator is sitting alone and strikes up a conversation. Esmé is poised and perfectly mannered in the English upper-class style. She is slightly precocious in her use of language, using words that are a bit beyond her years and not always quite correct. We find out that her father has been killed in the war. Her mother is also dead, but that is not explained.

The narrator has already told us that his fellow soldiers are solitary types and Esmé instantly says, to his surprise, “you’re at that intelligence school, aren’t you?”, perhaps explaining why that should be.

She gets the narrator to admit that in civilian life he is a short-story writer. She hopes that he will write a story for her. As we read on, we realise that the story we are reading is, as the title tells us, that very story. She hopes that he will return from the war “with all his faculties intact” and promises to write to him.

If that is the “before” part of the story, there is now an abrupt switch to “after”. The scene changes to occupied Germany at the end of the war. The narrator identifies himself as “Sergeant X”. A page of description makes clear that his war experiences have left him a dreadful state. He has spent some time in hospital. He chain-smokes but can’t taste the cigarettes, his gums are bleeding, and he can’t sleep. He has what we call today PTSD: “Then, abruptly, familiarly, and, as usual, with no warning, he thought he felt his mind dislodge itself and teeter like insecure luggage on an overhead rack.”

He contemplates a book by Goebbels left behind in the house the American soldiers live in. It belonged to a woman, an official in the Nazi party who the narrator himself arrested. There is an inscription in her handwriting: “Dear God, life is hell.”  

There is a fleeting reference to the Hurtgen forest. This was in fact the gruelling battle that Salinger himself was involved in. It’s also made clear that the narrator and his jeep-mate, “Corporal Z”, have been involved in the whole campaign, from D-Day to VE day.  

He takes out a letter from a pile of correspondence that he has put on one side and not read. It is letter from Esmé, enclosing the gift of her father’s watch, with its smashed face. This loving gesture from the young girl he befriended is the beginning of healing for him. He has been unable to sleep and suddenly feels very tired. The nightmare is over. He realises that his faculties are, despite everything he has been through, intact.

The story is only twenty-eight pages long, beautifully written and profoundly moving. It appears to be quite autobiographical, closely based on Salinger’s real-life wartime experiences. It makes its meaning as much by what is understated or not quite stated as much as by what is said directly. It brings home the very real human cost of the liberation of Europe, both for soldiers and civilians.

It’s also worth noting that Salinger’s state of mind after his experiences in the war influenced his descriptions of Holden’s mental troubles in his famous novel The Catcher in the Rye, published in 1951.

To Any Member Of My Generation by George Barker

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Given the grim events of the last few days, I thought I should try to find an appropriate poem, but it’s been a harder task than I imagined. For some reason, this one popped into my mind. Perhaps it is the feeling of “we should have seen this coming” that it conveys so powerfully.

George Barker, (1913–1991) was a prolific poet, much admired in his time, but perhaps over-prolific, which may be part of the reason he has become less well-known today.

He was in the generation that came to maturity in the 1930s, and who were in their twenties during the second world war.

To avoid any confusion, I should point out that the “Richmond” here is Richmond on Thames, a place I know well and perhaps another reason this poem speaks to me.

To Any Member Of My Generation by George Barker

What is it you remember? – the summer mornings
Down by the river at Richmond with a girl,
And as you kissed, clumsy in bathing costumes,
History guffawed in a rosebush. What a warning –
If only we had known, if only we had known!
And when you looked in mirrors was this meaning
Plain as the pain in the centre of a pearl?
Horrible tomorrow in Teutonic postures
Making absurd the past we cannot disown?

Whenever we kissed we cocked the future’s rifles
And from our wild-oat words, like dragon’s teeth,
Death underfoot now arises; when we were gay
Dancing together in what we hoped was life,
Who was it in our arms but the whores of death
Whom we have found in our beds today, today?

The Ministry of Fear by Graham Greene

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The Ministry of Fear, Graham Greene’s 1943 spy thriller set during the London blitz always seems to be underrated. There could be several reasons for that. It is one of the novels that he subtitled as “an entertainment”, which is always a problematic description with his work, and an invitation to take the book less than seriously. Greene is normally thought of as a realist but the tone here is quite odd, as if the physical displacement of the blitz has caused a psychic shock as well.  

Everything is seen from the point of view of the main character Arthur Rowe, who is himself a damaged person. We gradually learn that he was responsible for the “mercy killing” of his sick wife and served some sort of sentence for it, although whether in a prison or a hospital we are not quite sure. He carries a weight of guilt about with him because of this.

Rowe’s mind moves between the reality of the blitz, his dreams, and his childhood memories. This theme of nostalgia for childhood is introduced right at the beginning,  at a charity fête taking place in a square in bombed-out Bloomsbury. It is because the stalls remind Rowe of his past that he is drawn to the fair and it is at the “guess the weight of the cake” stall that he stumbles into a dark world of espionage. He has guessed correctly and won the cake, but it becomes apparent that it was intended that the cake should go to someone else. The stall was in fact a front for a network of fifth-columnists who have been blackmailed into spying for the Germans. This atmosphere of threat and coercion into spying is “the ministry of fear”. The Nazis have imposed it all over continental Europe and now it has come to London.    

From this point on, the plot becomes very complicated quite quickly. Rowe attempts to contact the organisers of the fair to put things right, but finds himself in a sort of living nightmare. After what appears to be a murder at a séance he becomes a hunted man, fearing that his past will make him the obvious suspect. There was something valuable to the spies in the cake and an attempt is made on his life. This is prevented by the lucky fall of a bomb nearby.   

The narrative takes an abrupt turn, when, after another explosion, the scene switches to a mysterious clinic, where a man called Digby is a patient with amnesia. We slowly realise that Digby is Rowe, who has forgotten most of his adult life and seems far happier living with his memories of the world before the war. Then we find out that the doctor running the clinic was at the séance, his assistant is the man who tried to kill Rowe, and the plot starts to move towards its conclusion. 

A clue as to how we should read the novel is that Rowe is described as follows: “He felt directed, controlled, moulded by some agency with a surrealist imagination.” Indeed, the strange atmosphere of the blitz as rendered here rather calls to mind G K Chesterton’s fantastic vision of London in The Man Who Was Thursday. There is a vein of the absurd running through The Ministry of Fear, for example when we are told after an air raid that “a man with a grey dusty face leant against a wall and laughed and a warden said sharply, ‘That’s enough now. It’s nothing to laugh about.’”

It is these vivid descriptions of London in the blitz that linger in the mind. “Most of the church spires seemed to have been snapped off two-thirds up like sugar-sticks and there was an appearance of slum clearance where there hadn’t really been any slums.”  Apart from its place in the context of Greene’s writing, it deserves to be remembered as one of the creative works recording the blitz for posterity, such as the photographs of Bill Brandt or the paintings of Graham Sutherland.

The Burning of the Leaves by Laurence Binyon

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I have written before about the way in which familiar novels, stories and poems have taken on new meanings with the unforeseen events that we have all been living through this year.

This poem is a new discovery for me. How did I not find it until now? It is regarded as one of the best about the impact of the blitz on London in 1941, yet lines leap out from it as if they were written recently about what has been going on these last few months.

It is a long poem in five sections, too long to quote in full here, so I have just included the first two sections. There are lines that seem to me startlingly appropriate for the situation we find ourselves in now. I think that Binyon, who was not a young man at this point, poured all his dismay at what he saw happening around him in London into this poem.

The second part describes the sadness of the closed and empty theatres during the blitz. It is sobering to read this during a week when it seems that cinemas may have closed forever.

A poem for this season of autumn then, and truly a poem whose time has come again.

The Burning of the Leaves by Laurence Binyon

I
Now is the time for the burning of the leaves.
They go to the fire; the nostril pricks with smoke
Wandering slowly into a weeping mist.
Brittle and blotched, ragged and rotten sheaves!
A flame seizes the smouldering ruin and bites
On stubborn stalks that crackle as they resist.

The last hollyhock’s fallen tower is dust;
All the spices of June are a bitter reek,
All the extravagant riches spent and mean.
All burns! The reddest rose is a ghost;
Sparks whirl up, to expire in the mist: the wild
Fingers of fire are making corruption clean.

Now is the time for stripping the spirit bare,
Time for the burning of days ended and done,
Idle solace of things that have gone before:
Rootless hope and fruitless desire are there;
Let them go to the fire, with never a look behind.
The world that was ours is a world that is ours no more.

They will come again, the leaf and the flower, to arise
From squalor of rottenness into the old splendour,
And magical scents to a wondering memory bring;
The same glory, to shine upon different eyes.
Earth cares for her own ruins, naught for ours.
Nothing is certain, only the certain spring.

II
Never was anything so deserted
As this dim theatre
Now, when in passive greyness the remote
Morning is here,
Daunting the wintry glitter of the pale,
Half-lit chandelier.

Never was anything disenchanted
As this silence!
Gleams of soiled gilding on curved balconies
Empty; immense
Dead crimson curtain, tasselled with its old
And staled pretence.

Nothing is heard but a shuffling and knocking
Of mop and mat,
Where dustily two charwomen exchange
Leisurely chat.
Stretching and settling to voluptuous sleep
Curls a cat.

The voices are gone, the voices
That laughed and cried.
It is as if the whole marvel of the world
Had blankly died,
Exposed, inert as a drowned body left
By the ebb of the tide.

Beautiful as water, beautiful as fire,
The voices came,
Made the eyes to open and the ears to hear,
The hand to lie intent and motionless,
The heart to flame,
The radiance of reality was there,
Splendour and shame.

Slowly an arm dropped, and an empire fell.
We saw, we knew.
A head was lifted, and a soul was freed.
Abysses opened into heaven and hell.
We heard, we drew
Into our thrilled veins courage of the truth
That searched us through.

But the voices are all departed,
The vision dull.
Daylight disconsolately enters
Only to annul.
The vast space is hollow and empty
As a skull.



N or M? Agatha Christie’s wartime spy story

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Agatha Christie did not only write whodunnits; from time to time she dabbled in the spy story. I think N or M? is by far the most effective of those. It sees the return of her married couple sleuths, Tommy and Tuppence Beresford. In the summer of 1940, with invasion looming, they are enlisted to winkle out German spies in a quiet south coast seaside town. Or rather, Tommy is enlisted and Tuppence very cleverly gets herself into the game.

It was published during the war in 1941 and it’s intriguing to read a story of this sort written in the heat of the moment when invasion was still a real possibility. This is not a completely realistic novel, but it does reveal some of the atmosphere and attitudes of the time.   

I suppose this is what would today be called a comedy thriller, because as well as the air of suspicion and menace, where anybody might be someone other than who they seem to be, there is a good deal of humour running through the story.

The couples’ children are rather sorry for their middle-aged parents and their desire to find active roles in the war effort. They remain convinced, almost to the end, by the cover story that Tommy is a sort of filing clerk and Tuppence is visiting an elderly sick aunt.

In fact, both the elder Beresfords have put themselves back in harm’s way, by going undercover at Sans Souci, the guest house in Leahampton which the secret service is convinced is the centre of an enemy spy network, with its male and female leaders, codenamed N and M.

Playing roles themselves, both  are only too aware of how the other guests conform almost too perfectly to stock “types”. There is the young mother with her toddler, the young German refugee, the large, elderly Irish woman, the retired gent fussy over his health with his wife whose only purpose in life sems to be to minister to his needs, the retired army man; and so on. Which of them are spies?

Both Beresfords use spy tradecraft. Tuppence puts an eyelash in the fold of a letter she leaves out on view, and checks the paper with fingerprint powder later. The couple’s contact is a man who appears to be fishing at the end from the pier.  

It’s interesting that in a novel that mentions codebreaking work and features a personal code used between Tommy and Tuppence, there should be a character called Major Bletchley. Questioned by MI5 about this, Christie claimed that she had once been on a train for a long time as it waited at Bletchley station.

The novel has quite a resemblance to the final chapters of The Thirty-Nine Steps, with the seaside house making a convenient location for boat landings and signalling out to sea. The vision of the upper echelons of the armed forces and government being riddled with spies and nazi sympathisers also owes something to Buchan. Indeed, it is the uncertainty about who to trust that leads to the Beresfords becoming involved. Having been out of the intelligence game for so long, they are not known to the enemy spies.

The pace picks up towards the end with chases over the downs and a bewildering series of revelations as to who is and isn’t a traitor.

There’s a good deal of sympathy here for German refugees, and a grudging respect for enemy spies who risk their lives, as opposed to traitors who sell their own country out. Tommy and Tuppence were involved in this sort of thing in the last war and remember Edith Cavell, the British nurse shot by the Germans for spying, and her statement “Patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness for anyone”.

Tuppence recognises that although people are encouraged to hate the German people as a whole, that doesn’t mean that she does not sympathise with the feelings of individual Germans caught up, like the British, in this awful situation. This applies particularly to the mothers of those involved in the war, and indeed maternal feeling is one of the main clues leading to the eventual solution.     

Christie offers an interesting explanation of how the Nazis plan to take over Britain, not by an armed invasion, but by an internal coup of British nazi sympathisers. The appeal of nazism is to “pride and a desire for personal glory”. It is “the cult of Lucifer”. As always with Christie, there is a firm basis in Christian morality. After all, the title is taken from the Book of Common Prayer.

Battle of Britain by C Day Lewis

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The skies over South East England have been quieter and emptier than we are used to of late. Eighty years ago they were full of warplanes as the Battle of Britain began.

This poem was written in 1970 by the then poet laureate, Cecil Day Lewis, for the thirtieth anniversary.

The big-budget cinematic re-enactment of the battle was released around that time, and if my memory is correct, this poem was printed in the programme for the film.

I like the way the narrator of the poem is a witness to the real events, speaking to someone younger for whom they are history. It deserves to be better known, I think.

 

Battle of Britain by C Day Lewis

What did we earth-bound make of it? A tangle
Of vapour trails, a vertiginously high
Swarming of midges, at most a fiery angel
Hurled out of heaven, was all we could descry.

How could we know the agony and pride
That scrawled those fading signatures up there,
And the cool expertise of those who died
Or lived through that delirium of the air?

Grounded on history now, we re-enact
Such lives, such deaths. Time, laughing out of court
The newspaper heroics and the faked
Statistics, leaves us only to record

What was, what might have been: fighter and bomber,
The tilting sky, tense moves and counterings;
Those who outlived that legendary summer;
Those who went down, its sunlight on their wings.

And you, unborn then, what will you make of it—
This shadow-play of battles long ago?
Be sure of this: they pushed to the uttermost limit
Their luck, skill, nerve. And they were young like you.

 

 

 

The Good Shepherd by C S Forester

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The Good Shepherd by C S Forester is a novel of the second world war at sea, published in 1955. It’s the story of a convoy making its way across the Atlantic from America to Britain in 1942. It is concentrated into a short period of time, about forty eight hours. There is really only one fully developed character, Commander Krause of the US navy, and we see everything through his eyes. He commands the escort force, but four ships are not really enough to protect a convoy of thirty seven merchantmen as they sail towards the u-boat wolf pack that Krause knows lies ahead to meet them.

His job has a diplomatic element to it, because the four ships are from four different allied nations, America, Canada, Great Britain and Poland. This is his first command, as he was passed over for promotion before the war. Now by a quirk of seniority, he finds himself in charge of men who have been at war for several years.

The novel brilliantly captures the physically draining effect of constant vigilance. Fate has put Krause in this position. He must rise to the occasion and bring all his ability and experience to bear. As we read on we come to realise the loneliness and responsibility of command.

Krause’s mind is constantly occupied with calculations: navigation, time, distance,  fuel consumption. If a ship detaches itself from the convoy to hunt a submarine how long will it take to get back into position? When the sonar indicates a submarine ahead, which course should the escorts steer to try and intercept it? How can they know what course the sub will steer to try and evade them? We find out that Krause was a fencing champion before the war. Now his opponents are the German submarines.

Krause must constantly think of the effect of his actions, on the men of his ship as well as those on the other escorts. He must analyse whether men under his command will do the right thing under fire; it is the first time in action for all of them. He is under relentless pressure.

What makes this book a little different to other stories on a similar theme is that Krause is a devout Christian, the son of a Lutheran minister. His thoughts are full of biblical quotations. What God is to Krause, he must be to the ships of the convoy, as he attempts to get them across the Atlantic to safety.

There is an intriguing feeling at the end that even things in Kraus’s life that seemed negative were somehow part of a higher plan that put the right man in the right place at the right time.

There is a short introduction and a short coda, but the main body of the novel is not divided into chapters; the only breaks are the changes of each watch. The book brings the reality of a trans-Atlantic convoy starkly to life. The reader is there on the bridge of the USS Keeling living every minute of danger and drama along with Krause, the good shepherd.

The Small Back Room by Nigel Balchin

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The Small Back Room by Nigel Balchin was published in 1943, while the second world war was still going on. I am quite surprised that publication of this short, vivid and grim novel was allowed under wartime censorship rules, given the rather jaundiced picture it paints of the scientific establishment of that time. The wartime civil service atmosphere is very well caught; they work long hours and weekends with little time off. It is written in a terse, stripped-down, dialogue-heavy style, so that when there is a figure of speech it comes as a surprise.

Complex bureaucracy and office politics figure strongly in this story of a small technical research unit. The Reeves gun is an anti-tank weapon at the experimental stage; the army doesn’t like it, and the narrator, scientist Sammy Rice, has written a report saying it isn’t ready. However, his boss, Waring, and Professor Mair, head of the unit, have already persuaded their minister that the gun is a good idea.

Any consideration as to whether this will eventually be a useful weapon takes second place to a plot to oust Mair. The effectiveness of the gun becomes merely a pretext in the power struggle. The senior scientists and civil servants seem less interested in winning the war than scoring points off each other. Mair tells Sammy that scientists over fifty are not capable of original thinking anymore; it’s all about competing for knighthoods and so on. When Holland, the old soldier, intervenes in a meeting to make a point about the soldiers who will eventually have to use the gun on the battlefield, Sammy thinks he is the first person who has spoken as if they meant what they said.

Sammy is not very good at all this game-playing and career making. He has an artificial foot, a drink problem and a tendency to feel sorry for himself. He rails against “the bloody silly way things were arranged”. He doesn’t realise he is being sounded out as deputy director of the unit and is amazed when the job goes to Waring, the ex-advertising man who knows next to nothing about science, but is good at selling ideas to people.

Sammy is kept more or less on an even keel by his relationship with Susan, Professor Mair’s secretary. They have a ritual to keep Sammy’s drinking under control. She asks him if he would like a whisky and he replies that, no, he wouldn’t.

The real war in which people get killed keeps intruding into this world of farcical meetings and inconclusive conversations. Sammy’s younger brother Dick, is a twice-decorated fighter pilot who volunteers for secret and highly dangerous duty. Sammy has been asked by the engineer officer Captain Stuart to help with the investigation into a booby trap bomb the Germans are dropping, that is responsible for the deaths of several children.

Eventually, two of the bombs are found intact on a west country beach. Sammy tells Stuart to wait until he gets there before starting work. But by the time Sammy’s train gets in, Stuart has gone ahead and been blown up while attempting to defuse the first one. Sammy is a civilian; it was Stuart’s responsibility to do the dangerous part, but for various reasons, Sammy volunteers to defuse the second bomb.

We have now arrived at the novel’s tense, dramatic and unforgettable climax, with Sammy alone on the beach, working painstakingly on the second unexploded bomb, using the notes left by Stuart, giving a running commentary on every move he makes to the control point by telephone, in case he too should be killed. It tends to be this part of the novel that readers remember, despite the fact that it is only one chapter or so. It leaves a very strong impression.

I’m not sure if this novel actually introduced the phrase “back room boys”, to mean wartime scientists. The phrase is usually attributed to Beaverbrook, but I think the novel may have popularised it. The dialogue is full of 1940s expressions, such as “the balloon going up” and “I’ll put you in the picture”.

It was filmed in 1949 by Powell and Pressburger in a black and white expressionist style, I think they altered it a little too much. It’s time for a remake, in colour and widescreen, more faithful to the realism of the book.