Mme Kanyi: 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 […] Were there none in England?
Guy Crouchback: God forgive me. I was one of them.
(Conversation towards the end of Unconditional Surrender, the third volume of Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy)
How did we get from the Phoney War to the grand rejoicing of VE Day, and the final triumph of VJ Day? How did a war begun in uncertainty and confusion, continuing in defeat, evacuation and bankruptcy, conducted in many cases by dubious methods, become the War that Saved the World?
We did not, really, make this journey. The war was never the simple-minded morality play we now make it out to be. History, beyond doubt, records a series of blows to our pride and to our power. The moment the war ended, so did Lend-Lease. We struggled to borrow enough from the USA to keep going as an economy. We were forced to make sterling convertible. We were forced, at Bretton Woods, to agree to a new global economic regime that was entirely based on the needs and desires of the USA. We were made, soon afterwards, to end what was left of imperial preference. It was American arrogance, not the Soviet threat, that led to the decision (which still haunts us today) to spend scarce funds on developing a British atom bomb. The Americans either tore up or pretended to have lost agreements under which they had said they would share nuclear technology with us. Britain’s nuclear deterrent, still presumably viable even now, was not born out of fear of Stalin but out of pique at American high-handedness. Our Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, was treated in such an offhand fashion by the USA’s Secretary of State James Byrnes that the Labour government there and then resolved to build a British bomb whatever the cost. Bevin fumed to a Cabinet committee on 25 October 1946,
That won’t do at all … we’ve got to have this … I don’t mind for myself, but I don’t want any other Foreign Secretary of this country to be talked to or at by a Secretary of State in the United States as I have just had in my discussions with Mr Byrnes. We’ve got to have this thing over here whatever it costs … We’ve got to have the bloody Union Jack on top of it.1
We made a hurried and shamefully disorganised departure from India, at a vast cost in Indian lives, leaving behind us two dangerous frontier conflicts that remain unresolved to this day. We could not afford to maintain ourselves in Palestine, and scuttled humiliatingly from territory we had only gained 30 years before. Again, as in India and in many parts of Africa, we left an unresolved quarrel for others to try to fix.
And how was it that our great triumph brought us so few fruits and joys, even if it left us holding an H-Bomb with the Union Jack on top of it? At least, at the end of the Great War in 1919, the British empire grew and we were able to dictate the peace. There was, if only briefly, an appearance of victory. But after 1945, the empire visibly and swiftly shrank. And we were poor. Rationing continued and intensified, to include even bread, long after the war had ended and long after the USSR had itself abolished rationing. In my early childhood, I can still recall my mother running her finger round the insides of eggshells to make sure that nothing was wasted and cutting chocolate bars into small pieces to make them last longer. We were haunted, even then, by the ghost of deprivation.
Later still, as our diminished power and influence became clear in so many ways, the ghost of our 1940 defeat, and the necessary but reluctant compromises we had to make to survive it, haunt our lives. The most popular film in the British cinemas of summer 2017 was an account of the Dunkirk evacuation, 77 years earlier, mainly composed of noise, sinkings and aerial combat. No attempt was made to explain to a new generation why the entire British Army was standing up to its armpits in salt water, being strafed by the German Air Force, having wrecked, burned or dumped arms and equipment worth billions in today’s money. Nobody wants to know. The partly true, partly untrue myth that it was all glorious, and that it saved the world, will do for another generation, a comforting old muffler keeping out the clammy draughts of economic failure and political weakness.
It is in our personal lives that we fully understand the truth. It is when I examine the things my parents and teachers said, when I recall the strange attempt to recreate the 1930s still evident in my childhood, and its utter collapse during my teens, that I know that the myth is not true. In the devastating cultural revolution of the last 50 years, I have been increasingly aware that such events do not happen in countries where the victorious governing class are confident and assured. As for our absorption into the European Union – the continuation of Germany by other means – this is not the fate of a dominant victor nation.
The unhappy reality, largely suppressed in political debate, is unsparingly described in two great works of fiction. One of these is more or less from the Left, by Olivia Manning, and one from the conservative Right, by Evelyn Waugh.
At first sight all they have in common is that they are obviously autobiographical, and prominently feature men called Guy. Manning’s central character is Guy Pringle, a pro-Soviet teacher working for what is obviously the British Council, together with his wife Harriet, stranded at his side amid the collapse of British power in Eastern Europe and the Balkans. Waugh’s hero is Guy Crouchback, a disappointed and lonely Roman Catholic of the most reactionary sort, cuckolded by an old friend and deserted by his wife, short of money, washed up on a shoal of disillusion and too old for the conflict that has suddenly arrived. But yet he believes the war is virtuous. His new illusion, shining with false glory, is mainly thanks to the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact which has destroyed Britain’s strategy in an afternoon, and which worldly men must view as a catastrophe. But Guy Crouchback is anything but worldly. He is the most frightening sort of idealist. He delights in being in arms against the world’s two worst and most powerful tyrannies. Waugh describes him rejoicing:
But now, splendidly, everything had become clear. The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off. It was the Modern Age in arms. Whatever the outcome there was a place for him in that battle.2
Waugh himself was not in fact especially idealist at the time. In his novel Put Out More Flags, which was first written and published while the war was still taking place, Waugh is mercilessly satirical about the farce of evacuation and about the absurdities of ‘security’ in wartime. A distinguished publisher is imprisoned for the duration, and an ageing, harmless aesthete has to flee to Ireland to avoid the same fate. Both are innocent of any treachery, but the popular frenzy of democratic war, with its wild, irrational hunts for spies and traitors, requires them to suffer anyway.
Put Out More Flags also contains a heartbreaking final leave-taking between an army officer and his schoolboy son, of a kind that only those who have undergone an English boarding school can fully appreciate.3 And then it follows that unhappy officer, Cedric Lyne, through an incompetently managed voyage to Norway to his futile, amateurish, useless but brave death at the hands of a professional enemy.
In Men at Arms, the mood of righteousness does not last long. Waugh is equally consumed with pessimism and barely concealed fury at his own country’s lack of preparedness for what it now faces. When Guy Crouchback eventually finds his way into the Army, he is sent to train at an abandoned preparatory school in a melancholy seaside resort. The name of the school is Kut-al-Imara House. Nobody in the book ever comments on the name, and only the curious or those very well educated in the more obscure disasters of World War I will know that Kut-al-Imara, in present-day Iraq, was the scene of what Jan Morris, in Farewell the Trumpets, described as ‘the most abject capitulation in Britain’s military history’.4 A large garrison of British and Indian troops surrendered to the Ottoman Army there in 1916. Appalling numbers of these captives later died from disease or ill treatment. Their commanding general, meanwhile, lived on in shameful comfort. Nobody would have named a school after such an event. By giving the dismal and disorganised place this name, Waugh is plainly expressing his disdain and scorn for the state of his country, its army and defences, at that wretched time.
As Guy Crouchback begins his slow progress towards the various disasters and failures of his military career, Guy and Harriet Pringle are rattling across Eastern Europe by train in the last few days before war. Once in Bucharest, they watch powerlessly from afar as France falls and as their homes in Britain are subjected to German terror bombing. But bizarrely, being in a neutral capital, they are within sight and sometimes touch of the German enemy, and able to see the propaganda in the brightly lit window of the German legation. The contrasting feebleness of British power and propaganda are pitifully evident. Even more evident is the real menace of National Socialism, a new horror whose nature is grasped swiftly by Continentals. They, unlike the insular British, have long had cause to understand the German language and will soon have to understand it even better. Hitler’s soldiers in a Berlin propaganda newsreel, ‘fair-haired young men […] unscathed and laughing from the ruins’, with their faces held up to the sun, are shown lustily singing disgusting, diabolical hymns. First is the Hitler Youth song about how it does not matter if the Nazis destroy the world, as they will build it up again once they have conquered it.5
Then the sinister tune alters to something even worse, a threat to Christian civilisation itself:
This might of armour was a new thing; a fearful and merciless thing. The golden boys changed their song. Now, as the vast procession passed, they sang:
Wir wollen keine Christen sein,
Weil Christus war ein Judenschwein.
Und seine Mutter, welch ein Hohn,
I will not translate this in full, as it is too distressing, but simply say that the lines are both deeply anti-Semitic and also painfully, hurtfully blasphemous to any Christian person. This was an explicitly pagan, anti-Christian army approaching, not like the armies of the last few centuries but something either entirely new or terrifyingly old. As Olivia Manning records (and who can doubt that this is the recollection of a real event?), ‘Someone gasped. There was no other noise.’
Almost immediately afterwards, after Calais falls, the Germans in Bucharest stage their own symbolic triumph over the broken Allies. They brusquely drive the British colony out of the ‘English Bar’ of the main hotel, with sheer numbers and bad manners. As power drains from the British empire, the British abroad cease to be lordly and rich, and fear abandonment, penury, possibly internment. Much later, when the Pringles, more or less refugees, have reached Egypt as Rommel’s soldiers approach Cairo, Harriet gives thanks that Muslims are charitable because, stranded in such a place in the midst of defeat, what else will there be to live on but charity?
On the night that Paris capitulates, a furious Romanian woman complains at the noise of an ill-timed English party (to celebrate the successful production of a Shakespeare play, of all things):
She was storming at Inchcape’s astonished guests: ‘What is it that you make here, you English? You have lost the war, you have lost your Empire, you have lost all – yet, like a first-class Power, you keep the house awake!’7
The English men and women, at first taken aback, eventually respond with patriotic self-reassurance. But the moment has happened. They have felt the scorn of defeat. They are not a first-class power. Even Romanians now feel free to berate them. They have no business keeping their neighbours awake any more.
The draining away of power continues until the Pringles mistakenly attend a German propaganda concert at which the German minister comports himself as if he were King of Romania, and the Pringles almost stand (in a moment of ghastly comic error) for the playing of ‘Deutschland über alles’. Eventually they slink out of the hall, to the amusement of the triumphant German audience. They flee, with hours to spare if they are to avoid internment, to Athens, where they are fated once again to witness the collapse of British arms.
And so their paths almost cross with Guy Crouchback’s equally absurd and pointless meanderings. After various futile and ill-starred military adventures, he has been sent to Crete. He arrives there only just in time to take part in another of Winston Churchill’s needless gestures leading to defeat and loss. Wars are not won by evacuations, as Churchill himself had said. And yet here was yet another evacuation, this time entirely his own creation.
Waugh’s account describes in personal detail the incompetence, demoralisation and worthlessness of the whole operation. Guy Crouchback knows that air cover, such as it was, has already been withdrawn from Crete before he and his men even set off to reinforce failure there. The pathetic Major Hound, a bureaucratic officer of the modern type, suffers a total moral collapse as defeat becomes certain. Hound, we now know, was based upon a real officer observed by Waugh in an abject panic. There are other disgraces. Guy’s old friend Ivor Claire, whom Guy has admired as an archetypal English gentleman, shamefully deserts his men and embarks in one of the few evacuation ships, disobeying orders so that he can escape capture. Guy, by contrast, gets to Egypt in an open boat and almost dies on the way.
This last episode is an interesting and major departure from fact. It has even been suggested that Waugh himself did something similar to the indisciplined flight of the fictional Ivor Claire. Biographers and historians dispute this fiercely, and perhaps it is better not to know. But the moment of truth comes as Guy recovers in Cairo. News is brought to him of Hitler’s invasion of the USSR. It had been, he notes, just such a sunny Mediterranean day two years before when, after the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, ‘the Enemy was plain in view’. But,
Now that hallucination was dissolved […] and he was back after less than two years’ pilgrimage in a Holy Land of illusion, in the old ambiguous world, where priests were spies and gallant friends proved traitors and his country was led blundering into dishonour.8
In both Olivia Manning’s and Evelyn Waugh’s books there is much left to tell as the war slowly turns. And both sagas, like the war itself, are repeatedly profoundly moving and distressing. Waugh’s account is the more political, and the more bitter. Arbitrarily, good people die or are otherwise destroyed. Worthless frauds are decorated and promoted after fatuous propaganda exploits. Real courage and valour are thrown away. A sort of human life struggles on in the margins of the vast destruction. In Waugh’s account the deep penetration of Britain’s establishment and military by Communist sympathisers is angrily portrayed, and shown as being triumphant and unchecked. To this day, this undoubted and very damaging infiltration is barely discussed, and most of us wrongly think it was confined to a few famous traitors in the Secret Intelligence Service. If only this was so.
The ridiculous worship of the Soviet Union, symbolised by the beautiful ‘Sword of Stalingrad’ fashioned by the last true craftsmen of their kind in England, presented to Stalin by an admiring British nation, is justly lampooned.
Guy Crouchback’s attempts to save a group of stranded Jews in Yugoslavia recoil horribly on those Jews and especially on their intelligent, undeceived and perceptive leaders. Had Waugh ended his book with the terrible conversation in which Mrs Kanyi regrets the noble impulses which drove so many to war, and Guy Crouchback responds ‘God forgive me, I was one of them,’ his trilogy would be almost perfect. Yet instead his story trickles away into a tying up of ends that could just as well have been left loose. And then there is an account of Guy’s personal contentment, as if England was still secure and would endure around him and his descendants. So it might have seemed, for a comfortably off person of the upper middle classes, for a few years after the war. But it did not prove to be so, as the empire departed, Suez was followed by Profumo, Profumo by the Cultural Revolution and the 1960s and the European adventure which still has us in its grip. By the time he died, in April 1966, Evelyn Waugh must have known that the world he had fought to save was utterly lost.
Olivia Manning, by contrast, ends with a coda, painfully affecting to those, such as this author, who, all unknowing of the sacrifices they had made, watched the bruised, puzzled, disappointed, disoriented survivors of the war try to pick up the threads of normal human existence, and largely fail.
How could it be, they wondered, that they had won the war and yet this rackety, cheapskate remnant of greatness was their portion? And it is thanks to their inevitable failure to re-establish that which was lost, to repair what was broken and raise up again what had fallen, that a diminished people now scurry about in the ruins of a civilisation they neither value nor understand.
Olivia Manning, on this occasion, greatly outdid Evelyn Waugh. As she surveyed the six turbulent years which she had more or less survived, she found no refuge, in domestic tranquillity, from the vastness of these events. She wrote, in a passage of astonishing force,
Then, at last, peace, precarious peace, came down upon the world and the survivors could go home. Like the stray figures left on the stage at the end of a great tragedy, they had now to tidy up the ruins of war and in their hearts bury the noble dead.9
We who came after are now those stray figures left on the stage. Until we understand the true nature of that great tragedy, which we seem unwilling to do, I do not think that we can ever, in our hearts, bury the noble dead. Worse by far, we may be tempted again into wars that may utterly ruin us, because we have been beguiled into thinking that these wars are good. Peace, precarious peace, survived wonderfully and unquestioned through my safe and happy childhood and somehow persisted in the years beyond. I never knew until I was old just how hard-bought it had been. I never understood until I was old just how much my own parents had paid for it, and how thankless I and many of my generation had been. It is with their memory in mind that I conclude this unhappy story. Peace, precarious peace, depends now more than ever on our casting off these fantasies of chivalry and benevolence, and ceasing to hide the savage truth from ourselves.