Feb 28 2010
On Beevor and books on war
I am a fan of books on war. There. I’ve said it. Actually I haven’t read many since I was about fifteen years old, but I am still partial to a browse in the Military section of the bookshop every now and then. Which might be rather strange for a committed pacifist who believes that there must always be a better alternative to sending in the soldiers. But there’s something about a war story …
… that grips me.
I think it has something to do with the ‘do or die’ and ‘now or never’ thing about major conflict. We’re none of us very special, not in the scheme of things and we’re all expendable, when the chips are down. It’s just that we don’t have to acknowledge it in normal life.
But when a war come along, everything is up in the air. All the plans, all the hopes, all the careful setting-asides and deferring of everything goes by the wayside. Suddenly you are involved, you have to help. So the rhetoric goes.
I can’t say what I would do, if I was called up. But reading books on war, good books, written with insight and detail (they’re big on detail) always raises the question once again. Would I be brave enough to say I wouldn’t go? I have taken part in several anti-war rallies in my life. Or would I accept that the country is committed and would I then be brave enough to join in and make an honest fist of it? Or would I slink along, keeping as much as I can in the shadows, behind solid objects, as far out of harm’s way as possible, cynical, craven, surviving until it was all over? I wouldn’t be the first.
Anthony Beevor writes very good books on war. He understands detail and the value of research, but he also does overview well, and context, and the significance of every push and push back. His books are inevitably huge, they have to be, the big conflicts take years to work themselves out. And there are so many stories to be told, bringing the human aspect to the maps and charts. There’s the politics, the alliances, the lies and the tricks. The bravery and the cowardice.
On every page, I find myself wondering. Would I storm the pillbox? Attack a Tiger tank singlehanded? Climb over the wire and start running? How would I fare, being bombed, being shelled, being fired at?
The first Beevor I read about twelve years ago was Stalingrad and I remember it was tough going. There was something static and heavy about the story itself. Too cold, too awful, too foreign. Berlin, The Downfall 1945 was better, although there was again too much detail without familiarity.
But two more recent Beevor books really thrilled me. The Battle for Spain, The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939 is the first. It is a wrenching story. There’s such hope at the outset, a new chance, openness and freedom after centuries of a certain kind of orthodoxy (I’m choosing my words carefully here). But ill-discipline, inexperience in government and infighting between factions opened the door to an outrageous comeback. Where you stand on the Spanish Civil War depends everything on both your political and religious affiliations and Beevor does as good a job as anyone could of keeping his personal biases out of the story, but it is impossible to read the history without feeling connected to one side or the other.
I have been moved to tears by fiction. Not often, but it does happen. But to be gripped by a history book, to be taken through the inevitability yet the somehow arbitrariness of war is an odd feeling, not least because you always know how the story ends. Yet, I cried at the end of Spain. The awfulness of it, the failure, the waste and the inevitable recriminations and retributions. Whichever side won, the consequences would have been terrible, after such bloodshed. Beevor does a great job of bringing it all home.
The other Beevor book is D-Day, the telling of that invasion and the ensuing fight across Normandy towards Paris. Like Spain, the settings are familiar. In fact, I have stood, as a child, in forts and gun emplacements and pillboxes in northern France wondering what it would have been like. And like many I’ve seen Saving Private Ryan. The 1944 battle for France is perhaps one of the most familiar settings for a history book, but there remains much to learn.
When I started reading the book, the day I was given it, I couldn’t put it down. The build up, the training, the supplies, the new devices and strategies, the worry about the weather, the fear that the enemy would guess the landing sites, the unimaginable scale of the thing, all these contribute to a growing sense of excitement. The Allies faced a huge task, to drive the Germans out of France.
In each of the chapters, as the invasion gets underway and the landings begin, Beevor skilfully takes us from the strategic overview and the decisions of generals and commanders down to the personal: the soldiers, the aircrews, the sailors, the support people, the civilians in France and back home — and on both sides. The Germans had been expecting invasion and many believed the propaganda. Their weapons, their training, their discipline would push back the tide.
Of course, they were wrong. But it wasn’t plain sailing. As the Allies worked their way across northern France, terrible mistakes were made. One detail that shocked me was when Allied planes began bombing their own troops. The soldiers on the ground lit yellow flares to let the bombardiers know. But in a horrible mix-up, yellow flares had been used as markers by the front aircraft and so the bombs kept falling.
With its wise inclusion of a chapter on the assassination attempt on Hitler, D-Day manages to break the repetition of battle after battle, something that Stalingrad and Berlin had perhaps failed to do. As a consequence, I kept reading at some pace. We’re now about to enter Paris. The French are insistent that they be the first. Hemingway is there, with Capa the photographer and other characters. There’s going to be a hell of a party when they hit the Champs Elysees. Part of me wishes I could have been there but not for the difficult bit. Not for the awful, endless, boring reality of war, only for the relief when it was all over.
In the end, the stories of war are human stories. Of grand plans and strategies, of how they could and often did go wrong. What makes them different is that they are real stories about real people. Real lives trapped in a great arbitrary machine that, once set in motion, could not be stopped. What fascinates is the truth about the whole business — that many survived but many did not. And you couldn’t know at the beginning which side of that awful line you’d be on when it was over. I’m savouring D-Day as I reach its end. I know what happens and I’ll be relieved. But I’ll remember too how lucky I and my generation and the ones following have been. Not to have been put to the awful test of an all-out war.
Other war books I have read since a boy include:
