WAR CAN BE HELL… OF A READ
As the Imperial War Museum rediscovers forgotten novels from WWII, writer William Boyd explains why personal experience triumphs over gung-ho jingoism every time
WILLIAM Boyd has a theory about armed conflict and writing. The First World War was dominated by poetry because back then almost everyone knew rhyming verse by heart. By the time of the Second World War, the likes of T S Eliot and modernism had made poetry an elite pursuit. It was no longer universal.
But better schooling meant greater literacy, and thus was the war novel born. More recently, says the bestselling author of Any Human Heart and Restless, hard-hitting memoir has become the dominant literary response of Britain’s fighting men and women to conflicts in The Falklands, Iraq and Afghanistan.
“Poetry was in the culture of every educated or partially-educated person,” explains Boyd. “Whereas writing novels wasn’t. But by the time the SecondWorld War came along, most soldiers, even the enlisted men, were much better educated and they read a lot. Poetry became difficult in the 1920s with modernism and the literary form for the everyday person became the novel”
Ironically, however, while Wilfred Owen’s 1917 poem Dulce et Decorum Est remains well known, with its accusatory retelling of “the old lie” that it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country, many of the most thrilling British novels of the Second World War have fallen into obscurity. Which is why we are talking today about the republication by ImperialWar Museums over the past two years of a series of “forgotten” novels, including, most recently, Sword Of Bone by Anthony Rhodes, championed by Boyd.
“These books are not gung-ho, patriotic celebrations of British pluck and derring-do,” he explains. “On the contrary, the world-view is more often cynical and jaundiced. Plans go wrong, officers are sometimes fools, your fellow soldiers can be insufferable.War is both deeply boring and deeply terrifying.”
SWORD Of Bone, featuring the socalled “phoney war” of 1939 to 1940 and culminating in the retreat and evacuation of British forces from Dunkirk, was based closely on Rhodes’ experiences as a Royal Engineers officer serving with the 3rd Division of the British Expeditionary Force in France. Published in 1942, it brilliantly recounts the boredom, terror and general absurdity of army life. It is not a work of propaganda.
“On the contrary, this is what it’s really like and to publish that at the darkest hour of the war was pretty brave,” says Boyd. “I just spotted this bit, ‘Our mess had ten members which meant it was just small enough for everyone to hate each other’. It’s that tone which is so deadpan; the war is looked at through a blackly humorous, absurd lens. You feel, ‘Yes, I believe that’.”
The IWM’s tenstrong and growing Wartime Classics series also includes
Alexander Baron’s outstanding 1948 tale of infantrymen, From The City, From The Plough; Warriors For The Working Day by Peter Elstob, featuring tank crews during the Normandy campaign; and Squadron Airborne by Elleston Trevor, which brings to life a fictional Spitfire squadron. Life on the home front is covered by Plenty Under The Counter by Kathleen Hewitt, first published in 1943, and Green Hands by Barbara Whitton, 1943, featuring Land Army girls. Anthony Quayle, who would later find fame as an actor, fictionalised his experiences in the Special Operations Executive in Eight Hours From England.
The IWM list is based on literary merit and realism, drawn from each author’s direct experience of the aspects of war they narrate. In September, Monica Felton’s To All the Living, based on her job in a munitions factory, will be the 11th in the series. Rhodes died aged 87 in 2004, having survived the war to become a journalist. Boyd was introduced to him almost by accident. “There was a throwaway remark about his astonishing novel-memoir, and I’m interested in these realistic portrayals of conflict and warfare so I bought Sword Of Bone,” he says.“I thought, ‘This is unbelievable’, it’s up there with my other favourite, a book called Alamein to Zem Zem by Keith Douglas, who’s mostly known as a poet.
“I tried to get it republished but nobody took me up until the Imperial War Museums started this new series.” War, with all its horror and dark humour, is a subject to which Boyd has returned time and again in his work. His second novel, An Ice-Cream War, published in 1982, featured the First World War’s little-known East African campaign.
“There were about 60 books in the world that dealt with it, mostly regimental histories. It was one of those gifts as a novelist when you stumble across something that hasn’t been done before,” says Boyd, who was born in Ghana to a Scottish doctor, lived in Nigeria and attended boarding school in Britain.
“It’s crazy and absurd and everything goes wrong and nice people get killed – the cockup theory of warfare. It was the same with my espionage novel Restless.”
That Costa Prize-winning book, based on the real-life covert British Security Coordination organisation set up in New York by MI6 in 1940, became an acclaimed BBC TV drama starring Hayley Atwell as a young woman sent to America to seduce a presidential aide as part of a plot to bump the US into joining hostilities against Hitler.
“My great uncle was at the battle of the Somme, and won a medal, and my grandfather, also called William Boyd, was injured in the third battle of Ypres, so war is part of the family legend,” explains Boyd.
“My grandfather had seven sons, five of whom were caught up in the Second World War. All survived and had the most astonishing adventures. My father was an Army doctor but one of my uncles got the Distinguished Flying Cross.”
He continues: “So often novels about war tend to glorify it. Even a classic like The Naked And The Dead by Norman Mailer is still quite gung-ho. Very often there is well meaning
propaganda: ‘It wasn’t as bad as all that, a few rotten apples don’t spoil the bunch and so on…’ but in fact the reality is much more complex. In my novels I’ve written about war and conflict, always trying to demythologise it and show it for what it is. I think that’s because I lived in Nigeria in the late 60s when it was having this horrendous civil war. It utterly changed everything I thought about warfare.
“I realised 95 per cent of all war novels were heroic hogwash and I started seeking out books that seemed to me to be authentic.”
Which is why Boyd is such a staunch supporter of the IWM’sWartime Classics series.
“It’s only by sifting through eye-witness accounts or novels written by people who were actually there that you can cherry pick the reality,” he says. “As a genre, if you include films, how many great movies or books are there that don’t heroicise the process? The whole remit of the genre is to say, ‘War is hell but in a way it can be uplifting and you’ll never make such firm friends as your fellow heroes…’
“There’s always a kind of positivism about this universally awful experience so you’re looking for clear-eyed books like Sword Of Bone to tell you what it’s really like.”
BOYD, who has homes in West London and France, knows how easy it is even for best-selling novelists to slip into obscurity. “Posterity is a great winnower, not necessarily of wheat from chaff,” he smiles.
“It’s very easy to slip out of view. Look at the best-selling authors of the 19th century – Edward Bulwer-Lytton and Mrs Humphry Ward – and who reads them now?
“Nevil Shute in the 20th century is another example of a best-selling novelist who probably no one reads now, yet On The Beach is one of the great nuclear novels.
“Even in your own lifetime you can see how writers fall out of favour. It’s a thing that comes to obsess you as you get older as a writer, ‘Are all my books in print?’”
During lockdown, Boyd, who has had a parallel career as a screenwriter, with an enviable hit rate of 20 films and TV series, has been as busy as ever.
He has a Cold War-based TV series, Spy City, running in America, starring Dominic Cooper and set in Berlin the summer before the Wall goes up, and has just finished a script for a film based on the memoirs of General Sir John Hackett, who was wounded during Operation Market Garden at Arnhem and hidden by the Dutch resistance.
Boyd is researching his next novel, his “most historic yet”, he says without going into detail other than to tantalisingly hint that he’s reading into the battle of Waterloo.
How does he remain so prolific, I wonder? “It’s a very British thing. In France or America you might write a novel every ten years. There’s a Scottish, Calvinistic work ethic in my case too,” he laughs.
“I still can’t believe my luck so I’m not going to grumble about hard work as I’m the ultimate one-man band.
I’ve been at this a long time and the show’s still on the road.”
●●Sword Of Bone by Anthony Rhodes is published by IWM at £8.99 and available with the otherWartime Classics titles from all good bookshops or via shop.iwm.org.uk/ wartime-classics