The Shetland Bus (1951)
Peculiar questions of discipline
therefore arose. Our thirty-odd crew-men were temperamental individualists who
had not the slightest notion of military behaviour, but had been recruited
specifically to sail the ships. Many of them were very good at that, but they
were naturally not very willing to do anything else, and it was clear to
Mitchell and myself that if we tried to run our unit on military lines we would
inevitably fail to carry out successful operations. We could already see that
if our men could be allowed to work in their own way, with all the help we
could give them, but with the least possible interference, they would develop a
pride in their job, a mutual loyalty and ultimately great skill in our kind of
warfare. This could not be achieved by imposing on them a new uniform character
as naval ratings; such an imposition would have stifled their independent
judgment, on which the outcome of an operation depended from the moment they
left the base. It was unjust as well as unwise to expect them to exercise this
judgment at sea, and then when they were ashore to submit as ratings to the
restrictions of naval or military discipline.
[...]
I kept a room to myself and had my
meals there; but this concession to my liking for solitude was excusable on the
grounds that both Mitchell and the men often had to speak to me in private. I
usually looked like a fisherman; as, for example, when I was wading in the sea
in a pair of ragged flannel trousers and a shirt without a collar, with my hair
full of cement, and looked up to see, with astonishment, an admiral standing on
the beach, who asked me where he could find a naval officer called Howarth.
None of the crew-men showed Mitchell or me the slightest formal sign of
respect.
In
trying to identify myself with the crew-men I was inevitably guilty of a degree
of disloyalty to those of my seniors who did not understand the life we led at
Lunna; and I paid penalties for this. But I never needed to be disloyal to
Mitchell. He called me the devil’s advocate; but he did much more than I, in
ways which the men did not see, to preserve their character as independent
buccaneers outside the shadow of discipline. It was he who explained our
mission and its implications to the senior naval and army officers in Shetland
and Orkney, and who pleaded skilfully with the civil police when celebration of
a successful operation led, as it frequently did, to the cells; till the phrase
‘one of Mitchell’s men’ became reason enough for any eccentricity or
misdemeanour.
When we invited the crews to elect
their own skippers they seldom made a mistake. Leif Larsen was the first to be
elected by the vote of the men who had sailed with him, and he turned out to be
the finest leader of them all. He did not look the part. He was a stockily
built man in his thirties, with china-blue eyes, a broken nose, and a wide
humorous mouth; and he had so quiet and modest a manner that it might have
taken us a long time to find out his latent powers. But after he became skipper
of Arthur he soon showed astonishing
qualities of a rough and ready leadership and perfectly unshakable courage, and
a combination of confidence, bravado and luck which brought him through one
adventure after another that would have broken the nerve of most men. By the
end of the war he had become the subject of legendary stories in Norway, and
the object of devotion among the crews, affection and admiration among his
British colleagues, and a certain natural jealousy and mistrust among officers
of the Norwegian Navy; all of which left him unmoved, unchanged and unspoilt. He
was not only an outstanding figure of our little unit, but one of the most
remarkable characters of the war.
[...]
I
think the most notable quality of Larsen’s character was its stability. He was
always the same. I was often in his company with people of every rank, from the
Commander-in-Chief Home Fleet and the Crown Prince of Norway to the cook of his
own crew, the British army privates of our shore stuff, or the humblest of
Shetlanders. He remained himself with them all, never raising his soft gentle
voice with his juniors, and never being obsequious or overawed with his
seniors; so of course both seniors and juniors liked him. His men said he
remained the same in a battle, equally unruffled and quiet as he stood at his
wheel unscratched while his wheelhouse was slowly shot to matchwood around him,
or as he sat in the cabin of the Arthur discussing with a
German examination officer the cargo of peat in his hold which concealed tons
of war machines and six British sailors; equally unruffled hove-to in a
hurricane, or in his dinghy, with wounded and dying comrades, abandoning his
sinking ship a hundred miles from shore and four hundred from home. Yet this
was not the calm which can be shown in danger by people of little imagination,
and which sometimes passes for courage. He once told me in a confidence which I
now break that he had been scared stiff on his last adventure, and I believe he
had the sense to be often afraid, but he could always overcome his fear by that
mixture of a sense of duty and self-respect and of strength of will which is
true courage.
The change came abruptly soon after
dark. Within a few minutes of rounding the bend in the fjord they found
themselves pitching into a steep short sea which gave the boat an unnaturally
lively motion. In a moment, as they rose to a crest they felt the tug of the
towing wires on the keel. The bows fell into the trough, and when they rose
again the sharp tug was repeated. Then something hit the propeller.
At once the boat’s motion eased, and
they knew that the Chariots were gone.
In despair they cruised on up the
fjord at slow speed. One of the divers put on his gear to go down in the slender
hope that one of the Chariots might still be there, but the sea got so bad that
Larsen persuaded him to wait till they reached calmer water at the head of the
fjord.
When at last they reached the lee of
the hills beyond the town the diver went overboard. Their worst fears were
confirmed. Both the wires were hanging from the keel, and on the end of each
was the towing lug from the nose of the Chariot, which had been torn off by the
boat’s pitching. It was the bitterest disappointment. They were within five
miles of the Tirpitz, which was easy
range for a Chariot. Nobody knew they were there, and the way to her was wide
open. But their weapons were sunk beyond retrieving, and there was nothing
whatever they could do.
[The fate of the Blia]
This crew going on their first trip
were like children waiting to go for a picnic. They shouted jokes to myself and
Kvalheim and the others who stood on the pier. I cast off the stern ropes, and
Kvalheim stood by the forward spring. He was admiring the gun mountings he had
installed.
‘You damn well ought to be able to
bring back a plane with those,’ he shouted.
Leroy shouted back, ‘You’d better come
with us and show us how.’
‘Will you take me?’ Kvalheim asked
eagerly; and when Leroy and the rest of the crew shouted yes, Kvalheim turned
to me.
‘Can I go?’ he asked. ‘I’d like to do
just one trip.’
The ship was already cast off, and I
had to answer at once. I knew very well how he felt. I was another shore-based
sailor, and I also wanted to do just one trip. It would have been a great help
to my self-esteem. There were plausible reasons, and definite orders, against
my going, but they did not apply to him.
‘All right,’ I said. ‘But don’t forget
we want you ashore when you come back. Can you jump it?’
He shook my hand vigorously, then
jumped about six feet from the quay to the ship’s rail.
As Blia
turned to head for the harbour mouth the crew were waving, and Kvalheim was
doing a fantastic dance on the forecastle. In this cheerful manner six men left
for their fatal trip, and I, by a quick decision, sent a seventh with them
We pieced together some of the story
of what happened to Blia from scraps of information which we
received during the next few months, but her end will never be known except to
our imagination.
She arrived safely at her rendezvous
in Bremnes, and met the agent. He was in touch with an efficient military
‘cell’ in the island of Stord, which also acted, like most of the local
organisations on the coast, as an escaping club. This cell had at that time a
large number of people waiting for a chance to get away to Shetland. Some of
them were in danger of arrest by the Gestapo, and others wanted to come across
to join the Norwegian forces; with their families they totalled nearly forty
people. Plans were in hand to obtain a ship for them, but when the head of the
organisation heard from our agent that Blia
was in Bremnes he decided quickly to assemble the party and embark them with
her the following night.
To collect so many people on one of
the outer islands was always a difficult task. Trustworthy messengers had to be
sent round to tell them when they should leave their homes or hiding-places and
exactly how they should travel to the rendezvous. There was a considerable risk
that the movement of so many people converging on a normally isolated spot
would be noticed by the Germans or by quislings; and if one of them had been
arrested for any suspicious action German patrols would at once be called out,
and not only the whole party but the ship and the military cell itself might be
detected. Above all the operation had to be carried quickly. Many of this party
were professional men and local workers. They could not leave their homes until
after dark, and by next morning when they failed to report at their works and
offices the ship must be safely away from the coast.
However, thanks to the efficient
organisation in Stord, the whole party were safely embarked, and Blia sailed with between forty and
forty-five people aboard.
The congestion on board her must have
been appalling. She was fifty-five feet in overall length. Forward was a cabin
with six bunks enclosing a small triangular space containing two benches and a
table. Amidships was the fish hold. This was damp and dark and without
ventilation. Some of the passengers might have found room to sit down there,
but it could only be reached by opening the fish hatch, which would be
impossible in very bad weather. Aft of the hold was the engine-room, with a
minute wheelhouse and galley above it; and in the stern the skipper’s cabin,
with two bunks and four feet of floor space between them.
On a calm summer’s day the discomfort
would have been intense; but on her passage back to Shetland Blia run into the storm with which Arthur was struggling a few miles to the
northward. It would have been suicidal for her to put back to Norway. By the
time she arrived there the disappearance of her passengers would be known and
the coast on the alert. She had to try to fight her way through it to Shetland.
Somewhere on the way she failed. We shall never know why. Did she break up? The
two Leroys, at least, would have denied that such a thing could ever happen. Was
the hold being used as a cabin? Perhaps the hatch was left open too long, to
give light and air to passengers down below, till a sea suddenly broke aboard
and partly filled her. One could imagine that before the passengers could be
got out of the hold, with the boat flooded and dangerously low in the water, following
seas might quickly have completed her destruction. Perhaps the congestion of
people aboard prevented the crew from working the ship in some crisis; Larsen
doubted whether he could have kept Arthur
afloat with so many aboard. After the Germans found out that so many people had
escaped they claimed to have sunk her, and this may have been true; but on the
other hand they may have said this to discourage others from leaving Norway by
the same means, and may not have known that she was really lost.
When our friends in the base
disappeared in this way we could not forbear to speculate on the possible
causes of their deaths, though we knew such speculation was useless. From the
loss of Blia the image of a dreadful
scene of suffering and fear, of revolt against an inescapable fate, or of
resignation as the end could be seen to be approaching, will always remain with
us and haunt us, and remind us that though wars can still bring adventures
which can stir the heart, their true nature is of innumerable personal
tragedies, of grief, waste and sacrifice, wholly evil and not redeemed by glory.
It was a bitter blow that Bård and his
crew, of all people, should be lost. Bård himself had such an outstanding and
yet simple character that we all felt we knew him very well, and cherished him
as a kind of mascot. Both he and his boat and most of his crew had been with us
from the very beginning, sailing regularly to Norway and back without any fuss,
and without worrying at all about Germans. We remembered the time they had
stayed for four days in Traena having a party while we worried more and more
about them; and the time (it was just a year ago) when they had brought
Christmas trees for us all from the enemy coast; and the time Bård had saved up
and placed an order, on one trip, for an accordion from a firm in Oslo, and
called to collect it next time he was in the neighbourhood. And Bård’s awful
old hats, and the way he would stay in bed till dinner-time; everything we
remembered of him was unmilitary, perhaps exasperating, but certainly
endearing. And so strong was his own conviction that the Aksel would always come back that we had all unconsciously learned
to share it. We could hardly believe she was sunk, and he dead. Every one of
the men half believed he had sailed his dinghy to Norway and would come back
again. This possibility was discussed endlessly, and for months there were rumours
that he had been seen there and was only waiting for a chance to escape. In the
face of the obvious evidence, I almost believed it myself. I tried not to admit
the truth to my mind, and so postpone the distress of imagining that moment of
terror (I see it so clearly) when, in the inhuman cold and darkness of the
wastes of sea, Bård at last understood that his luck had failed him, and lost
hope, and knew he was drowning.
In writing a book on a kind of warfare which was picturesque and adventurous and sometimes even enjoyable, I have been anxious not to lead any members of a younger generation to think that these are, or ever can be, the qualities of warfare itself. Our adventures were not created by the war, but by the adventurous spirit of the men who sailed our boats. Adventure can always be found by adventurous, in war or peace, and enjoyment by the joyous. For a very few war may increase the opportunity for adventure; but for nearly all ordinary people it brings no gain, but only pain and sorrow, whether the war is won or lost. The drowning of Bard and his crew, the dreadful end of the Blia, the execution of Mindur and Pete: these were the effects of war upon us. And to ascribe glory to the violent death of any young man loving life is only to add further folly to the failure of human wisdom which is the cause of war.
We Die Alone
(1955)
I spent four years of the war as an
R.N.V.R. officer in Shetland, as second-in-command of the base of the ‘private
navy’ of fishing boats and submarine chasers which landed agents and arms in occupied
Norway. Brattholm was one of our boats,
and Jan Baalsrud was one of our passengers. In those days, I was living among
brave men and in the midst of their desperate adventures; but of all the
extraordinary stories they brought back to base, Jan Baalsrud’s had this
special fascination: that he obviously knew only half of what had happened. Up
in the mountains of Arctic Norway there had clearly been an epic of rescue, and
nobody knew the whole of it.
I met Jan in Oslo in 1952, and suggested
we might go up to the far north to try to piece together the whole of the tale.
We set off in April, 1954; I wanted to be there in the spring thaw, when the
story itself had happened. We went first to Toftefjord, where the Brattholm had been blown up; we followed
the route of Jan’s escape, calling at each of the houses where he had been
given shelter. The same people still lived in them, and over coffee and cakes
and brandy the story began to tell itself, without any prompting from me. I
think each family remembered Jan’s sudden dramatic appearance at their door,
eleven years before, more vividly than any other event in their lives.
We crossed the Lyngen Alps on skis,
and went to the deserted log cabin at Revdal; on the floor there still lay the
bottles in which milk and brandy had been brought to Jan. With the same four
men who had carried him up, we climbed the 3,000 foot wall of Revdal; at the
top, under the boulder on that ghastly desolate plateau, the wind had scooped
exactly the same hole in the snow as it had when Jan was buried there.
Even there in the north, I found no
one had known more than his own part in the story – not how it had begun, nor
how it had ended, yet all that they told me began to fit together. When at last
I could see the story as a whole, I began to wonder if anyone who had not been
there would believe it. It was not just the staggering feats of endurance; if I
had invented it, I would never have dared to rescue my hero so many times from
so many apparently hopeless situations. But I did not invent any of it, or even
attempt to dramatise it; this is how it happened, and nobody who heard the
story bit by bit, as I did, from different and humble men and women up there
could ever doubt it.
[Author’s Note in all editions]
I heard the bare bones of this story
during the war, soon after it happened, and I mentioned it briefly in my book The Shetland Bus. All that I knew about
it then was based on a report which was written in a Swedish hospital by a man called
Jan Baalsrud. It was a graphic report, but Baalsrud was very ill when he wrote
it, and it left a lot unsaid. One could see that there was much more in the
story, some things which Baalsrud had forgotten and others he had never known, although
he played the main part in it. But it was not until ten years later that I had
a chance to talk it all over with him, and persuade him to come with me to the
far north of Norway where it happened, to try to find out the whole truth of
it.
Now that I have found it out and
written it down, I am rather afraid of being accused of exaggeration. Parts of
it are difficult to believe. But I have seen nearly all the places which are
mentioned in this book, and met nearly all the people. Not one of the people
knew the whole story, but each of them had a most vivid recollection of his own
part in it. Each of their individual stories fitted together, and also confirmed
what Baalsrud himself remembered. Some minor events are matters of deduction,
but none of it is imaginary. Here and there I have altered a name or an
unimportant detail to avoid offending people; but otherwise, I am convinced that
this account is true.
When the engine stopped, Toftefjord
seemed absolutely silent. After six days of the racket and vibration of a Norwegian
fishing-boat under way, the mere absence of noise was unfamiliar; but there is
always a specially noticeable silence in sheltered places when the land is covered
thickly with snow. All familiar sounds are muted and unresonant. There are no
footfalls, no sounds of birds or running water, no hum of insects or rustle of animals
or leaves. Even one’s own voice seems altered. Even without reason, in places
hushed by snow, the deadening of sound seems menacing.
So when the shopkeeper played for
safety, and the official did what he afterwards claimed was his duty, their
actions cost fifteen lives. Yet it is not for an Englishman, who has never
lived under the rule of the Germans, to pass judgment on what they did. Their
own countrymen judged them hardly. In a few moments of panic, they both threw
away their peace of mind for ever. For the rest of the war, their lives were
made a misery by their neighbours, and after it ended, the shopkeeper was
sentenced by a Norwegian court to eight years’ hard labour, and the official to
fourteen.
She overcame her terror and revulsion
enough then to creep near him and look at him closely to see if he was somebody
she knew.
It would have been hard to tell. When
he lay still like that on the floor, one would have thought he was a corpse dug
out of the snow. He was caked with ice and frozen dirt and dried blood. His
hair and his beard were solidly frozen and his face and hands were bloated and
discoloured. His feet were great balls of compacted snow and ice. His eyes were
tight shut, screwed up with the pain of snowblindness.
One is apt to forget that this sort of
activity needs money, but it does: or at least, it did in north Norway. People
like Marius were glad to stretch their own rations to feed Jan, and to sleep
with a blanket less on their own beds, and to give him their clothes; but sooner
or later he was sure to need something which neither of them possessed
themselves. Then there would be only one option: either to go to somebody who
could supply it, and let him into the secret so that he would give it for
nothing, or else to buy it. The things Jan was most likely to need, the simple
necessities of life, were rationed, and a lot of things he might possibly need
could not be bought at all except at black market prices; and of course a man
who was willing to sell on the black market was the last sort of person one
would want to know about Jan. The only safe way to get what was needed would be
to pay the price which was asked, however high it was, and not tell anybody.
[...]
But as things turned out, this was
only the very beginning of the expense of saving Jan’s life. Before the end, it
cost £1650 in cash, besides the labour and goods which were given freely by hundreds
of people; and the whole of this sum was contributed by business houses and
individuals in Tromsö who regarded him as a symbol of the battle against the Germans.
Sometimes in those solitary days, between the chores which always kept him busy, he still had the strength of mind to laugh at the contrast between himself as he used to be and his present state of elementary existence. Looking back, his life before the war, and even in the army, seemed prim and over-fastidious. There was a certain kind of humour in the thought that he had once taken some pride in his appearance, chosen ties as if they were important, pressed his trousers, kept his hair cut, and even manicured his nails. Grubbing about in the snow for a crust of bread reminded him of a time he had had to complain in an Oslo restaurant because there was a coffee stain on the tablecloth, and of how apologetic the waiter had been when he changed it for a clean one. It had seemed important; in fact, it had been important to him as he was in those days. If the man he had then been could have seen the man he was now, the sight would have made him sick. He had not washed or shaved or combed his hair for weeks, or taken off his clothes. He had reached that stage of filth when one’s clothes seem to be part of one’s body, and he smelt. But, luckily, what had happened to him in the last few weeks had changed him, and he did not mind his dirt. It had changed him more fundamentally than merely by making him dirty and ill and emaciated and crippling his legs. It had changed him so that it was quite difficult for him to recognise the spark of life which still lingered inside that feeble disgusting body as himself. He knew already that if he lived through it all he would never be the same person again. He would have lost his feet, he supposed, but he would have grown in experience. He felt he would never dare to be impatient again, that he would always be placid and tolerant, and that none of the irritations of civilised life would have the power to annoy him any more. Travel broadens the mind, he thought, and laughed out loud because the plateau was so damnably silent.
Heroes of Nowadays (1957)
Introduction
Another thing I have learned is that courage means much more than simply not being afraid. Sometimes you hear of men who have done great deeds in battle just because it never occurred to them to be afraid. But from what I have seen, I am sure that not to be afraid in a battle is more a sign of stupidity than of courage. In times of great danger, every intelligent person is afraid. It is a natural feeling, and nobody should ever be ashamed of it. In fact, you cannot really be courageous unless you are afraid to begin with; because true courage is the power to overcome your fear, and in spite of it to do what you think is right. That is the quality you will find in the people in this book.
[...]
The
new generation is growing up in the most interesting and important period there
has ever been in human history: the period when war is becoming so destructive
that it is useless and out-of-date as a way of solving disputes between
nations. This generation – the one younger than my own – is faced with the task
of finding new tests of courage, new outlets for the spirit of adventure, to
take the place of the old-fashioned adventure of warfare. Of course, new
adventures will be found; in scientific research, perhaps, and space travel,
and in new discoveries which I can no more imagine than my grandfather, at my
age, could have imagined jet aircraft or television. Meanwhile, here are
stories of how some of my generation have faced the tests of courage which have
come to us.
Augustine
Courtauld
It is comparatively easy to make a
courageous decision when one is in good health and comfort: one’s will-power
then is at its strongest. But it is much more difficult when one is tired, or
ill, or in pain. As one example, it has always surprised me and filled me with
admiration to know that Nelson suffered from seasickness all his life, yet
became the greatest of all admirals and planned and fought his battles in spite
of it. It also surprises me and makes me admire Courtauld to know that when he
decided to volunteer to stay on the ice-cap alone, he was already worn out by
the strain of a month of continual struggle. It might have been easy to make a
suggestion like that when he was sitting in warmth and comfort at the base; one
might even have thought that he did not know what he was letting himself in
for. But that is not what happened. He made his offer when they had already
discovered that winter on the ice-cap was far worse than they had imagined it could
be.
Leif
Larsen
But
even now, so many years after the war has ended, whenever he goes into town,
people recognise him in the street and point him out to each other as the great
Shetland Larsen: often strangers come up to him just to shake his hand. I think
he enjoys being famous, as most people would; but it has its drawbacks, because
sometimes he has to make speeches. He hates that, just as much as he used to
hate writing reports for me. I have seen him doing it sometimes; and the man
whose nerve was never shaken by storms or German shells looks scared to death
when he has to get up on a platform and address a few words to a friendly,
admiring crowd.
Test
Pilots
This
part of the test pilot’s work takes him up into regions of fantastic solitude.
Eight miles high, the weather is always fine, and by day the sun is always
shining. The empty sky above him is perfectly cloudless, and very dark blue.
Down at the bottom of the enormous space below, the earth looks like a curved
map; or if there are clouds down there, he looks down on a gleaming white
wrinkled floor. Alone in his machine, he has no sensation of speed, so long as
his flight is level, because there is nothing close at hand for him to measure
his speed against. He seems to be hanging in space. Only the map-like earth
below gradually unrolls. But if he started over London, and steered south, in
seven minutes the whole of Kent and the English Channel would have rolled away
beneath him, and he would already be above the coast of France. In the time
that it takes you to read this single sentence, he would have travelled another
mile.
Freddy
Spencer Chapman
He has written himself: “I made
another discovery, which is this: almost all difficulties can be overcome. Mere
cold is a friend, not an enemy; the weather always gets better if you wait long
enough; distance is merely relative; man can exist for a long time on very
little food; the human body is capable of bearing immense privation; miracles
still happen: it is the state of mind that is important.”
I think that might be a motto for all
adventurers.
Londoners
But although everybody knew the attack
was sure to come, nobody knew what would happen when it did come, or what it
would be like, because no such thing had ever happened before.
For this reason, I think everybody who
lived or worked in London in 1939 was more or less afraid: not only afraid of
the destruction which threatened the city, but even more afraid of how he
himself would behave if the attack should suddenly start. For this is one of
the commonest kinds of fear: the fear of being afraid and showing it, the fear
that when danger comes one may disgrace oneself by seeming to be a coward.
[...]
All the people in the streets were
herded into shelters by the police and air-raid wardens. And there, crowded
together, they all waited to see what terrible thing was going to happen: it
might well be some secret weapon which nobody in Britain had ever heard of.
Everybody was nervous, more or less. Everybody felt his mouth was dry and his
heart was beating harder than usual: and everybody looked at his neighbours to
see how they were taking it. And each one, a little ashamed perhaps of his own
nervous feeling, and anxious to hide it, saw then that everyone else was
feeling exactly the same.
The Golden Isthmus (1966)
It was the bottom of the jungle, not
the top, that concerned the adventurers, and the only way to see what they saw
is still to walk – to go boldly ashore on one of the long white Caribbean
beaches and walk inland. It does not matter where: it is all the same. And
luckily, because it is all the same, you do not have to walk very far. After a
day’s march from the sea-cost, or for that matter a week’s march, there is
nothing much to be seen that could not be seen in the first few miles, and
nothing much to be seen that could not be seen in the first few miles, and nothing
much to be felt except the degree of exhaustion and, if you are prone to it, a
kind of claustrophobia.
You start up a river. Perhaps in the
long wet season it may be possible to use a canoe, and in the dry season, which
lasts roughly from January to March, the river bed is the easiest place to
walk. But the rivers on the northern coast are short, and on the southern coast
so meandering and so often choked with jungle debris that you soon have to
leave their course. And then, as all the early explorers discovered, it only
takes a few steps for the jungle to wrap you round in its endless twilit
sameness.
All the time in the jungle, you are
walking on mud or on wet squashy leaf-mould which feels alive, and you are scrambling
over or under fallen rotten tree-trunks full of ants. You are always sweating
prodigiously, not perhaps because it is very hot – it may be only 85 degrees [°F
= 29.4°C] – but because the air is saturated and perfectly still. You are
always being bitten by mosquitoes and other creatures which you feel but seldom
see. And almost all the time, you are using a machete, the heavy two-foot knife
which is the only piece of equipment you must take with you, to chop off
branches and fronds of palms or gigantic ferns, and creepers as thick as your
arm which cross your way. This is not precisely because you could not push them
aside or force a way through them: there are not many places, except perhaps
mangrove swamps, which really deserve the word impenetrable. It is rather
because experience tells you not to touch the jungle plants if you can help it.
Some have poisonous juice which raises blisters, some four-inch spines, some blades
as long and sharp as swords; and in the dim light among the tangle it is hard
to see which is which.
When you pause to look round, you can
seldom see more than ten yards, and seldom see more than a glimpse of sky. The
palms and the half-grown deciduous trees make a roof, and other enormous trunks
rise through it, as bare and straight and untapering as columns in a temple, to
branch and bloom far out of sight above. Creepers hang looped like bellropes in
a church, and feel for the earth to plant their aerial roots. On every growth
there are other growths – mosses, fungi, ferns and orchids. Parasitical trees
take root on other trees, and climb up and strangle their hosts. Over it all is
the smell of hot, wet, rotten vegetation. And the undergrowth flops back into
place across the way you came.
Here, unlike the coast, it is never
silent. There is an underlying hum and rustle, and the sound of dripping water.
Birds squawk and chatter high above, things crash and crackle just beyond the
limit of your vision – living things perhaps, or perhaps dead branches falling.
And cicadas trill incessantly. It is said that a single cicada can be heard a
quarter of a mile away, and there are billions. It is a daunting, pervasive,
irritating noise which comes from everywhere and numbs your sense of direction
so that it sometimes seems to be inside your head. It is made by the male
insects, and is said not even to attract the females, which appear to be deaf.
It may not really be very loud, but it is so shrill that it inhibits your sense
of hearing, just as the stink of decay inhibits your sense of smell.
It may be this inhibition of the
senses which makes the jungle a rather alarming place, especially if you are
alone and night is falling. There is no particular danger, but when you cannot
see or hear very well you feel acutely inadequate. Other animals know what to
do, they run on all fours underneath the thickets or climb above them; but an
animal which has to walk upright and cannot climb or crawl is at an absurd
disadvantage – it is simply not designed for this terrain. And there may be
another more subtle reason for alarm. The jungle is so virile, its life is so
prolific, that death can be seen more plainly than usual here as a part of a
cycle. The struggle for life is shown in every twist of the plants which grope
and cling and thrust themselves up to the light. Everywhere are those which
have failed or are clearly doomed to fail, to die and rot and feed the roots of
those which have succeeded. The value you put on your own spark of life seems
exaggerated. You know that if you had to lie down and die, the jungle would
almost instantly convert you into humus. On the spot that you chose, it would
grow just a fraction taller, and you would have fulfilled your natural
function.
But what happened next was unique. After
taking Careta back to Santa Maria, Balboa began to talk to him. One has to
imagine the scene: the bearded Spaniard, relaxed perhaps at the end of an
active day, talking at first in idle curiosity; the naked Indian, knowing his
life and his family’s were at stake; the two traitorous interpreters; the smoky
light in an Indian hut Balboa had fitted roughly as his home and headquarters;
outside in the stolen village, the voices of the armoured Spanish watchmen and
the sounds of the sea and jungle. Nobody divulged what the two men talked
about. But slowly in those long laborious conversations, through the inept
interpretations of the two deserters, a revelation must have come to Balboa’s
agile mind: the revelation that here was not merely a savage to be enslaved,
but a man of intelligence, perhaps of charm, a man with values and customs and
beliefs which deserved respect. Careta, whatever he said, brought his
antagonist to see that he had done wrong to enslave him. He offered
forgiveness, alliance and friendship in return for his freedom, and as a
binding token of them he offered Balboa his daughter as a wife. This was a girl
whom all the Spaniards agreed was beautiful. Unluckily they never described her
further: not even her name is known. But since she was a Cuna Indian and a
maiden, one may be sure she was very young – perhaps fourteen – small,
delicately formed, brown-skinned, black-haired, wide-eyed.
What was it that changed Balboa?
Perhaps, at the lowest estimate, it was only a degree of shrewdness and an eye
for a good proposition: both he and Careta were rulers, and they may both have
seen that they would be stronger together than apart. Yet one feels there must
have been something more than that, because other Spaniards were shrewd, but
Balboa did something that none of them had done. Perhaps it was the pretty and
doubtless almost naked girl: it was a very long time since Balboa had seen such
a sight. Yet it was not only lust, because the girl was already a captive, and
if that had been all Balboa felt, her father’s offer would have been
superfluous. Perhaps Balboa was put to shame for all the horrors of Spanish
conquest, because Careta’s promise certainly revealed a standard of honour
which, without any Christian basis, corresponded strangely to the chivalry the
Spaniards had almost forgotten.
The death of Balboa was a crime which
affected millions. If he had lived, Peru would have had a tolerably humane
discoverer instead of the savage Pizarro: it is even conceivable that the Inca
civilisation would still exist today. But instead, the wave of conquest, with
its slaughter and destruction, after passing through Darien like a wave of the
sea through a narrow sound, began to spread out beyond. Pizarro carried it
south, defeated the Incas, betrayed and killed their god-king, and stole, broke
up and melted down their incomparable golden treasures. On the isthmus, the ebb
of the wave left a kind of peace behind, but it was only the peace of death.
The terrible rule of Pedrarias lasted for sixteen years until he died in 1530,
and the historian Oviedo y Valdes, who was there until he could stand it no
longer, made an estimate that he had caused the death or enslavement – or both
– of two million human beings. The Darien Indians disappeared from all
historical record for over a century. For all that anyone cared, they might
have ceased to exist, like the Indians of Hispaniola. But enough had survived,
hiding in scattered remnants in the jungle, to save their race and slowly
rebuild the ruins of their simple society. They rebuilt it exactly as it had been
before. Even now, it is not much different. But they never forgave the
Spaniards.
[On the people behind the Scottish
colony in 1698–1700:]
Reading the orders in the company’s
minute book, one begins by assuming that the directors knew what they were
doing, and that the strangeness of their purchases is only due to the passage
of two hundred and seventy years. But did they? Was this a reasonable list of
merchandise even then? Slowly a sad suspicion grows. These men were worthy solid
citizens, lawyers, merchants and a good number of nobles, the backbone of
respectable Edinburgh life. They were rushing ahead with child-like enthusiasm,
enjoying every moment of it, blazing a trail for Scotland, ploughing the seas
by proxy. But they knew nothing at all about founding a colony. Not one of them
was a seaman. Not one of them, except Paterson, had ever travelled far afield
from Scotland. Not even he had ever been to Darien – and they had not told
anyone else where their ships were bound for. It is like watching children walk
gaily towards a precipice. One longs to shout to them to stop. One hates to
fear, long before it happens, that they are going to be hurt. And one knows it
need not happen. There are plenty of men in England who could advise them –
there is all the experience of the English merchant ventures since the
Elizabethans. But England has snubbed them, and they are too proud to ask.
[On the delusions on De Lesseps and
his disastrous attempt to build the Canal:]
But de Lesseps, alone in his cabin on
board the ship on the way to New York, cut down the figure of cost, without any
explanation, to 658 million francs; and he clung to his estimate long after
events had proved that all three of them [765 and 843 million] were ludicrously
low. It was not dishonesty in any crude sense: it was more like the blindness
of love. He had fallen in love with the idea, and he could not or would not see
any fault in it, nor bear to hear anyone criticise it. On the results of this
expedition, he announced that a canal at sea-level could and would be built,
and finished by 1888. This time, his appeal for funds was a splendid success.
He asked for 600 million francs, and the French public offered double that
amount – solely because the Great Frenchman had been to Panama and said the
sea-level canal was feasible. No other such enterprise has ever been launched
with so little preparation. Wyse had chosen the Panama route largely because
the railroad made it easy to explore, and de Lesseps never considered any
other. The Panama Canal, indeed, stands where it does today because the
railroad was there before it, and the railroad was there because the Spanish
trail was there. The choice belonged to Pedrarias, not de Lesseps.
[On the French tragedy in the future
Canal Zone:]
It was not carelessness or
inefficiency that made the deaths so high: they built the finest hospitals in
Colon and Panama, and good housing for themselves and their labourers all along
the route. It was simply ignorance – the ignorance of the world at that time.
Nobody had yet seen the connection of malaria and yellow fever with mosquitoes
– the connection that seemed so pathetically obvious once it was seen. The houses
had windows without any glass or screens. The huge excavations they made were
full of pools of stagnant water, and nobody knew they were dangerous. The
hospital at Panama was staffed by nuns, who laid out a beautiful garden round
it with ornamental ponds. It is said that they stood the feet of hospital beds
in bowls of water to stop ants climbing up them, and that mosquitoes bred in
the bowls. Twenty-one of the twenty-four nursing sisters died. Of four
successive chief engineers, two died on the isthmus, and one in France after
going home because his wife and son-in-law and daughter had died. The fourth,
who took over because there was nobody else, was a young man of 26 called
Philippe Bunau-Varilla: he caught yellow fever and was one of the very few who
recovered from it, and he lived to play an important part in political events
on the isthmus twenty years later.
[Pan-Am tensions in the Zone:]
Most of the Zonians had a feeling that
Panama had been ungrateful, after all the United States had done for the
country. A few extremists even revived the old stories of Roosevelt, not as
scandals but as something else deserving gratitude: “Why, the Republic would
never have even existed if it hadn’t been for Roosevelt.” They had still to
learn, as the British had painfully learned, that a colonising power has no
right to gratitude for the benefits it brings to a colony, any more than
parents have a right to it for feeding and housing their children. Perhaps the
most sensible summing-up was made by one American who lived in the city, not in
the Zone. “Of course,” he said, “we’ve given them most of what they have. But
gifts are no good without the old-fashioned thing called love, and that’s a
thing we’ve never given them. God knows, they didn’t make it easy. But we
didn’t try enough.”
There is something peculiarly shocking
about an underground nuclear explosion, even though one can only watch it at
close quarters through slow-motion moving pictures made by automatic cameras.
To the most sophisticated city dweller, there is still something important in
the solidness of the ground he walks on: it is still an instinctive symbol of
stability. To see a wide stretch of placid countryside bulge upwards in a
monstrous blister, and then split open with tongues of flame and smoke,
disturbs something fundamental in an ordinary person’s emotions. Nobody is
likely to think unmoved of the mountains of Darien, wild and useless though
they are, being burst apart, and the trees and animals, rocks and streams and
valleys, all the primeval panorama of the jungle, suddenly flung into
non-existence. But of course, one knows this is sentimentality. If one man with
a button can do in a microsecond what would take an army of men a lifetime with
picks and shovels – well, so much the better: that is progress.
The life the Cuna lead there still
seems as idyllic as it seemed to the buccaneers in the moments when they grew
tired of gold and slaughter. Of course, a sophisticated person could never join
it and enjoy it: but a glimpse of it can give him an uneasy feeling that this
may be how mankind was meant to live.
Mulatupo will certainly cease to exist with nuclear blasts, and the scorched and scarred shores, when it is all finished, will surround an international anchorage full of ships. No doubt the cacique and his people will be treated very generously: the world has changed since Pedrarias, even though the Cuna still suspect it never changes. Perhaps other caciques along the coast will find room for them. But whoever has the distressing job of going to Mulatupo, and telling its people what the world has decided, will know – as they will know themselves – that dollars cannot buy back what they will lose.
A Near Run
Thing: The Day of Waterloo (1968)
The earliest accounts of the battle,
in prose and verse, were written in a heroic style that many people even then, including
the Duke of Wellington, knew was far from reality. Later, there were technical accounts,
written by officers who were there, and read, one can only suppose, by officers
who were not. Then, after the last survivors were dead, the controversy became
the main topic, and many books, especially since the turn of the century, have
analysed the orders given by Wellington and Napoleon, and the marshals’ actions
and the movements of regiments, in the smallest detail.
That kind of critical analysis is the
essence of military history, and it has an intellectual interest of its own. But
it is not the essence of a battle: it does not describe a human experience.
Historians can see a battle calmly as a whole, but no soldier in battle sees anything
of the sort. He is half-blinded by gunsmoke, half-deafened by noise, and either
half-paralysed by fright or driven to a kind of madness by exaltation and the
hope of glory.
There is a moral in the story, for
anyone who cares to look for it. Of course, what a general does in a battle is
more important than what a soldier does, or what he feels or thinks; but the
deeds and thoughts of soldiers have a special interest, because they sometimes
illuminate the mystery of military life. The mystery is this: what makes a man,
who joins an army and puts on a more or less exotic kind of dress, behave on
the word of command entirely unlike himself, but like a ferocious animal? This
is a question of more than historical interest, because the same thing still
has to happen in any successful army when it goes to war.
Waterloo was an extreme case of this
strange behaviour. The combatants on both sides were ordinary men with
ordinary, homely faults and virtues. French and British soldiers admired each
other. Yet the battle they fought was not the impersonal, scientific kind of
battle that armies fight nowadays. They hacked and slashed at each other with
sabres, lances and bayonets, shot each other point-black with muskets and
pistols, and triumphantly mowed each other down with grape-shot from cannon at
thirty paces, until one in four of them was lying dead or wounded and the field
was encumbered with the heaps of corpses. Why did they do it? Why do men ever do
it – and women never? Why, on the other hand, did 10,000 men of Wellington’s
army run away? And why did the French, who had been attacking all the afternoon,
suddenly change in the course of ten minutes from an army to a rabble?
In the soldiers’ tales of Waterloo there
are glimpses of the answers of these questions. Most of the men who wrote them
down were lacking in introspection, and less critical of authority and the established
order than anyone is today. So they reveal unconsciously the muddled hopes that
took them there, the fear that trapped them and the pride that blinded them.
Mercer’s clash with the Prussians was
not the only one: Prussian and British cavalry charged each other, and all over
the field there were isolated fights between the allies. It was not surprising,
and nobody was to blame. The Prussians arrived without knowing the lie of the
land, on a field of battle shrouded by smoke and fought over all day by men of
four nationalities in scores of different uniforms. A large part of
Wellington’s army spoke French as its native language, and when British and
Prussians spoke to each other, French was often the only language they had in
common. To both sides, anyone with a foreign accent and an unfamiliar uniform
looked like an enemy, and it was safest to shoot first and ask afterwards.
[On the night after the battle:]
The paralysis of the army in the dark
seems strange in retrospect. Wellington, who rode back across the battlefield,
and then sat down to his dinner and went to sleep, gave no order and made no
suggestion about the wounded until the following evening. Nor did any other
senior officer, so far as can be known. The army medical service was
overwhelmed, and it was nobody else’s business even to give first aid. Everyone
was distressed by the groans and shrieks he could hear, but nobody walked a
yard from his bivouac to fetch water or to help to bandage men who needed it.
Everyone, of course, was tired, and that was some excuse. And the dark field,
where friends and mortal enemies were lying mixed together, was genuinely
terrifying. Above all, it was an unfamiliar situation, for which there were no
standing orders. Battles seldom ended so suddenly, so conclusively, or so
exactly at dusk: more often both armies had moved before nightfall, one in
retreat and the other in pursuit, and both had to be ready to fight again the
next morning. So active soldiers were accustomed to leaving their wounded
companions behind with their dead and quickly forgetting them all. The idea of
halting among them was unfamiliar, and nobody liked it. Some British regiments
at Waterloo moved off the field before they bivouacked, simply in order to
spend a quiet night. And the rest of them slept, compact little groups of
healthy men among the sea of suffering, waiting like armies everywhere for
somebody to tell them what to do.
But in the morning, when the Guards
were marching away in belated pursuit of the French, they passed some carts
full of wounded on the road, abandoned by their drivers. Some of them were
Guardsmen, and one recognized Gronow and shouted ‘For God’s sake, Mr. Gronow,
give us some water or we shall go mad.’ He jumped into the cart and gave the
man his flask, and the others begged him to fill it again from a ditch. He did
so, and he also took off his cap, stopped up a bullet hole in the top of it
with his handkerchief, and took them a drink in that. But this act of kindness
was remarkable. ‘I did not hesitate a moment,’ Gronow himself wrote many years
afterwards, as if he were still surprised at his own impulsive generosity: and
clearly the rest of his regiment passed the cartloads of wounded men without doing
anything.
[On the smaller battle of Quatre Bras,
fought two days earlier:]
On the field of Quatre Bras lay 4,000
corpses, all of them stark naked, for the Belgian peasants had stripped them of
everything. It was like a gigantic morgue. The most hardened soldiers, passing
through, were struck with horror there. The dead, alternatively lighted by the
moon and covered by the shadows of the clouds, seemed in some men’s imagination
to grimace and move their limbs.
The women were more in need of pity
than the wounded. Officers, for the most part, who had their wives or lovers
with them in Belgium, had left them in their billets or sent them to safety in
Brussels or Antwerp. But private soldiers, with less money and possibly less
sense, kept their wives with them on the march and in bivouacs. A good many of
these women had been there all through the battle, anxiously hovering on the
edges of it. Some, hearing their husbands had been hurt, had dashed on to the
field to try to help them and been wounded or killed themselves. Sad stories
were told of corpses of married couples found lying together. But most, of
course, failed to find their men, and had no way of knowing whether they were
still lying there or had been carted away to Brussels; and these distraught
creatures could be seen, when dawn broke again, hunting among the corpses and
begging for news from any of the wounded who could speak.
Trafalgar
(1969)
It was strange that among all the
rumours of secret weapons, nobody on either side seemed to give a thought to
the one invention that could have upset the balance in the Straits: steam.
People in England believed Napoleon was digging a Channel tunnel, and possessed
troop-carrying balloons or monstrous rafts, which were fitted with forts and
carried ten thousand men, and were propelled by a paddle-wheel at each corner,
rotated by a windmill. Yet among these nightmares, nobody dreamed of the little
steamboat Charlotte Dundas, which
since 1801 had been peacefully pulling barges along the Forth and Clyde Canal
in Scotland: nor, in France, did they think of the steamer that Robert Fulton,
the American engineer, had built in Paris in 1803. A very few steam tugboats,
on a calm and misty night when England’s warships could not move at all, would
instantly have solved Napoleon’s problem, without the intervention of his
fleet. If he had given the order, they could have been built. Within four years
of Trafalgar an open sea passage was made by a steamboat in America, from
Hoboken to Philadelphia; and the moment Napoleon’s reign was ended, steamers
were built in England not merely to cross the narrowest part of the Channel,
but to run a passenger service to Le Havre. This was the nearest escape that
England had, but it seems that the English were not aware of it. Nor did anyone
at Trafalgar, so far as one knows, reflect as they slowly sailed into battle
that their ships and their art were almost out of date, or that such a sight
would never be seen again.
Emma Hamilton has often been harshly
judged. But of course the judgements of history often reflect the moral
standards of the historian’s era, not of the subject’s. Emma had many misfortunes
in her life, and another after her death: the misfortune that a series of
biographers of Nelson wrote about her in Victorian times. Nowadays, few people
could have the heart to condemn her as freely as they did. She was born into
poverty, illiterate, outstandingly beautiful in her early teens, without a
father and with a mother who was not averse to living off her daughter’s
earnings; so she was a natural victim of an age when rich men bought and sold
their mistresses. And she was a victim too of her own capacity for love, for
she fell in love with one of her early protectors, Charles Greville, and was
heart-broken when, to pay off his debts, he sold her at the age of 21 to his
uncle who was 56.
Nobody left a deliberate first-hand
account of the scenes on the gun decks in these close encounters. If one puts
together the scraps that are known, they make a picture like a medieval hell.
It was a hell of noise: cannon thundering, crashing back in recoil and flashing
fire: the shouts and yells, occasionally cheers, of hundreds of men as they
loaded, rammed, hauled on the tackles or hove the carriages round with
handspikes; the awful rending crashes as enemy shot smashed through the sides
and splintered the timber; and the screams of the wounded.
It was a hell of vision too. You could
not see far, the narrow space was full of blinding smoke: within your sight,
the dim square light of the nearest gunports, slow-matches burning in their
tubs, the gush of flames from the touchholes which scorched the beams above,
men staggering towards the hatches clutching their wounds, the surgeon’s
assistants heaving up the wounded who could not walk, men shoving their dead
and dying companions through the ports and overboard into the sea: the
powder-monkeys, small boys running through the horrors carrying cartridges; and
the blood, which flowed from side to side as the ship rolled, and made curious
patterns on the deck.
All this was compounded when ships
were locked together. The enemy’s hull cut off the light from one of the rows
of ports, and made the scene even darker. Sometimes, at point-blank range, the
red-hot blast of a gun came straight through a port and scorched everything and
everyone inside it. And where the hulls were touching, the guns could not be
run out, but had to be fired with their muzzles inside the ports, so that all
their smoke came back on the deck and the concussion deafened men for life.
Cuthbert Collingwood was a strange
kind of man to be an admiral. He was conscientious, capable, shrewd and unquestionably
brave: as a strategist he always seemed to know better than anyone else what
the French intended to do. But he was also scholarly, pedantic, puritan and
dour – at the age of 55, a fatherly or even grandfatherly figure in the fleet.
He made a good admiral, but he might have made a better bishop.
And yet, in all these circumstances,
something like a miracle was achieved. The fleet was manned by thousands and
thousands of ignorant uneducated men. Half of them had no wish to be where they
were. Perhaps a sixth were beggars and convicts. They were herded in a
confinement worse than prison with nothing constructive to do. And they became
the most excellent navy the world had ever seen. Partly this was done by
iron-hard discipline. But discipline could not have been enough. There had to
be leadership too, and the leadership was brilliant.
That night, the night of Wednesday
October 23rd, the wind and sea had been the worst so far, and in the morning
Collingwood was forced to his hardest decision. At 8.30 he made the general
signal: ‘Prepare to quit and withdraw men from prizes after having destroyed or
disabled them if time permits.’ This was one of Popham’s standard phrases, and
he repeated it to several individual ships. At ten o’clock he made what seems a
more ruthless general signal: ‘Withdraw English, cut masts and anchors away
from prizes.’
[...]
It was hard in many ways: first
because these ships were regarded as the personal property of the fleet, which
they had fairly won and would sell under Act of Parliament to the country; and
secondly because it called for another prolonged feat of seamanship from men
already almost tired to death, to take off the thousands of men who were still
on board the prizes. And there was even more in it than that: a victory without
any prizes seemed hardly a victory at all. There would be nothing to show for
it. Too soon, they had fancied themselves sailing into Spithead with the flower
of the French and Spanish fleets. But with this order, in the eyes of the
fleet, almost all of the glory and profit went out of Trafalgar.
Yet everyone knew the time had come:
this was one decision for which nobody criticised Collingwood. They simply
could not take the prizes out: British ships would be lost if they persisted.
One duty therefore remained, to stop the enemy repossessing them. Collingwood
was as deeply upset about it as anyone, but he found a puritanical comfort:
‘Such a triumph as the whole would have been, coming into port in England,
might have made us proud and presumptuous, and we ought to be content with that
good fortune which Providence has thought sufficient.’
So it began: the ghastliest episode of
Trafalgar. A good many of the British ships by then had anchored close inshore
to save themselves, although no order to anchor had been given. Here, close to
Cadiz, were the Orion, Leviathan and Ajax, and the Donegal, which had joined from Gibraltar; and they
had also brought to anchor the San
Agustin, Monarca, Argonaute and Bahama. They began on that Thursday afternoon to bring the men out
of the prizes. But they were far apart, and in the vast rolling sea the journey
from ship to ship was perilous. Many boats and many men were lost. On Thursday
night the Monarca parted her cable
and was seen at daylight driving ashore to be wrecked with hundreds of men
still in her. Three days later British crews were still at work to get men out
of the others. In the end the Argonaute
and San Agustin were scuttled. The Berwick was set on fire, and she drove
ashore burning.
Out at sea, where prizes were still in
tow, the work was more urgent; and again, of course, the wounded suffered most.
Several ships combined to take off the huge crew of the Santisima Trinidad. ‘What a sight,’ a lieutenant of her prize-crew
wrote, ‘when we came to remove the wounded, of which there between three and
four hundred. We had to tie the poor mangled wretches round their waists, and
lower them down into a tumbling boat, some without arms, others no legs, and
lacerated all over in the most dreadful manner.’ Who could tell, down in the
darkness among three hundred dead, whether all the living were taken out before
the ship was sunk? The Spaniards thought they were not. ‘Up through the
hatchways came a hideous shriek,’ one Spanish account recalled. ‘It came from
the wretches on the lower deck, who already felt the water rising to drown
them.’
The Story of British Sea Power
(1974)
And yet, by coincidence, these
pioneering voyages [in the 12th century] remind one of the
backwardness of British seamanship. Their destinations were the ports of Acre
or Tyre; and it was from Tyre that Phoenicians had constantly come with trading
ships to England, sailing the same long route, a thousand years before.
In 1258, Roger Bacon in Oxford showed
a compass to Brunetto Latini, who was the tutor of Dante but had not heard of
compasses before; he judged it would one day be very useful to seamen, but that
no master at that time would dare to use it for fear of being thought a
magician, under the influence of an infernal spirit. But meanwhile, the
magnetism of the lodestone was held to be useful for other purposes: among
them, to cure the gout, and to influence wives to confess their adulteries.
And under his [Drake’s] example the
English found an entirely new motive for going to sea. It was neither trade nor
conquest: it was not organized by the merchants, nor by the Crown. It was
sport, the greatest sport of Elizabethan England: baiting Spaniards.
It was in this sport that the English
found their mastery of seamanship and shook off forever their feeling of
inferiority: the supremacy which built a world-wide empire started as a game.
Looking back, it seems that such a great historical movement should have begun
with some serious intent, but it did not; the seamen who started it thought of
it as sport, and it fits no other sphere of human activity. It was not war,
although it led to war after fifteen years; nor was it piracy, although it came
rather near it. It was organized by the men who took part in it, simply because
they enjoyed it and it was fun. They were only a few score captains and a few
thousand men, and almost all of them were very young. But the whole of the rest
of the nation followed it precisely as they follow football now: they
celebrated its wins and suffered its losses, and made heroes of its most
successful captains.
As a sport, it excelled the outright
piracy of the centuries before. It was very exciting and very dangerous, it
needed skill and stamina and a kind of team spirit, and it took its players on
long adventurous journeys to exotic shores. It gave a chance of unimaginable
wealth and yet seemed perfectly moral, for all the treasures plundered from the
Spaniards had already been plundered by them. It had the spur of religion, of
Protestant against Catholic, and also something of the ancient spur of chivalry
– because it was played at the pleasure of a Queen who was feared and loved, a
woman who took the place, on distant voyages, of the romantic lady-loves of the
earlier knights. And it was played according to strict unwritten rules. Every
sea captain knew he could go so far but no farther. If his behaviour to the
Spaniards was too outrageous, the Queen would disown him to preserve her
tenuous peace with Spain; if he failed, her scorn would put an end to his
career; but if he came home with trophies and a good story to tell, she would
gladly take her share of the booty and reward him with her favour.
[...]
There in that distant harbour [San
Julian, today in Argentina], farther from home than any Englishman had ever
been before, Drake defied sea conventions that were centuries old: he insisted
once and for all that things were not decided at sea by consultation or by
social rank, but by an unchallengeable power which did not exist on land,
except in the will of a determined king or queen. Ever since his lifetime,
captains and masters of ships alone at sea have had extraordinary power.
Perhaps it has been to the good, because it would be hard to run a ship without
it, but in the days when voyages lasted for years it was often misused by weak
and cruel men.
The navy which gave its officers a
steady career in 1670 did not do the same for its seamen until about 1860.
Meanwhile, they were recruited or impressed for each ship’s commission and
simply put ashore to fend for themselves at the end of it: such an astonishing
waste of manpower and training that it is a wonder the navy survived, and much
more a wonder that it was ever efficient or successful.
Anson’s voyage illustrates a very
important aspect of naval life. His astonishing perseverance, and his crew’s,
may partly have been due to patriotic feeling; but to judge by the chaplain’s
account, the hope of prize money was a very much stronger motive. The capture
of the galleon made Anson rich for life, and gave each survivor of the voyage a
worthwhile bonus. But it was not really an ignoble motive – or if it were, the
same could be said of any naval action in most of the seventeenth, eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries. It was in Cromwell’s time that naval officers and
crews were first given a formal right to the value of the ships and cargoes
they captured. The shares were varied from time to time by Acts of Parliament,
and the seaman’s share was always a minute of the captain’s or the admiral’s.
Many captains made fortunes in a single happy fight, while their seamen only
got enough to get drunk on; but once in a while a prize was so rich that even
the seaman’s share was worth more than years of his pay.
It was a practical arrangement. A
seaman’s reward, whatever his rank, was a wage which was very small, but on top
of it he had, as it were, a ticket in a tremendous lottery. It was always hard
to man the naval fleet: without the lure of this gamble it would have been
impossible. Without it, the boredom and discomfort of life in wartime would
have been much harder for seamen to bear. And without it, the navy would
certainly not have fought so eagerly as it did against such heavy odds. Even
their tactics and gunnery training were designed for the winning of prize
money. The navy did not fight or shoot to sink the enemy’s ships, it fought to
capture them and bring them home intact. No doubt British seamen were as
patriotic as anyone else, but what they talked about when they sighted an enemy
fleet was not the victory they might win for Britain, it was the prize-money
they could hope to win for themselves; they counted and spent it in anticipation.
Soldiers fought from a sense of military glory that was drilled into them, but
in naval annals the thought of a glorious victory is far less often found that
the thought of a profitable prize. And on the whole it was perhaps a healthier
frame of mind; certainly naval wars were fought with less hatred and
bitterness, and with more courtesy and compassion, than wars on land.
...the whalers who descended with
drink and rape, escaped convicts who would rule like kings if they had a few
muskets, the missionaries who demolished the Polynesian customs and imposed, as
it happened, a particularly dour and joyless kind of Christianity; and finally,
long afterwards, the colonists, French, British or American. Cook foresaw a
disaster. ‘We introduce among them wants and perhaps diseases which they never
before knew, and serve only to disturb that happy tranquillity they and their
forefathers had enjoyed.’ And again: ‘I own I cannot avoid expressing it as my
real opinion that it would have been far better for these poor people never to
have known our superiority in the accommodations and arts that make life
comfortable, than after once knowing it, to be again left and abandoned.’ But
nothing in the eighteenth century could have halted the process of exploration
or guarded against its results, whatever they might be.
Edward Vernon was one of those
irascible and outspoken men who are popular with their subordinates, difficult
with their equals and impossible with their superiors. It is said that on the
lower deck he was known as Old Grog because he wore an eccentric cloak of the
material called grogram. It was in the West Indies that he began the ration of
rum and water which was later named after him: the grog that became the
seaman’s only solace and also the commonest source of drastic punishment when
who drank it were found to be groggy on duty.
Below, on the gundecks, such close
encounters [of ships side by side] were hellish. They were a hell of noise, the
concussion of guns that sometimes deafened men for life, the shouts and yells,
occasionally cheers, of hundreds of men as they loaded, rammed, and fired, the
rending crashes as enemy shot smashed through the wooden sides, and the screams
of the wounded. A hell of vision too: through the blinding smoke, the dim
squares of light from the nearest gunports, the flashes of fire, the surgeon’s
men heaving up the wounded who could not walk, men shoving their dead and dying
companions through the ports and overboard into the sea; the powder monkeys,
small boys running through the horrors carrying cartridges, and the blood that
flowed from side to side with the rolling of the ship.
In that peace [during the 19th
century], the British built up their Empire; but they also built up something
else, of permanent and less arguable use to all mankind – an unrivalled
knowledge of the sea. They were always eager for discovery, not only in
fighting and exploration but in surveying, navigation, astronomy, the sciences
of the sea, and the design, construction and organization of ships and their
machinery and equipment; and they gave their discoveries with extraordinary
freedom to other people. National pride is not an emotion that logic can
justify, but perhaps the British may be allowed a touch of pride at this
achievement; for nowadays, no ship of any nation goes to sea without some
benefit from that age of British enterprise and ingenuity. Sea power has faded,
and the power of Britain may be past; but still, the prime meridian runs
through Greenwich.
It is the fashion now to criticize the
rule of the British on land in their imperial day, but prejudice apart, it is
hard to find fault with what they did at sea. They conceived that sovereignty
of the seas was a trust, and should not be exclusive or repressive – that at
sea humanity came first, and the national flag it flew was less important. If
Britain had not imagined the seas should be free, and commanded them long
enough to ensure it, who knows what national rivalries might have divided them?
Nations would surely have drawn jealous frontiers across them like the land. In
centuries past, Spain had claimed the exclusive ownership of the Pacific, and
Portugal of most of the south Atlantic. The British themselves before that had
claimed the narrow seas. The same thing might very easily have happened all
over the world in the age of steam.
But the opposite happened. Every yard
of habitable land on earth has a national owner, but the seas beyond coastal
waters belong to everyone now, and everyone has an equal right to sail across
them in peace wherever he will. The rules and customs the British devised are
observed because they were just; and it seems so natural that people forget it
is not an ancient right of mankind; it is a freedom that needed one seafaring
race with the wisdom to begin it a century and a half ago. No doubt there are
nations that would have done the same if they had had the power; but the
British did it, and freedom is the best memorial to any age of supremacy.
Lord Byron and Other Eccentrics in the War of Independence (1976)
It was a war, I found, that was even
more barbarous than most, and barbarities are no pleasure to write or read
about. But it had a peculiar charm: among its ghastly massacres there were
often moments of the purest farce, as if a gothic tragedy were being played by
the cast of a comic opera. For its leaders included Greeks and Albanians, Turks
and Egyptians, so shamelessly villainous that their wickedness, at this safe
distance, seems endearing; and among the many foreigners who went before and
after Byron, to give the leaders advice they did not want, were the most
diverse, eccentric, quarrelsome, vain and unconsciously comical men who ever
assembled anywhere to do heroic deeds or to boast about doing them.
[On the Battle of Navarino]
To the survivors in the allied fleet
it seemed a glorious and splendid victory: glory was always the comfort of men
in war, and they needed comfort. [...] But in retrospect this final battle of
all the centuries of navies under sail seems a sordid slaughter. It was fought
at anchor, without the redeeming skill of handling ships and canvas in the open
ocean. And it was fought at ranges that needed no skill in gun-laying. It only
proved that the efficient drill of a European fleet could devastate an eastern
fleet at any odds.
It was no scene of glory when the
shrivelled, dyspeptic, doom-ridden little man came limping across the Genoa
quay and climbed on board, a sombre victim of an impulse he regretted. At the
very last minute he confessed to Barry that he would cancel the expedition even
then, ‘but that Hobhouse and the others would laugh at me.’ Perhaps that is a
common spring of what the world calls heroism.
Byron’s death has often been called a
death for Greece, as if it had been a deliberate sacrifice. But there is only
the faintest suggestion that any such thought came into his mind in the days
when he knew he was dying. ‘I do not lament,’ he was reported to have said in
his weakness, ‘for to terminate my wearisome existence I came to Greece. My
wealth, my abilities, I devoted to her cause. Well, there is my life to her.’
It does not seem to me a claim of hopeful sacrifice; rather a negation of hope,
an acknowledgement that all he had done had been useless and dying was useless
too. It was natural, as the news spread through Europe and America, that people
wanted to mitigate the wasteful tragedy with the comforting thought that his
death achieved something in the cause he had wanted to fight for. That belief
has lasted every since, and grown to a legend: the rest of this story will show
what truth there is in it. My own belief is that Byron would firmly have said
it was cant, his favourite word for a kind of muddled thinking he detested. If
I have understood him at all, he would much have preferred to admit that his
only success was to rescue a couple of dozen Moslem prisoners from the Greeks.
For the rest, his brave intention had ended in total failure, and that was the
kind of fact he thought should be honestly faced. It undervalues him to make
him a story-book hero.
The heroic reputation of Marco
Botzaris was based on battles he fought, but perhaps he deserved it more for
his single-handed battle of wits with the pashas, who were no mean exponents of
that game. He went on meeting them for several weeks, playing on their mutual
disagreement and coming back each time with better terms. Each time he went
out, he certainly run a risk that they would call his bluff and instantly cut
off his head. And each time he came back, he run an equal risk that someone in
Missalonghi would decide he was double-crossing and would stab him in the
night. Clearly he enjoyed it all; but nobody has left a close enough
description of him to explain what personal charm he had that kept him alive.
Some biographers make too much of Byron’s influence on the Philhellenic idea and on the war in Greece. He was not the originator of the romantic attitude to ancient Greece; many others had said the same sort of things before him, but had not said them in quite such a popular way. What he did, for better or worse, in the ten years before the war, was to make the romance of Greece a best-seller. A great many people read his poetry, not only in Britain and America but almost all over Europe; and when the time came there were certainly some who turned up in Greece saying he had been their inspiration, and knowing not only the famous stanzas from Childe Harold, but more obscure passages from his other works:
Whose land from plain to mountain-cave
Was Freedom’s home or Glory’s grave!
Shrine of the mighty! Can it be
That this is all remains of thee?
Approach, thou craven crouching slave:
Say, is not this Thermopylae?
These waters blue that round you lave, –
Oh servile offspring of the free –
Pronounce what sea, what shore is this?
The gulf, the rock of Salamis!
These scenes, their story not unknown,
Arise, and make again your own.’
But the influence of Byron’s poems was
fortuitous. He seems not to have dreamed, when he wrote them, that they would
be read a few years later in the context of a genuine bloody revolution. It is
one thing to incite people in verse to throw off their yoke, and quite another
to think of the horror and grief it causes if they really try to do it. Byron’s
distaste for his own early poems may have been partly artistic. But also, he
may well have had a sense of guilt when he heard of the atrocities in Greece
and remembered the rhetorical indictments to revolt he had composed so
carelessly when he was young. Certainly he was embarrassed when anyone
mentioned them.
Most writers who have tried to
describe Colonel Stanhope have been at pains to say he was not a buffoon; which
suggests they have all been tempted to say he was. He had most of the qualities
it is difficult not to laugh at. He was a do-gooder who had no sense of humour
at all and was always perfectly certain he knew best. He had a fixed idea – the
doctrines of Bentham – which was a religion to him, or something more: one did
not question or discuss it. And he was one of those men who are never aware of
the impression they make on others and never pause to imagine it might be
adverse.
Small groups of these out-of-work
officers in their exotic green and scarlet cloaks and jackets, their elegant
breeches and polished boots, medals and braids and epaulettes, and their
various monstrous helmets and cockaded hats and caps, were landed in all the
primitive little harbours of southern and western Greece in the summer and
autumn of 1821. Their first shock was to find they had to carry their own bags
ashore. Then they asked where the army headquarters were. None of them spoke
modern Greek and none of the inhabitants spoke anything else, so there was
plenty of scope at once for mutual misunderstanding. But the Greeks had the
oriental politeness to tell strangers what they thought they wanted to be told,
and so they sent the officers off in the direction where the Greek army might
have been if it had been anywhere. And in the course of time, the people of the
seaports were asked the same question so often that they really began to
believe the foreigners must be right, and that an army must really exist
somewhere else in the country. So all over the Peloponnese that year, groups
wandered from village to village in their pathetically inappropriate finery,
slowly growing more tattered, footsore and dejected, and heading towards the
ultimate disillusion when they found the army in which they expected high
command was nothing but the Regiment Baleste.
It was really tragic, but one could
feel the tragedy more if so many of them had not been such proud and pompous
men. It was an age when anyone in authority, and army officers most of all,
could display a conceit and self-esteem that would only be ridiculed nowadays.
Among themselves, they were always on their dignity, always taking affront,
always demanding satisfaction for imaginary insults and fighting duels on
trivial points of precedence and etiquette. Their affairs of honour were all
the more difficult because they all suspected each other of being impostors,
which many of them were; and nothing could be more distressing than for a
gentleman to call out another and give him the trashing he deserved, only to
find he was some upstart from the lower classes with whom it was undignified to
fight. Not many were killed in these affrays, but plenty were wounded badly
enough to have to leave the country. They spent much more time and energy
fighting each other than preparing to fight the enemies of Greece.
And to the Greeks they behaved with
odious condescension. They expected every Greek to be grateful to them for
offering their talents to the cause; they often mentioned the personal
sacrifice they had made and the brilliant career they had interrupted, although
the fact was that most of them had nothing better to do. In the villages they
demanded food and accommodation befitting officers and gentlemen, they
complained at what they were given and never considered than the people who fed
them were on the edge of starvation. In the early days they got away with it:
the villagers did not know who they were and treated them with peasants’
humility. But after a while, some Greeks began to ask the obvious question: who
asked you to come? And there was no answer.
There are many moments in the story of
Byron’s journey to Greece when one is tempted to write ‘if only’, and this is
one. Both Byron and Hastings were men of exceptional vision, the one poetic and
the other practical. Both were rich and aristocratic, and willing to devote
their lives and fortunes to Greece. If only Byron had recognized Hastings’
quality and made him his ally instead of the allies he chose, they might have
achieved between them all they wanted.
[On modern Greeks]
If they are having a party, you may be
whisked into it, and whatever you intended to do has to wait for another day: I
have a hazy recollection of being stuffed with wine and cake by a huge crowd of
people in a country tavern who turned out, so far as I ever understood, to be
the annual outing of the Athens Plumbers’ Union. And I remember the very first
time I ever anchored in an empty bay in Greece. It was that blessed time of day
when the sails are stowed and the chain has rattled out and you switch off the
engine and total peace descends; the first glass of ouzo is in your hand, a
drink deceptively strong and ludicrously cheap, the warm air is scented by
rosemary and thyme and the hills are mirrored as if the world had stopped. An
old man came rowing with creaking oars from the shore that had seemed deserted.
He looked like one of Colocotrones’ brigands, and we waited for him anxiously,
expecting some kind of request or complaint we would not understand. But he had
come to give us some pomegranates. Of course he accepted a cigarette and a
drink, and a cynic might say he had hoped for this sort of bargain. But I do
not think so. I think he came only because he was Greek and wanted to show his
goodwill – and of course to ask who we were and where we had come from.
Sometimes, one must admit, their geniality is complicated by a belief that any northern woman welcomes being instantly seduced. But that seems to be a common opinion in the Mediterranean, and if his rebuff is explicit a Greek will accept it cheerfully; it was worth trying, he seems to say, and was meant as a compliment.
[On
eastern, non-European wars]
They were more like modern wars in
their horrible thoroughness. Nowadays, people burn women and babies with
incendiaries or blow them up in their homes with high explosives; then, in
eastern wars, they cut their throats. The Europeans judged the Greeks of the
time by inappropriate standards; but now, I need hardly add, we have lost any
right to judge them at all. They were fighting an eastern war, because it was
the only kind of war they had ever heard of.
This was the quality that enabled the
Greeks, for example, to glorify their brigands. On one level they might know
from experience that they were dirty, lousy, greedy and callous thieves; on the
other they could see them as knightly heroes and guardians of a noble
tradition. To a Greek, both could be equally true.
Great Britons
(1978)
Nelson
The long blockade of all Napoleon’s
ports in the years before Trafalgar was the greatest sustained communal feat of
seamanship there has ever been and ever will be. The watch on Brest was perhaps
the hardest of all – a notoriously dangerous shore which lay to leeward in the
prevailing winds, exposed to seas with a fetch of thousands of miles. No modern
mariner would dare to explain exactly how the navy was able to stand off and on
that coast, estimating the tidal streams and currents, constantly solving the
problems of navigation and ship-building – and not merely in one ship, but a
whole fleet of them. The achievement astonished the French, who looked out
every morning and saw the sails still there, and it is just as astonishing now.
So is the toughness of the crews, who lived in wind and rain and spray, with
neither shelter on deck nor warmth below.
The affair has damaged Nelson’s reputation in some historians’ eyes, and nobody can deny the harm it did. But so far as I know he did not lose a single friend through it: all his friends waited patiently for him to recover, while the navy and the nation as a whole did not give a damn for its hero’s private life. And one cannot deny that some good came out of it. In Emma, Nelson had found a woman who matched his fire and vitality – and to some degree his compassion and charity. He was always an intensely loving man: he would not have been complete if he had never experienced the passionate love that came to him so late in life – or the parental love, for Emma bore him his only children, his daughter Horatia and another christened Emma, whom he never saw because she died at a fortnight old. It is fair to say that Emma completed Nelson. Ever after, he was a man of two loves: his love of duty, honour, glory, the navy and the men he served with; and on the other hand his love for Emma. Both loves lasted until the very minute he died.
The Spanish Story
(1981)
Most of what we are taught about the
armada comes from English sources. Those were meagre, but were embellished by
nineteenth-century historians, who wrote at the peak of British imperial pride
and made the armada story into a national heroic epic tale which was far from
true. For many years I have wanted to do what I could to put the balance right,
and give whatever credit was due to the Spanish soldiers and sailors.
[...]
So it is a Spanish story; but I cannot entirely avoid judging things as a twentieth-century Englishman, and Spaniards might not agree with all my judgements, especially perhaps of King Philip. This is a perennial difficulty: one honestly tries to discard all personal prejudice and to respect all honest opinion; but in the end one is left with certain people one cannot admire – people who were themselves extremely prejudiced and had no respect for anyone else’s opinion. King Philip was one of those.
The God that Philip served was
all-powerful, all-knowing and unforgiving. He could and did take part by
miracles in men’s affairs. Yet paradoxically He depended on His servants to do
His will. He demanded worship absolutely exactly in the forms the Catholic
Church proclaimed, and not in any other. He also demanded the most cruel and
terrible punishments men could devise for anyone who deviated in the least degree.
Especially, he demanded this service from the man to whom he had given the
highest earthly power: King Philip. It was truly an awful burden for a man to
carry.
It was also a burden for a human
empire. Saddled with that primitive belief, the Spanish empire was doomed to
fall to pieces, and during Philip’s reign the cracks had begun. In an age when
reports and orders were carried by horsemen and sailing ships, the empire was
too big for any kind of central control – and far too big for the clerkly bureaucratic
control he tried to impose on it. He hated to delegate an atom of his power:
among the heaps of paper momentous questions waited his decisions while he
struggled with trivialities. The empire was choking to death on paper.
[...]
But in Philip’s simple mind the
mixture of military and religious thought became an insoluble muddle. The God
he conceived had the vices and ambitions of an earthly tyrant, which has always
been a philosophical impossibility, suited only to primitive people in elementary
societies. Yet the society Philip ruled was highly complex. In all his problems
as a ruler, how could he ever distinguish his own will from the will of a God
who was so much like himself? He never could and never did. In all his projects
he explained to everyone that he was pursuing God’s design, as if it were just
a happy coincidence that God’s purpose happened to add to Philip’s power.
Foreigners, fearful or envious of the dominance of Spain, thought this was
hypocrisy, but it was not. Reading Philip’s letters in the twentieth century
and judging him by twentieth-century standards – which of course has the
inherent unfairness of history – one has to say he was bigoted, dogmatic,
self-righteous, illogical, ruthless and hopelessly confused; but also, he was
appallingly sincere.
This was the intrinsic reason why the
armada failed: the king’s belief that he could organize a huge operation of war
without leaving his study, without consulting anyone, without any human advice,
without allowing his commanders to discuss it. It was true he inspired it all.
But when it came to details he did not always understand what he was doing.
Especially, he did not understand seafaring or navigation – he had never
embarked on a ship except as a passenger. When a misunderstanding was firmly
rooted in his mind, almost nothing could dig it out again. Mistaken decisions
emerged from the Escorial with all the force of royal commands, backed by the
assumption that his guidance was divine. Sometimes his commanders humbly tried
to tell him he was wrong. But they could only do it by letter; and by the time
his erroneous orders reached them and their written replies had come back – a
week from Lisbon and a month from the Netherlands – his mind was occupied with
other problems and he seldom took any notice of what they said.
The misunderstanding was mutual, and
the fault for it lay far away in the secret rooms of the Escorial; for the king
had given each of them false information, or no information at all, about the
other. He had led Medina Sidonia to think Parma had a reasonable fleet, good
enough to meet him off Margate, and led Parma to think the way would be cleared
for him so thoroughly that he could cross without firing a shot.
Royal marriages, like the duke’s, were
always political. Babies could be betrothed before they were born, laws against
incest could be cast aside, doddering palsied old men could be married to
teenage girls in last-minute hope of producing an heir to combine the power of
two royal houses. All princes and princesses had to expect this calculated,
unromantic mating: Queen Elizabeth alone refused it, and played the inheritance
game by keeping her suitors guessing.
[On Don Bernardino de Mendoza,
Philip’s ambassador in Paris:]
So his loyalty to Philip was perfectly
secure; but he lived in the twilit world of men whose loyalties were divided
between their churches and their states. No period of history has been richer
in potential spies. Every country had men who were exiled for their religion,
or for crimes their religion had impelled them to commit.
As for England, thousands of English
Catholics were living abroad, not merely because they were Catholic, but
because they were under suspicion, rightly or wrongly, of all degrees of
treason and had had to flee the country to escape imprisonment or even
execution. Most of them were hard up, and happy to accept a ‘pension’ from
Mendoza, and to tell him what they knew in exchange. But they did not know
much, and their pensions were therefore small – just enough to keep them from
starving. More useful, and much better paid, were people playing a double game,
who still held official positions under the queen but were willing to sell
information to a Catholic power.
[...]
Yet he could never trust anybody. His
letters are full of hints of a cloak-and-dagger world with all the elements of
a modern spy romance. There were horsemen waylaid on the road, despatches
mysteriously stolen, and nobody knew by whom, knives slipped between ribs in
the dark alleys of cities, shaded torches on the coasts at night and men put
ashore in rowing boats. There were successful double agents, and men who
unaccountably changed sides; and there was also false information, deliberately
‘planted’ on him and his men by rivals in English pay. Infinite care and cunning
were needed not to press people too far and provoke adverse reaction.
But the duke felt forced to believe
the king’s premise was fundamentally wrong; God had not accepted the Armada’s
cause as his own. Bereft of that faith, he had to look at the armada in the
chilling light of military power, and to admit that if it could not hope for miracles,
it had no hope at all.
It seems very unlikely that he was the
only man in the fleet who had come to this conclusion. The omen of the storm
had been eloquent. One wonders whether there was anyone he could confide in.
Obviously, it was a dangerous opinion to discuss; in the wrong company, it
could have been made to look like treason.
That very morning, it seems, the high
commanders of both fleets had begun to understand the unique situation they
were in, a situation that never occurred again in the history of naval war.
Here were the two most powerful fleets in the world, intent on fighting each
other, and there was no possible way they could do it. They had chosen and
armed themselves for different ways of fighting, and neither of them could be
made to work. The Spaniards wanted to board, but the nimbler English could
always slip to windward. The English wanted to cannonade, but their longest
shots could only reach the nearest edges of the Spanish fleet, leaving the mass
of it unscathed. The kind of battle each had imagined was simply not going to
happen. There was no way they could come to grips, and neither side could hope
to beat the other – unless one side run out of ammunition or the Spaniards,
somehow, somewhere, abandoned their close formation.
The breaking up of a wooden ship was a
terrifying experience. It was slow, but once it had started it grew inexorably
worse. It would start with the whole hull flexing under the impact of waves, so
that adjacent planks were moving minutely against each other. That would cause
the caulking to work its way out. There is a phrase for it: a ship is said to
spew her oakum. The next step would be for the trenails to loosen – the wooden
pegs that fastened the planks to the frames. Finally, the clenched iron bolts
that held the plank ends might also loosen, or else the iron nails that
fastened the plank ends to the stern and stem. At that stage, nothing could be
done, except man the pumps, day and night, and set human chains with buckets to
bail the water out.
Recalde was perhaps the greatest hero
of the campaign on either side. At sixty-two he was too old for such an
experience, and he had been a sick man before he started. Nevertheless, he was
always wise, always loyal to the duke and to the king, and always in the
forefront of every battle from Plymouth to Gravelines. Now as a final duty he
brought his ship back to Corunna, and the remnants of his crew; and having done
it, he lay down resigned to death. He died four days after he reached safety,
it was said of shame and horror at the failure. People do not die of those
emotions, but perhaps he felt such memories would make old age a burden, and
was content to let exhaustion take its course.
Famous Sea Battles (1981)
Fighting is always foolish. But
fighting at sea has one advantage over fighting on land: soldiers fight against
men, but sailors fight against ships. Of course in a naval battle men get hurt
and killed, but that is never the object of the battle: the object is to sink
the enemy’s ship, and if you succeed your next immediate duty is to rescue the
survivors of the enemy’s crew. So there is still room in naval warfare for
compassion, and the ancient fraternity of sailors. There is seldom any furious
enmity: all sailors, of all nations, have a common enemy, the sea.
This duty, to save the lives of one’s
enemies rather than kill them, has been recognized with very few exceptions for
the last four hundred years. It was in the sixteenth century, about the time of
the Spanish Armada, that battles at sea were first fought by sailors. Before
that, they were fought by soldiers, and sailors were regarded as inferior
people whose sole function was to take the soldiers to the scene of battle and
put them in an advantageous position for winning it. Sea battles in those early
days were therefore just as bloodthirsty as battles on land. Luckily, they very
seldom happened. In the 1,600 years from 31 BC to AD 1571, while battles on
land decided the fate of nations, not more than half a dozen battles of any
importance were fought at sea.
Nelson brought many qualities to the
navy: personal courage (he really enjoyed danger), tactical genius, and – most
strangely in a fighting service – kindness and love. Nobody at second hand has
ever quite defined the reasons why his fellow men were so devoted to him. In
letters that other men wrote, one can read of his numberless acts of kindness
and thoughtfulness, great and small; one can see that however busy he was,
tired by responsibility, worry and ill-health, he never neglected old
friendships or failed by some instinctive touch to make new ones. Nor can one
hope to recall his irresistible charm: one can only imagine it from the way
that hard-bitten sailors of every rank wrote more or less laboriously of their
love for him – and love, not respect or admiration, was the word that all of
them used. Yet history has to take account of this intangible fact; for ships
and fleets under Nelson’s command had a loyalty, pride and efficiency no other had
ever achieved.
To a modern imagination, the scene on
the gun-decks must have been hellish: a hell of noise, with the shouts and
cheers and screams of agony, and the concussion of the guns which sometimes
deafened men for life; a hell of vision too, in the smoke and half-darkness lit
by gun-flashes, when the enemy shot began to come through, and the surgeon’s
men shoved mangled corpses out through the gun-ports and carried the wounded
below, and the blood ran back and forth as the ship rolled, making curious
patterns on the deck, and little boys ran through the shambles each carrying
powder to his gun.
Yet for weeks the Graf Spee remained hidden – hidden by nothing but the vastness of
the sea. The South Atlantic is roughly 3,000 miles (4,800 km) across and 3,000
from north to south – 9 million square miles (19.6 million sq km) of ocean –
and in much of it even nowadays one might wait a lifetime and never see a ship.
Supposing a ship can be seen twenty miles away, at least 20,000 ships could be
stationed down there so that none of them was in sight of any other.
But the wind was getting up from the
north, and that force, plunging into very heavy seas, had had to reduce its
speed to seventeen knots. Even so, the Ark
Royal was taking green seas over her flight-deck.
At dawn on 26 May the Ark Royal flew off her Swordfish for
reconnaissance. She was rolling so much that aircraft slid sideways on the wet
flight-deck in spite of extra men to hold them down, and measurements showed
that her bow and stern were rising and falling 55 feet (17 m). Her aircrews,
unlike those of the Victorious, were
well experienced, but neither they nor anyone else had flown off or on in
conditions like that. On a runway like a see-saw, the takeoff was erratic, but
at length they were all off for a search of three and a half hours.
[Battle of Jutland, 31 May 1916]
The British destroyer Spitfire collided bow to bow with the
German dreadnought Nassau. The Spitfire
was left with no mast, funnel or bridge and a 60-foot hole in her side – and 20
feet of the Nassau’s upper deck
insider her messdeck. Lying helpless, the Spitfire
saw ‘what appeared to be a battle-cruiser on fire steering straight for our
stern. She tore past us with a roar, and the very crackling and heat of the
flames could be heard and felt. She was a mass of fire.’
The Germans also saw this macabre
apparition. ‘A burning ship drove past us,’ one of them wrote. ‘The whole ship
was red hot. There could not have been a soul alive on board for some time.’
Neither British nor Germans knew what ship she was, but it seemed afterwards that
she must have been the cruiser Black
Prince, which had been badly hit in the afternoon and again in the night
and now steamed through the heart of the battle carrying nothing but her dead. She
disappeared into the darkness and was never heard of again.
But it was the loss of the Prince of Wales and Repulse, sunk by Japanese aircraft off Singapore within ninety
minutes in 1941, that brought home to the British the chilling realization that
the battleship and the naval gun, on which they had depended since the Armada,
belonged to an era that was ending.
[On the battle of Midway, 4 June 1942]
For the first time in history, fleets
had fought a decisive battle without ever seeing each other, at a range that
began at 170 miles (275 km) and came down in the end to 80 (130 km).
No sailor can look back on these two
battles, Coronel [1 November 1914] and the Falklands [8 December 1914], with
satisfaction. Both were one-sided, and the result of both was cruel. Both
indeed re-open the age-old question of why men will fight to the death when
they know they will lose. Why did Craddock sacrifice hundreds of men by giving
battle? And why did von Spee do the same, when at any moment he chose he could
have scuttled his ships and surrendered his crews to live out their lives?
There is no logical answer. They did it for nothing more than the ancient
concept of honour, which Albemarle expressed so memorably two hundred and fifty
years earlier: ‘to be overcome is the fortune of war, but to fly is the fashion
of cowards.’
[...]
It was in these circumstances [victory
at all costs at the Leyte Gulf] that the concept of Kamikaze was begun. Once
before, in the year 1281, the Japanese Empire had been equally close to
despair. At the command of the Mongol Emperor Kublai Khan, 3,500 ships bearing
100,000 warriors, the combined forces of China and Mongolia, had threatened the
shores of Japan. The homeland had been saved when a great typhoon sank most of
the enemy ships. The gods were thanked for the divine wind. Now, the story was
remembered: Kamikaze means divine wind.
The name was given to a corps of
pilots who were trained to crash their aircraft into enemy ships. The concept
of training men for suicide was one that many western people found hard to
understand: they thought the pilots must be drugged or brainwashed in some
sinister way. But they were not; on the contrary, they went to their death in a
mood of ecstasy. It was really the final logical extension of the ancient idea
of military glory. In every warring nation all through history, men had fought
on when they had no hope of surviving, and had been admired for it. The
Japanese merely took this tradition one stage further by organizing it.
Perhaps they were able to do it
because their civilization was distinct from all others in the world. Few
Japanese at that time had travelled outside it. It was the only world they
knew, and its history was the only history. It had its own deep-rooted concepts
of poetry and beauty. Moreover, its Emperor was divine; so the force of
religion was added to patriotism. To many Japanese, it was unthinkable that
their civilization might be destroyed by another they did not understand, and
if it were destroyed they did not want to survive it.
[After the battle of the River Plate, December
1939]
[Hans] Langsdorff [captain of the Graf Spee] readily believed the British
rumours – so readily that one has to conclude that he wanted to believe them.
He had reported by shore radio to Admiral Raeder, Commander-in-Chief of the
German Navy, and Raeder had consulted Hitler; but they sent him no positive
orders, only the negative order that he was not to let the ship be interned in
Uruguay. Everything was left to him. Of what went on in his mind one can only
express a personal opinion. I myself believe that right from the moment when he
decided to enter Montevideo, Langsdorff in his heart had never intended to go
out again. He had been a naval officer all his working life; but he was
essentially a man who liked his fellow men. He liked the British: his treatment
of the prisoners proved it. When the test came, I believe, he could not summon
up any enmity for the British sailors; he could not make the transition from
the morality of peace to the different morality of war. When he saw the
wreckage of battle, saw his own dead and wounded, knew what he had done to the Exeter, he was revolted by the stupidity
of it all, and resolved that he would not do anything more to add to the
suffering.
Some things he said in those few days
seem to confirm this view. Of the Exeter’s
fight, he said to one of his prisoners: ‘When you fight brave men like that,
you can’t feel any enmity, you only want to shake hands with them.’ And again
to a prisoner: ‘I am not going out to commit a suicide with all my crew.’ And
to one of his own crew: ‘Better a thousand live young men than a thousand dead
heroes.’
If this is right, it was a terrible
self-revelation for a captain in war; but Langsdorff had to see it through to
its inevitable end, and he had to do it alone.
The climax came on the evening of
Sunday 17 December, four days after the battle. Just after six o’clock, the Graf Spee raised her anchors and steamed
out through the harbour mouth. It is said that three-quarters of a million
people were crowded along the shore, expecting a grandstand view of a naval
battle.
Offshore, the men in the [British]
cruisers heard the American radio commentary and braced themselves for the
final battle in the dark of that night. They could not really expect to survive
to see another day. But four miles out of the harbour, just as the sun went down,
a tremendous explosion wrecked the battleship, and she began to settle in the
shallow water and the river mud.
A wave of pure horror swept through
the crowds on shore, because they believed the German crew, or some of it, was
still on board. But it was not. Langsdorff had summoned German-owned tugs
across the river from Argentina. They had taken off all his men and landed them
the next morning in the friendlier world of Buenos Aires. He went with them,
saw that they were accepted for internment, spoke to them all in divisions and explained
what their future would be.
He had brought with him the battle ensign
of Graf Spee, and alone in a room
that night he wrote a letter to his wife and another to his parents; and then
unfolded the flag, spread it on the floor of the room, lay down on it and shot
himself dead.
At present, the nuclear submarine is
the only warship which might survive for a while in an all-out war. Perhaps
Leyte Gulf was the last great sea battle: one can only hope so. But it is
possible to imagine another, fought between nuclear submarines hunting each
other far down in the blackness of the ocean depths, long after their own bases
and everything on the surface has been destroyed.
Tahiti: A Paradise Lost (1983)
So when they saw the frigate [HMS Dolphin in June 1767] in the mist of
dawn, it surprised them as much as a flying saucer would surprise us now, or
perhaps even more, and they reacted as we would react, with a mixture of fear
and fascination. But the explorers, too, were soon amazed, for they found that
the Tahitians, far from being the savages they expected, had created in their
solitude a human society which seemed to be happier, more kindly, more stable
and harmonious than any in Europe.
Such an unexpected discovery needs
qualification. The Tahitians did not write, and their society was destroyed by
Europeans in the next seventy-five years; so the only descriptions of it are in
the writings of voyagers who saw the island and its people in their pristine
state. Yet all history has this same defect of being second-hand. It all
derives from documents, written at best by eye-witnesses of events; and all the
people who wrote the documents had human failings, sometimes an axe to grind,
and often a natural inclination to make a good story better. Some historians
have been driven to say that no historical fact has reality. But facts, they
would probably agree, come closer to reality if they are reported by several
diverse and independent witnesses whose idiosyncrasies cancel each other out.
Scores of witnesses wrote about what they saw of Tahitian life, and they were
certainly diverse. It is true that they were all eighteenth-century Europeans
and observed with European eyes – true also that none of them understood the
foundations of Tahitian life. But some had experience and education – naval
captains, scientists, mathematicians, astronomers and artists – and some had no
education at all. There were Englishmen, Spaniards, Frenchmen and Russians, a
few Swedes and Germans, and Americans from New England. Some, the more prudish
or inhibited, were shocked because Tahitian inhibitions were quite different
from their own, while others were perceptive and broad-minded; yet when one
allows for all their preconceptions they are unanimous in their affection and
admiration – even the earlier missionaries, who came with a prejudice of their
own. The quality of Tahitian society is therefore as real a fact as most of the
rest of history. One has to accept it.
The only welcome interruptions in this
placid life [on Tahiti before the Europeans came], the only days that were
different, occurred when the arioi
came. The arioi were a religious sect
which, it was believed, had been founded in a distant age by a god named Oro.
But they were so unlike any Jewish or Christian sect that visitors often
refused to believe they had any religion at all; for they were not only a kind
of priesthood but also travelling players, men and women, who gave professional
and highly polished entertainments, called heivas,
of singing, dancing, play-acting, and wrestling, which everyone from miles
around attended. Some of their plays were historical, but most were satires or
comedies which made fun of the mannerisms of chiefs and later of Europeans. All
the dances were more or less erotic; some were performed in the nude and gave
demonstrations of special sexual techniques.
Off-stage, too, their behaviour was
not what Europeans expected of a priesthood: they did not marry, but, among
themselves, continued the teenage practice of free indiscriminate love into
adult life. [...] They travelled in parties large and small all over the
Society Islands, the group of islands of which Tahiti was part, and there were
similar institutions in some other parts of the Polynesian world. Large parties
sailed from island to island in fleets of sea-going canoes, festooned with
flowers and wearing – if they wore anything – a uniform of yellow girdles of
leaves and red cloaks, singing rhythmical choruses and playing flutes and
drums. One of Cook’s reliable observers saw them in a fleet of seventy canoes
which he reckoned carried seven hundred arioi.
They must have been like a plague of locusts – they all expected to be fed
wherever they went – but when they were heard or seen approaching everyone
prepared to welcome them, all other work was abandoned, and the day became a
gala.
In France, Bougainville’s journal was
published in 1771, just before the last of Rousseau’s ‘Discourses’, and was
received with the ecstasy he had felt when he wrote it. It seemed to clothe
Rousseau’s theories with reality, and it enhanced his reputation in
revolutionary circles both as philosopher and politician – so that one comes to
the unexpected conclusion that the discovery of Tahiti may have hastened the
French Revolution. In England the first brief news had been given in Wallis’s
message to the press; but that said little about the Tahitians except that they
were ‘pretty much civilized’. The first solid information came in Dr John
Hawkesworth’s compilation from the journals of Byron, Wallis, Cook, and Banks,
in 1773. But Hawkesworth was a journalist, not an explorer or a seaman. He was
writing for a public he knew, or thought he knew, and he gave them what he
thought they needed. Many observations in his massive book were entirely his
own, and it was put together in such a way that a reader could not tell what
was Hawkesworth and what was Wallis, Cook, or Banks. This was the first of many
misleading accounts of Tahiti. One has to suppose the explorers themselves told
the truth as they saw it: they corroborated each other well. But other writers,
and general gossips too, were inclined to give the island the qualities they
wanted it to have.
Of course it was through gossip, at
dinner parties or in clubs or pubs or cafes, that the news first spread, before
any official reports came off the press. This was particularly so in England after
Cook’s first voyage, because that voyage had its rich and influential
passenger, Banks. Banks displayed his collections and curiosities at his house
in New Burlington Street and invited the nobility and gentry to see them; he
presented plants to the Dowager Princess of Wales. He became the greatest lion
a society hostess could hope for. Everywhere he went he was the centre of
conversation, and Tahiti was its subject; and without much doubt he painted its
joys in more or less lurid colours to suit his audience. So the idea of Tahiti
was launched in England.
Quite separately, it was also launched
at the other very distant end of the eighteenth-century social scale: for the
aristocratic society and intellectual brilliance of the age were founded on
abject poverty. As the sailors’ stories spread, beginning in dockyard towns,
Tahiti became the centre of them. One might say that Tahiti’s Noble Savage was
the first philosophical concept other than the teachings of the church to be
eagerly discussed by labourers and the people of the slums; and it was the
hopeless poor who had most reason to rejoice that somewhere in the world there
was a place which had no poverty, no hunger or oppression, where a man (they
believed) could live and make love and bring up his family in honest peace,
free from the fear of justice or injustice. This was one distinction between
England and France. In England, the novel idea made poor men dream of escaping
from the over-civilized world: in France, it made them want to destroy that world
and build it anew.
Of all the many misunderstandings
between Tahitians and Europeans, misunderstanding of sexual morals was the most
profound, or at least the most talked about. It was fifty years before the
Tahitians began to understand European prohibitions, which were finally made
clear to them by English Calvinists missionaries; and even now, many Europeans
know of Tahitian sexual freedom but do not understand it. Of course when they
first heard of it, and especially if they heard of the arioi, some were scandalized and felt it was their duty to put an
end to it. Others, a large majority perhaps, imagined what they would do if
they were suddenly freed from all restriction, and indulged in fantasies of a
perpetual orgy. The few Europeans who had the chance, in particular the English
crews, did make an orgy of it while they could. But by making sex as
commonplace as dinner, the Tahitians run a risk of making it as unexciting as
cookery. Even the arioi, with their
exceptional freedom in adult life, must have been limited like anyone else by
their physical ability. What the Tahitians achieved was not excess but a
healthy balance which was enjoyed by everyone and did no harm to anyone, either
social, psychological or physical – unless to the infants allowed to die before
they drew breath, who one might say ought not to have been conceived. And
trying to put all prejudice aside, one has to say that freedom, unless it does
proven harm, is always better than compulsion or prohibition.
Yet the Admiralty’s choice has
surprised historians ever since. There were many captains and lieutenants on
half pay who would have been happy to go, but the main it chose was not a
commissioned officer at all. Mr Cook was a master, which was the highest rank
of warrant officer, and normally a dead end with no hope of further promotion.
A master’s usual job was the practical and technical work of sailing a ship
wherever her captain decided she should sail, and Mr Cook had done this too:
but his main job had been surveying, and his only command had been a surveyor’s
schooner. He had made a name for himself in the highest naval circles by the
meticulous accuracy of his charts of the River St Lawrence and the coast of
Newfoundland, but it needed a stroke of brilliance in the Admiralty to detect
his latent genius: the genius for always going further than anyone else would
have gone, for commanding utterly isolated ships on voyages years long, for
keeping men healthy and contented, and for understanding people of distant
races.
[On Cook leaving Tahiti during this
Third Voyage, 1777:]
This time, when he left – and this was
the final time – Cook did not express any sorrow in his journal. Was he, one
wonders, disenchanted with by the final outbreak of thefts? Was he seriously
worried that his command would break up as a result of desertions? Or was he
perhaps remorseful, knowing, as he certainly did, that he had launched a course
of destruction that would never end? He put his foreboding in two well-known
and eloquent passages in the journal. First he mentioned the shame of civilized
Christians: ‘We debauch their Morals already too prone to vice and we interduce
among them wants and perhaps diseases which they never before knew and which
serves only to disturb that happy tranquillity they and their fore Fathers had
injoy’d. If anyone denies the truth of this assertion let him tell me what the
Natives of the whole extent of America have gained by the commerce they have
had with the Europeans.’
He wrote that earlier, in New Zealand.
It was even more appropriate to the smaller Pacific islands. Now, leaving
Tahiti for the last time, he was more prophetic: ‘I own I cannot avoid
expressing it as my real opinion that it would have been far better for these
people never to have known our superiority in the accommodations and arts that
make life comfortable, than after once knowing it, to be again left and
abandoned.’
[A tragic tale of “desertion” that
never happened:]
A more serious plan was discussed by
William Anderson the surgeon and no less a person than Charles Clerke, the
captain of the Discovery – though
Cook never heard of it. Both these men had consumption: they had come aboard
with it. Anderson knew, and Clerke at least suspected, that neither of them
would survive the far north where the ships were bound; but in the perfection
of Tahiti’s climate they might have a chance of life, or even cure. This of course
was not a question of desertion: they meant to ask Cook for leave to resign
their ranks ad stay. They talked about it for weeks, but kept putting it off,
and they left it too late. The last chance went by: both of them stayed at
their posts, and both died in the Arctic.
In modern times, the blame for what
happened to the Bounty has been
heaped on her captain, William Bligh. But it is risky to blame a man for events
so long ago – by what standard is one judging him? – and all the evidence
against Bligh was given by men on trial for their lives, so it is not without
prejudice. He cannot be proved to have been exceptionally cruel or wicked for a
naval captain of his era. He had been a success as master of the Resolution under Cook, which speaks well
for him, and he survived to be one of Nelson’s captains at Copenhagen and in
the end a vice-admiral. But this was 1788, before Nelson had proved that the
most efficient way to run a ship was with some sympathy and kindness, and before
Wilberforce had argued against slavery and cruelty in general. The worst one
can say of Bligh is that he was insensitive, tactless, rude, unreasonably
stern, and given to childish rages: and the same could be said of many
sea-captains then. Certainly he and Cook were very different. Cook looked for
and brought out the best in men: Bligh looked for and brought out the worst. On
the other hand, Fletcher Christian, the master’s mate who led the mutiny which
was to follow, seems neurotic and childish in the grudges he bore, and John
Fryer the master, who refused to join it, was certainly a weak, mean-spirited
man who hated Bligh simply because he was strong.
If anyone goes to Tahiti now in the
hope of finding the traditional South Sea he will be disappointed. He will have
to go further to find it, if it can be found at all: to the smallest, remotest
islands. Colonization is ebbing, but the tentacles of tourism extend ever further,
year after year, all over the world; and if one reaches a place they have not
reached, one’s very presence there is extending them further still. One may try
to escape from the world, but it goes without saying one cannot escape from
oneself.
Yet it would be a pity, towards the
end of the twentieth century, to forget entirely what the Tahitians achieved. They
did make a society which, in a simple way, came near perfection: nearer perhaps
than any other that has been recorded. They were able to do it because they
were left alone, and because the place where they lived provided plenty of all
the needs of human life: enough food, enough warmth, enough beauty and leisure
and fun; and because they had no ambition to struggle for anything more, and
were generous and unselfish people, happy to see that everyone else, not only themselves,
had enough.
In the near future, for the first time
in our history, we also seem to be promised enough of these needs for everyone,
through technological revolution. Shall we make a good use of it, like the
Tahitians, or did they have innate qualities we have lost and can never
retrieve? It is at least an arguable question, without a simple answer. Even
Rousseau admitted that people can never go back. Neither he nor anyone else until
the last few years thought civilization itself might offer enough for all. It
has always offered too much for a few and too little for most, dividing people
into rich and poor, and creating envy and strife.
Technology can only cure the second
part of that inequality – too little for most. The first part, too much for a
few, needs a more difficult change. It is a deep-rooted feeling that special
skills, long training or hard work should have extra material rewards – and that
unskilled, untrained, or lazy people scarcely deserve to have enough and would
not know what to do with wealth or leisure. In the civilized world it has
always been so, but it was not so in Tahiti. Clever Tahitians – canoe-builders
or navigators, say – use their skill for no reward except the pleasure of using
it and knowing other people would be grateful for it, not envious. They did not
grow rich, and no Tahitians were poor. Perhaps we shall find a reward for skill
which is immaterial, yet as acceptable as wealth. The change would need the
virtue Christianity enjoins and Tahitians had by instinct: kindness.
It is not the job of a simple history
book to stray into sociology. All it can do is offer the example of Tahitian
history, in the distant hope that wiser people may think about it, for the
benefit of all.
Pursued by a Bear: An Autobiography
(1986)
There is far too much emphasis now on
the value and sanctity of life. Of course you should be careful of other
people’s lives, whoever they are; of course you should not kill animals for
fun, or tread on insects. But your own life is your own, and you do not enjoy
it fully if you never risk it. My own younger children have been taught at
school never to take any risks. It thwarts them. For a long time, they were
scared to eat butter because it might give them heart disease, and they
demanded margarine full of polyunsaturated fats, though they knew no more than
I do what those are. Their school would have had them spend their lives in fear
of dying. But your life is for living, and I think you should be free to end it
when you are ready, and so learn to look at forward to its ending with
equanimity. I have wanted several times to die, once or twice when life was
very unpleasant, and more often when it was perfect. I think I only once told
anyone else. My wife and I were sailing alone in Greece (this was thirty years
later) and anchored one evening in a deserted bay. When the sails were down and
the anchor chain had rattled out in that warm pellucid water and she put the
first glass of ouzo in my hand, the purest of peace descended. The smell of
herbs drifted out from the shore, the silence was enhanced by the sound of
goat-bells from two converging flocks on the hills.
‘I’d like to die,’ I said.
She knew I meant it, and of course
that I wouldn’t do it then and there.
‘I don’t think there could be a better
time,’ she said. ‘Except that there’s squid for supper.’
So we began to compose the sort of
obituary notices people put in the papers: ‘HOWARTH, DAVID. Peacefully, at a
goat-herds’ convention near Galaxhidi...’ And I went on living, but more in
gratitude for such a wife than for the squid.
[Bear(able) encounters in Greenland]
Coming back from one trip after losing
my dogs again, I made a detour out on the sea-ice to look at an iceberg. The
icebergs calve from the glaciers in summer and drift towards the sea, and some
which have started late are frozen in again in the autumn and stay there as
part of the scenery until the next summer sets them free. There was one just
opposite the airstrip. There, the air is so clean and clear that everything
looks much closer than it is. It looked like an hour’s stroll to the other
shore of the fjord, which has the ungainly name of Geographical Society Land,
but it is really fifteen miles, and the iceberg was about halfway.
Skiing around it, I came upon a polar
bear. I had an idea that no wild animal will attack you if do not molest it or
run away. It was only a theory because I had never then seen a large
carnivorous animal except in a zoo; but I had a special sympathy for polar
bears just because I had seen them in zoos, where of all animals they are the
most tragic. In nature, they have a limitless cold domain. Shut in a concrete
bear pit, intolerably hot, with nothing but a scummy green pond too small to
swim in, they seem to go quietly mad. You can see it in their endless pacing;
they put their feet down in the same places every time until they wear smooth
pad marks in the concrete, and every time, as they approach the wall, the same
stimulus reaches what is left of their brain and they stop in mid-stride and
turn, and do it again, and again, and again, hour after hour, day after day, I
presume until they die. I am told imprisoned mother bears eat their cubs and
savage the mates they are locked in with, because in nature they meet only to
mate, and spend the rest of their lives in solitude.
So meeting one in its own home ground,
I stood still and spoke to it kindly, with remorse for what humans did. ‘Hi,
bear,’ I said, and the rest of the conversation was equally inane: ‘How are
you? Nice to see you.’ It is not easy to make small talk with a bear. It was
shambling towards me when I saw it, and I was glad when it stopped, perhaps
fifty yards away. We stood and looked at each other for rather a long time. I
think it was more surprised than I was. After all, I had seen a bear before and
knew what it was, and I doubt if it had ever seen human, certainly not so
suddenly and so close. After a while, I began to wonder what happened next in
this scenario. Exit, pursued by a bear? I always thought it the funniest line
in Shakespeare, but with all those miles of flat open ice behind me I couldn’t
see any dignified exit. ‘Bear,’ I said, ‘I’m not going to run away, you’ll have
to.’ It began to get visibly bored with the whole performance. It snorted, as
if it didn’t like the smell, and at last it seemed to shrug its shoulders and
turned its back on me and sauntered off eastward, the way it had come. When it
had gone, I went on round the iceberg.
Back at the weather station one of my
hosts said sternly, ‘Where have you been? Out on the sea-ice? Alone? And
without a rifle? You must never do that. It’s dangerous. Why, you might have
met a bear.’
[Sex education by his father]
I think that was his basic lack in
life. He was completely bored by sex. From her hints in old age (only hints,
she was never disloyal to him), I guess he felt sex was a distasteful,
undignified performance, unfortunately necessary in producing children, and
that he only endured it often enough to cause us to be born, and never for
pleasure or as an expression of love. That is a sad shortcoming in anyone, but
again it was not his fault, it was another result of his upbringing by those
aunts. He might have become homosexual, but he probably never heard of
homosexuality, or thought of it if he did as a rare disease that affected a few
other people – people like Oscar Wilde, but not ordinary, healthy people.
When I was about twelve, he suddenly
took an interest in me, and for months he insisted on bathing me. I hated it, I
was a prudish little boy and I had been bathing myself for years. But I think
now he was only plucking up courage to try to tell me the Facts of Life. One
night he achieved it when he was drying me.
‘Does that thing of yours often get
hard?’ he asked me.
‘Sometimes,’ I said. I thought he
might have seen it.
‘And does any stuff come out of it?’
‘No,’ I said. It did, but I wouldn’t
have told him or anyone else if ink or strawberry ice-cream had come out of it.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘remember, whenever
you have a bath you must be careful to dry between your legs.’ And he
decorously handed me the towel to do so.
I still don’t know what he meant.
Perhaps I ought to, but that was the beginning, the literal whole and the
absolute end of my sex education.
A public school in England, of course,
means an expensive private boarding school: a free day school, which is really
public, is a state school. I confess I don’t know why anyone who has been to
all the trouble and expense of having children should want to hand them over
entirely to schoolteachers and send them away for eight or nine months every
year, right through the most interesting and exciting part of their growing up.
I did not do it with any of mine, but most English parents do, or did, if they
could afford it, and there are endless arguments about it. Many people who were
sent to these famous schools wonder how they survived to think of themselves as
civilized, and I am one of them.
It was not that we did not enjoy it. I
enjoyed it all, after the first year which was deliberately made a misery,
nominally through ancient tradition, but really to satisfy the sadism latent in
so many boys. That year was full of degrading nonsensical rules and minor
tortures. One was to be made to hit the back of your own hand with a stiff
hairbrush until it was covered with spots of blood, and then to whirl your arm
round so that the blood-spots hit the ceiling. The ceiling of the tiny dungeon
where the new boys lived was covered with the blood of earlier generations. In
addition everyone in that year was the private fag of a prefect of seventeen,
to clean his shoes, perhaps to wash his smelly feet, to carry his books to
school, and do any other chore he was too lazy to do himself; and all fags, all
their spare time, had to lurk in their dungeon waiting for a shout of ‘Boy!’,
upon which they all had to run in a flock to the prefect who shouted, ready to
do what he demanded. You did not learn much in that year except how to keep out
of trouble, which is perhaps a valuable lesson, and you came through it only
because you knew the next year there would be an influx of even younger boys,
and you could look down on them.
After that, life became a matter of
defying school rules. Many of them were so silly that it was a pleasure to
break them, and you became increasingly expert at it. But sometimes you tried
and failed, and the penalty was to be beaten. I was always getting beaten. The
beating was done by the housemaster or a prefect – it depended what sort of
rule you had broken – and the weapon was a very thin flexible cane with a
curved handle like a walking stick, specially made for the job by some fiendish
supplier of scholastic equipment. It hurt like hell. It did not draw much
blood, but raised red weals across your bottom exactly the shape and size of
the cane; proud people displayed them afterwards. I cannot think why nobody
ever rebelled and just refused to bend over the table.
I have no quarrel with the Spartan
life, except that many parents thought they were paying for something much
more. What I do regret is the way these schools shut us into a world of their
own creation, and cut us off from realisty. Politically, socially, artistically
and sexually we remained uneducated: we were taught exactly nothing at all,
unless we tried to teach each other.
Politics: we were not allowed to have
a radio, although they existed, or to buy a newspaper except on Sundays, when the
few who could afford it invested in the News
of the World, the most salacious Sunday of the age. The general strike, the
most profound social upheaval of the century so far, happened when I was at
school and I did not know it had happened at all until I went home for the
holidays. Only one boy I knew expressed political views: he said he was a
Fascist.
And society: nine tenths of our
fellow-citizens were banned from our acquaintance, not by rule but by custom.
Anybody with an off-beat accent, all tradesmen, craftsmen, labourers or
artisans, anybody who had not been to a public school, was beneath us. Even the
day-boys, who were few, were looked down on as oicks, because their fathers
were thought to be shopkeepers, and we did not make friends with them.
As for sex, we never saw, knew or
spoke to a girl of any kind: they were all among the untouchables. Some boys
get through the years from thirteen to eighteen without apparently thinking of
sex at all; others are obsessed by it. Those who were obsessed had to work it
out on the prettier boys: there was nobody else. The school seethed with gossip
of these liaisons. A few were frankly carnal: most were ethereal, and their
only hoped-for climax was a glance exchanged, with luck even a smile, or at the
very extreme a secret hug. Boys fell in love, truly in love, with other boys
they saw only across the aisle in chapel and had little hope of ever seeing
anywhere else.
I am sure it did no permanent harm to
anybody, but it did indirectly do some temporary harm. The public schools went
on year after year producing boys who were homosexual because they had never
known anything else. Most of them grew out of it: there were no more genuine
homosexuals among them than among any others. But when they did grow up, and if
they took to girls, they were inclined to be gauche and clumsy and ignorant of
what to say to a girl, how to interest or please her, how a feminine brain or
body worked. I know my own daughters despised public school boys, who were away
most of the year and incompetent when they were not.
Men who are made to feel incompetent
often over-react to prove how virile they are, and my guess would be that in
the long run the public school morality, if you could call it morality, tended
to create male chauvinist pigs, not gays. Perhaps that was what was needed a
hundred years ago for running the Empire, when those schools enjoyed their
finest hour, but nobody could have planned such a devious way of doing it.
As for me (since this is my story), I
recovered fairly quickly from that lop-sided training, but with nothing
effective to put in its place. After three blissful years in Cambridge, where
again there were no girls, or none who impinged on my consciousness, I lived
alone in a flat in London, where there were plenty. But by then my ideas of
social behaviour came straight out of P. G. Wodehouse, whose heroes (addicts
will agree) were always falling in love at first sight, and the instant they
had done so proposed marriage to the desirable creature, defying ferocious aunts.
Whenever I met eager beddable girls I scared them into panic flight by
proposing to marry them. That was not what they wanted at all, and it was not
what I wanted either, but I thought it was what I was supposed to do. The
mistake was fatal to my plans.
All that time – it was five years or
so – I was labouring all day in the boatyard and sitting every evening writing The Shetland Bus. I did not mind the
hard work; I was used to it and I liked it – my work was always a hobby – but
it must have made life very dull for my wife. I never expected the book to be
published, much less to make any money, but I finished it and sent it to a
famous literary agent, who sent it back with the comment that it was not of
public interest. So I put it away in a bottom drawer with my oldest clothes and
tried to forget about it, and it stayed there a year.
Then I met a learned and charming man
called Dr Mortimer Manson, who was editor and proprietor of one of the local
papers. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘you really ought to write a book about those
wartime adventures.’ ‘I have,’ I said; he asked if he could read it, and I dug
it out of the drawer.
He must have read it all night,
because he rang me up the next day and insisted I should send it to a
publisher. Between us we chose the old-established house of Nelson; they
published mainly Bibles and educational books, but they had issued a guidebook
on Shetland, so we knew they had at least heard of the place. They fell on my
book with vast enthusiasm, and did things with it that fill me with wonder now.
That was long before anyone thought of the phrase to ‘hype’ a book, but The Shetland Bus was hyped. They spent
thousands on advertising it, with a logo that every potential reader came to
know, and I meanly hoped that literary agent knew he had missed a winner.
Thirty years later it is still selling gently, and Nelson still send me small
but welcome checks for the work I did half a lifetime ago. I have a lot to be
grateful for to Nelson, and to Dr Manson.
You can never forget a good style.
Prose needs a rhythm like verse, but a subtler rhythm, always changing. Each
sentence ought to be balanced, so that it sounds right if it is read aloud; it
should end before a reader runs out of breath. Above all, it should say exactly
what it means, in the simplest way. So should a paragraph, which is a set of
sentences strung together to express a train of thought. A writer should stop
at the end of each paragraph he writes and ask himself, ‘Is that what I was
really trying to say? And have I said it as plainly as I can?’ And, of course,
‘Was it worth saying?’ If one of the answers is no, he should go back and do it
again.
[...]
If you write down something you only
half understand, you cannot expect your readers to understand it, or to enjoy
trying. Of course there are thoughts and emotions the best of prose cannot
compass, but if you cannot express them clearly, you had better leave them out.
Nobody but you will know or care what you have discarded.
Yet some writers seem to like to write
obscurely, as if they hope to seem more clever than they are. I doubt if that
fools anybody. Robert Louis Stevenson was a master of stylish prose in my
father’s generation, and I love to quote him. ‘In any narrative,’ he wrote,
‘there is only one way to be clever, and that is to be exact.’
However hard you try to maintain your
style – and trying is most of the pleasure of writing English – you should
never expect to be complimented on it, because good style, like other arts,
should hide itself. If it becomes obtrusive, it is not a good style but bad.
The most you should hope for is to have someone say ‘I like your books, they’re
so easy to read.’ You should not hope he (or she) knows why they are easy, or
how much hard work you have put into making them so.
[...]
Anyhow, this is not a text book, it is
a narrative, as true as I can make it, or as I wish to make it. After The Shetland Bus [1951] I wrote two
novels. One was a thriller [Group
Flashing Two, 1952]. It was
really rather bad, but it did well. The other was a straight romance [One Night in Styria, 1953], and I
thought it was good, but it did badly. Both are forgotten now, and deserve it,
but they taught me I was not about to make my fortune as a novelist.
[Strasbourg during the Phoney War]
Strasbourg was unique: a major city,
completely undamaged and completely deserted. It was all in the field of fire
of German guns from the other side of the river, its river frontage indeed
within rifle range, and it had been evacuated the moment war was declared;
everybody had fled, whether in panic or under orders I do not know – it looked
like both – yet the Germans had never fired a single round at it. The people
had only taken time to lock up their shops and offices, factories and homes,
and they had never been allowed to go back there since, even for a day’s visit.
No human was there except a few patrols of soldiers or gendarmes on the
look-out for looters. There were dogs and cats, gone wild or lying dead where
patrols had shot them. Cars were parked or abandoned haphazard on the
sidewalks. It resembled nothing in life, except at first glance the biggest and
most ambitious of film sets, the actors and technicians all gone. You could
have expected to walk round the back and find it was made of canvas.
But it was the details that impressed
me most and are still clearest in my memory. The café tables and chairs still
stood on the sidewalk; some had tablecloths, cups and glasses, pecked clean by
sparrows and trampled by pigeons’ feet. Inside, the tables were laid for a
breakfast of six weeks before, the wizened rolls of bread, the butter and milk
grown over with mould. Here and there a crumpled napkin had been thrown down,
among the droppings of rats, as if by a customer who had abandoned his
breakfast in the middle.
And the shops. No windows were broken,
but all were dirty and streaked by rain. Peering through the grime, you saw the
window displays. Excepting the mouldering ruins of fruiterers, the most
shocking – because the most human – were the expensive dress shops, the elegant
fashions that had attracted ladies in the last summer of peace, now covered
with dust and draped with spiders’ webs; most shocking of all, perhaps, a
display of bridal gowns for weddings that had never happened. Their veils were
eaten by mice and stained by damp. The faces of the lay figures they were
draped on should have been skulls.
[On “Dave”, “Davey” and “Mr Howarth”]
For the first time [in Lowestoft c.
1940-41], I was living in equality with fellow-countrymen of every class and
every education. At my age [late 20s] it should not have been a revelation, but
it was. Most were innately kind; I liked them all in varying degrees, and they
happily put up with me if I did not pretend to be anything I wasn’t. I began to
think those were the qualities I valued most – kindness and freedom from
pretence; a conviction that has grown in me ever since. It was the only time in
my life that I was known as Dave.
[...]
You had a feeling then [in Shetland, 1941]
that humanity was only just succeeding in clinging to that wild, remote and
sodden bit of earth. The Shetland men were fishermen and very small-time
farmers, the wives and daughters knitted day and night for a pittance. You
found out only slowly that most of the men, who looked as if they had struggled
there in poverty all their lives, had been in the merchant navy when they were
young and had travelled the world before they came back to the same few acres
of bog and rock, for no reason except that it was home. They were very kind and
friendly, but they were like a large family; they had a language of their own,
a broad Scottish dialect with nearly a thousand old Norse words which had been
in general use since Viking times, so it was impossible for an outlander to become
one of them. I married one, and lived there eleven years, and learned to understand
the language (I did not speak it because that only made them laugh), but as
they had known me first as a naval officer I always remained Mr Howarth. After
the war, had I been born a Shetlander I would have been Davey, with a nickname
to distinguish me from othr Daveys. I wished I could be.
I have never discovered anything
better than sailing to cut yourself off from the world and all its worries. But
many people, to my mind, spoil it for themselves by racing, either in dinghies
or in vastly expensive ocean racers. I never had any competitive spirit, least
of all in sailing. In the boat, I never wanted to get anywhere more quickly
than anyone else. On the contrary, the essence of sailing ought to be
contentment in going slowly, at the speed at which everyone used to go before
the age of motors. So one can forget the eternal competition of life ashore. In
a boat, you decide where you want to go, but it does not matter in the least
when you get there, tonight or tomorrow or next week. You do not live by the
clock or the calendar, but by the tides or winds; and if you have an unexpected
night at sea, that is a special pleasure of its own – the phosphorescence in
your wake and bow-wave, the green and red navigation lights which colour the
sails, the dimmed light of the compass, the friendly flashing of lighthouses in
the distance, the lights of steamers and Christmas tree illuminations of
passenger ships, each bringing a minor problem of keeping out of the way.
Some people, normally kind and gentle,
also spoil it for themselves and their companions by a change of character when
they are in charge of a boat. They bellow orders in what they think is the
language of a Nelsonian bo’sun, and get angry when their wives or children do
not know what they are on about. Even the sight of a boat is enough to start
some of them off. I once offered to help a man’s wife and daughter, under his
direction, to drag his dinghy across his back garden. We could have picked it
up and carried it, but no: it had to be done properly on his words of command. ‘Man
the tackle,’ he shouted, correctly pronouncing it ‘taykel’. ‘Now, bowse away...
Check her. Belay hauling. Pay out handsomely. Handsomely, I said, Pamela. Fend off
the port quarter, Pauline. Make all fast for a full-do. Pamela, what sort of
knot is that? Use the painter with a clove hitch.’ And so on, until everyone
was in surly confusion.
My technique, I like to think, was the
opposite, and the nicest compliment I had was from a boy who spent a day with
us crossing the estuary of the Thames. ‘I never really liked sailing before,’
he said, ‘but I love it in your boat. Nobody shouts at me, and nothing ever
seems to happen suddenly.’ That is how it should be. In a cruising boat, nobody
should ever have to shout, and nothing should happen suddenly. It’s the job of
the person in charge to know what is going to happen, and to tell everyone
calmly in plain English what he intends to do about it. So they all come to
enjoy it. My family all did, anyhow, and became confident enough to take the
boat abroad for their own holidays with their own friends. My most blissful
recollections of being middle-aged all have a background of warm seas, strange
harbours and surprisingly accurate landfalls.
Of course it all came to an end, like everything
human. I grew too old, my elder girls started having babies, it became too
expensive and the most charming coasts, year by year, were more and more
over-crowded. Our last few voyages, unlike all the others, were a series of
minor disasters which made me decide I could not do it any more.
That was in 1980 and 1981.
Nobody ever taught me any history
after I was thirteen, when I managed to get out of it because I was frightened
of the history master, a sarcastic old devil who was convinced that if you
looked sleepy in his lessons it showed you were wicked and lazy, and not that
he made his subject so deadly boring. After that, I had no interest in history
until I was nearly fifty. Coming to it so late, I wondered if you can trust it,
if it is really true, and how any historian can be dogmatic. Of course this
suspicion is nothing new: Thomas Carlyle, no less, once said history was a
great dust-heap, and on another occasion, ‘History is a distillation of
rumour.’ And some of the greatest of modern philosophical historians, people I
now have the greatest respect for, have argued the question whether any
historical fact has reality.
The trouble is that all history, or
nearly all, comes from ancient documents which happen to be preserved in
archives or libraries or attics, and whether they have been preserved or not is
a matter of chance. At best, these documents were written by eye-witnesses of
events or, more likely in ages when few people were literate, were written down
from the stories the eye-witnesses told. But historians can see the events only
at secondhand, through the eyes of the writers of the documents; and the
writers were only human, they had prejudices of their own, their memories were perhaps
faulty, or they had an axe to grind or a natural inclination to make a good
story better. These frailties are often difficult to detect.
And what of the documents which are
lost? For every one that has survived through the centuries, one would suppose
that scores or hundreds have disappeared, through fire or damp, or being eaten
by mice, or written in ink that faded, or just being thrown out with the junk.
Would these lost documents perhaps have contradicted the ones that remained? We
can never know, and the chances are they would.
About battles, the interesting thing
to my mind is the tactics or strategy, much less the politics; it is what the
men caught up in them thought of it all. From this point of view, Waterloo is the
best of battles, because it was the first great land battle in which a fair
proportion of soldiers were literate, so that there are scores of eye-witness accounts
of what happened. Some men wrote reminiscences long afterwards, and some wrote
letters home the next morning, to reassure their mums. The question remains, to
what extent are they true? Do they tell what happened, or what ought to have
happened, or what their writers thought had happened? Or indeed, when they are
used in history books, what the historian thought ought to have happened?
I suppose even the most philosophical historians
would agree that there really was a fight outside Brussels on a Sunday afternoon
in 1815. But what more can we know about the Battle of Waterloo? The
traditional way of describing a battle is with maps, with neat little rectangles
on them representing regiments of infantry or cavalry, and arrows to show their
movements. This is a matter of intellectual interest, but it obviously does not
have much link with reality. It bears no relation to the human experience of a
battle: nobody who was there saw things in anything like those terms. Most of
them did not where they were, much less where other regiments, or what was
really going on.
Surely history, whatever else it is,
should be a record of human experience. I imagine the first feeling of the
average man at Waterloo was, ‘My God, this is a battle, and I’m in the middle
of it, and that fellow is going to kill me unless I kill him first.’ And the
natural human reaction was to get the hell out of it. It is said that ten thousand
men of Wellington’s army ran away, or marched away. Bad soldiers perhaps, but
common-sense human beings. What kept the majority there were the concepts of
martial glory and regimental pride which all armies drill into their men; and,
most of all perhaps, the fear of seeming afraid. The first idea of men who
found that they were still alive that evening was that they had a splendid
story to dine out on, or a story that would earn them free drinks in pubs for
the rest of their lives. Even in the morning-after letters, one can see the
story-telling beginning to form, and the myths beginning to grow. They were not
telling the story for historians, they were telling it for their friends and
families and making the best of it – and who is to blame them? Our legacy from
that Sunday afternoon is a mass of personal stories, all subjective, all more or
less revealing the teller in the light he wanted to be seen in, all more or
less tinged with that human tendency to make a good story better. And all
written by men whose memories were more or less clouded by shock , who at the moments
they were trying to recollect had been half blinded by smoke, half deafened by
noise, and either half paralyzed by fright or elated by dreams of glory.
Then what happens to those stories? There
is a second stage which removes them further from factual reality. The
historians get at them. I can’t speak for all the other historians of Waterloo,
but I know what I did: I made my own selection from the stories, with the
deliberate intention again of making a good tale. So I chose accounts which illustrated
different parts of the battle and could be woven together to make a coherent
picture of the whole. It was an arbitrary choice, but the alternative was to
try to put everything in. That was done a few years after the battle by a
captain who recorded every movement of every regiment, and finished with the
dullest account of a battle I have ever read. Yet undeniably this act of making
it comprehensible, a readable story, does remove it one degree further from
reality. Nobody who was there could comprehend it as a whole; not even the
Duke, much less the Emperor or Marshal Ney, and least of all the ordinary
soldiers.
When the war ended, I wrote four books
about episodes in which I had been more or less concerned with. Then I stopped
and turned to other subjects, because I thought it should all be forgotten.
Now, on the verge of writing about it again, I have to get one thing off my
mind: to say to people who do not remember it, as I have often said before,
that everyone’s recollections of it are selective and more or less mistaken,
including mine. War should be remembered only with shame, as the most wicked of
failures of human wisdom. But forgetfulness is mercy. It hides the things too
awful for memory to bear, or human conscience to admit, and leaves only, of all
the crime and horror, a few stories that seemed either comforting or funny.
I thought in 1939 that the war we had
to fight would come nearer than any other recent war to being morally
excusable, and I still think it did. It was not a patriotic war but a war
against a political and philosophical system which itself, we believed, was so
immoral that it had to be opposed, even with the immorality of war. Nothing can
make war either moral or logical. It turns morality inside out: killing and
cruelty are its virtues. And as for logic, the man you are expected to murder,
the man you see in your gunsight, is not your real enemy, but probably a
fellow-man as scared and bewildered as you are.
At best, war can only be the lesser of two evils, but that was what it
seemed in 1939. War was hideous, but a world ruled in triumph by Nazism would
have been worse.
[...]
Nevertheless, people who lived through
that war do not remember on the whole the enormity of the crime committed in
their name. Even those who lived month after month under aerial bombing and saw
their own cities reduced to rubble, and knew their own bombers were doing the
same to foreign cities, do not see the thing as a whole. They tend to remember
not hundreds or thousands of bombs, but one bomb in particular, or perhaps one
night of bombing: everyone then had his own bomb story, which bored everyone he
told it to. Many had a private bereavement, a private pain, or a private object
of devastating pity, and of course they remember that most clearly of all. But
if they were luckier, they remember with pleasure the friendship; because
sharing a common danger does certainly make people more friendly to each other.
And strangely, they remember the things that struck them as funny. War is
prolific in comedy, especially the comedy of errors made by one’s seniors, the
sort of error the army graphically calls a cock-up. The more humble one’s own
rank, the more seniors one possesses, and high posts in war can be occupied by
bone-headed people. So the more junior one was, the more one’s recollection was
filled by the frequent cock-ups.
Superficially, what you most regret in
growing old are the things you used to do with pleasure but cannot do any more.
I shall never climb another mountain, not even the Matterhorn, which I have
wanted to climb since I was too young to try. I shall never see the arctic ice
again, nor the tropical jungle, nor probably a coral island. I shall never come
out of harbour again and set a compass course for somewhere beyond the horizon,
or find my way in to an empty anchorage in the cool of the evening where the
hot scent of herbs comes off the land. I shall never play the solo part in a
great romantic piano concerto – not that I ever did, but I always supposed it
was the height of human ecstasy.
[...]
You can do without the physical
pleasures. What is more difficult is a failing brain. That is insidious. You
cannot be sure when it began to fail, or, as it proceeds, how quickly it is
getting worse. You are aware or half aware that your brain is not so clear, so
logical and ordered, as you think it used to be; but you know that when it gets
one stage or two stages worse, you will not be aware of what is missing. You
ask yourself if it was ever as clear as you thought it was. I have always known
– well, not always but for a very long time – that my brainiest thoughts are
the platitudes of cleverer men. But have all my thoughts been platitudes? They
certainly are now. However, an author has one comfort: he did create books,
pure products of his mind, and people did enjoy reading them, and not even
professional critics complained they were platitudinous at the time. What is
more, they still exist.
I said at the beginning of this story
that when I was young I had no need to imagine life after death. I still have
no need, when death seems rather close. In a Buddhist’s Nirvana, time stops and
leaves you in a static state of bliss where nothing happens, there are no
events to measure the passage of time, and the chain of cause and effect comes
suddenly to an end. So far as I know, the Middle Eastern religions do not
express this concept of time that stops, though it is trivial to a physicist
and is easy to imagine now, when all of us can see movies which can simulate
time that not only stops but goes faster or slower, or backwards. Eternal life,
going on and on for ever in time that passes, is an unbearable idea. It was fit
perhaps for medieval serfs who were content to furnish their heaven with pearly
gates and streets paved with gold and a ready supply of harps, but it is
impossible now.
I am not a Buddhist, but to me their
idea is more congenial. When I die, I expect to stop and let time for living
people go ticking on without me, leaving me behind in a static present. This is
not a faith, not much more than a form of words, but whatever stories you tell
yourself about what happens to you after you die, nothing, after all, can be
more comforting than nothing. If anything consciously happens to me when I am dead,
I shall be as mad as a good Buddhist would be if he died and found he was in a
Christian purgatory.
That raises the question of when and
how to die. In any previous age I would have been content to leave it to
nature, though nature may give you a way of dying which is more painful,
disgusting or alarming than it need be, not only for you but for your family
too. Perhaps nature will get there first. But I firmly think you should be free
to end your own life when you have had enough of it, without being marked as
depressed, eccentric, sinful, miserable or mad. The Biblical span of three
score years and ten was about right; a little too short perhaps, but not much.
Most people in their seventies begin this down-beat trip towards senility, and
any wise person will avoid becoming senile if he can.
Modern doctors have confused the whole
issue by finding how to prolong a life that nature would have ended, and
insisting that their archaic oath compels them to do it whether the owner of
the life wants it prolonged or not. And lawyers confuse it further. Suicide is
not against the law, but the law makes it as difficult as it can be by
forbidding anyone to help you, or even to tell you the best and tidiest way to
do it. Doctors tempt you with offers of a few more years of unnatural life,
lawyers try to prevent you doing what common sense tells you is right, and if
you listen to both, you will certainly end as a nuisance to your family. I
emphatically do not want to be kept alive by a machine, however clever that is,
and I do not want – worst of all things – to finish up in a geriatric ward. My
wife, bless her, understands this very well, but for fear of the law I cannot
ask even her to help me when the time comes. It has not quite come yet. I still
enjoy the last few dregs of life. But I am getting tired, I have had nearly
enough of a good thing, and I could do with a rest. The thing I am most afraid
of now is leaving it too late and living too long.
Having written this, perhaps I shall
be sitting here, looking out of the window and trying to flog a worn-out brain
towards coherence when I am eighty. It doesn’t seem likely or desirable, and if
it happens the last laugh will be on me.
As for the wise words I imagined I
would offer my children, I have forgotten them all except one. They do not need
that one, and it is very far from being wisdom of my own. It is simply: be
kind. Kindness has many names, love, compassion, charity – call it what you
like, they all mean the same. It is the quality that encompasses all virtue.
Christ said it of course: ‘Love thy neighbour.’ St Paul said it many times:
‘And now abideth faith, hope, and charity, these three; but the greatest of
these is charity.’ The Beatles said it, echoing St Paul: ‘All you need is
love.’ And the Dalai Lama on his different foundation says it too, not claiming
it as a Buddhist virtue, but as the essence of all religions. You can live a
good and happy life without faith, which is the antithesis of reason, and you
do not need hope unless you first have fear; but you cannot do without charity.
I would not make a good teacher, because that is all I would want to say: do
what you like, and if it is truly done in kindness, if it does harm to nobody
and preferably good to somebody, who will dare to say it is wrong? If I wanted
to pad out my sermon a little, and give it a slightly Christian slant, I might
offer my congregation (all thirteen of them) one of my favourite quotations. It
was in an unexpected place – in a letter Sir William Hamilton sent to Emma,
before he married her. ‘The whole art,’ he wrote, ‘is really to live all the
days of our life; and not, with anxious care, disturb the sweetest hour that
life affords – which is, the present. Admire the Creator, and all his work, to
us incomprehensible; do all the good you can upon earth; and take the chance of
Eternity without dismay.’ Poor Emma – she seldom managed to follow his
instructions. I have not been very successful either. But I have enjoyed
trying.
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