The Light’s on at Signpost
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This was taken as an extravagant compliment, no more—but sure enough, when Ali won his next fight (I’ve an idea it was the Rumble in the Jungle) and the ring was awash with fans, handlers, and journalists, the champion fought his way to the nearest TV camera and roared into the lens: “I won that fight for Christopher Lee!” Which, as Guy remarked, was not only a tribute to Christopher, but proved Ali a man of his word.
I didn’t stay in Spain, since my job was done, and despite the professionalism with which everyone carried on, you could feel the cloud over the proceedings. My next contact with the film was a press screening in Salford for French journalists (so help me, it’s true), and then there was the London premiere, attended by the Duke and Duchess of York, and the reviews, which were pretty unanimously unfavourable.
I wasn’t surprised. Roy’s death had overshadowed the making of the picture, and the aftermath of recrimination and litigation was no encouragement to the viewing public. But there were other reasons why the film wasn’t a success. Dick had fallen seriously ill before shooting began, and while he made an excellent recovery, the pre-production had been affected, not least because he and I had not been able to go over the script as meticulously as we’d done with the earlier films, and I’m sure the picture suffered in consequence; we never got our usual happy ping-pong of ideas. Talking it over years later we agreed that we could have done better—with hindsight, I should have strengthened Christopher Lee’s part and put more venom into his father–daughter relationship with Kim Cattrall; that would have worked well. And there were other areas I could have improved, too.
Yet I wonder if the concept itself wasn’t the chief flaw. Do people want to see heroes grown old? One can be sentimental about comebacks, but they’re seldom joyous affairs; the contrast with the youthful zest of the past is all too evident, and it could not be said of the third movie, as it was of the M3 and the M4, that they were “one for all, and all for fun.”
Well, you can’t win ’em all, and it’s enough to have done what I believe we did, and make the definitive version of Dumas’s story with the first two pictures. I’m probably biased, but they seem to me to be the last of the swashbucklers in the old Fairbanks–Flynn tradition, and I’d sooner have my credit on them than on Citizen Kane.
* Inevitably there was a third reaction, but not until much later, when I found myself wondering if the scene in which Roy had been killed (a link in which he and the Musketeers had to ride through an archway) had been strictly necessary. Could I have omitted it from the script, or done it a different way? Yes, probably; on the other hand, it had been a perfectly proper scene to write, and the script called for it. Heart-searchings of the “if only” kind are pointless—which doesn’t stop them from crossing your mind, of course.
ANGRY OLD MAN 1
Fourth Afghan
THE ATTACK ON THE WORLD TRADE CENTER on September 11 was a hideous atrocity, but once the first stunned horror had receded, I confess I was puzzled, dismayed, and at last appalled by some of the reactions to it. These have been discussed and analysed ad nauseam over the past months, and many of the points I made and the questions I raised in a public address before the Fourth Afghan War had been declared, somewhat rashly, by Mr Bush, have since come to be taken for granted, although they were far from being accepted at the time. My views may still be out of step with majority opinion, but since I’m writing for a personal record I don’t hesitate to repeat them, somewhat at random, as they struck me at the time, and still do.
Was I alone, shortly after the tragedy, in finding something tasteless about a three-minute silence which seemed to imply that the victims of a mere terrorist crime, however horrific, were worth more respect and mourning than the dead of two world wars? A trivial point, no doubt, yet it offended me almost as much as the hypocrisy of Bush and Blair in their refusal to explain why the Taliban, for shielding Bin Laden, could be treated as an enemy and targeted with the utmost ferocity, while the Irish Republic, which has given refuge and sympathy to the IRA, could not. We know why, of course: Bush presumably wants to get re-elected some day, and Blair wouldn’t dream of disturbing his ill-named peace process, but the fact remains that the intent of those maniacs who flew the aircraft into the twin towers was no more evil than the intent of the heroes who planted the bombs at Enniskillen and Omagh and tried to butcher the British Government at Brighton. Only the scale of atrocity was different, and scale matters nothing to the dead.
I am not suggesting that Dublin should have been treated like Kabul, merely noting the double standard, which has its roots partly in naked racism—just like the dropping on Japan of the atomic bombs, weapons which by no stretch of the imagination could have been used on Berlin or Vienna.
I was certainly not alone in noting that while a generation of terrorism in Britain (a terrorism largely financed from the United States which expected our help last September), and other terrorisms in Spain and Ceylon and elsewhere, barely merited a mention in the American press, it was a very different story when the US was hit by terrorism—suddenly it was an attack on the whole world, on freedom, on “demaahcracy”, etc., etc., and everyone was expected to fall in loyally behind American leadership.
It was not, of course, an attack on the world, or on anyone except America, and whatever the wisdom of Mr Bush’s war, Britain should have had no part in it. It was simply no affair of ours; we had not been attacked, nor was there any likelihood of an attack until Blair, with extraordinary impudence and stupidity, thrust us willy-nilly into the firing-line, with the patently irrational claim that action was less dangerous than inaction. The propaganda that it was everyone’s fight, trumpeted in Washington and echoed in London, was a necessary lie to coerce Europeans, especially the British, into America’s quarrel—and to give Blair the chance to strut the world stage in a parody of statesmanship, bask in ludicrous comparisons with Churchill while acting as Bush’s gofer, and distract attention from the mess New Labour had made at home.
Why Blair rushed with such indecent haste to stand shoulder to shoulder with America may be obvious; what was incredible was that a spineless Parliament let him get away with it, abusing his position and betraying his trust by railroading us into armed conflict without seeking a mandate from the nation’s elected representatives. What, one may ask, is Parliament for?
Wrong though he was, it was not surprising that Blair’s rash and unconstitutional behaviour was widely if thoughtlessly approved. The British are a loyal, belligerent, and rather sentimental people, and it was pointed out that America was a staunch friend and ally who had stood by us in the Second World War, so were we not bound to support her now? By all means, and it would have been right and proper to stand by America in 2001 exactly as she stood by us from 1939 to 1942: with moral support, intelligence assistance, boundless good will, and all the material aid we could muster—at a price—but stopping short of joining the fight. God knows the threat to the world now does not compare to that posed by Hitler in 1940; talk of how “the world changed forever” on September 11 is so much twaddle, and Bush’s bone-headed claim that whoever was not with America was against her was simply contemptible, as though he had the right to deny the option of neutrality to anyone who chose it.
The dictatorial dragooning of my country into war seemed to me to be quite as important as the moral question of blitzing hapless Afghans; British constitutional liberties were my first concern, not the follies and heedless brutalities of America’s present leaders. I might deplore the apparent mistreatment of prisoners of war and the continued killing of Afghan civilians by unnecessary bombing, but I consoled myself that this lapse from the standards of civilised behaviour was a temporary thing resulting from the unprecedented shock of September 11, when it was brought home to the American people that their country was no longer the impregnable fortress of their imagination. They were stunned, and infuriated into an understandable thirst for revenge—never mind silly excuses about self-defence, they wanted to “kick ass”, and s
ince Bin Laden’s was not available, and the world’s greatest superpower was incapable of finding and seizing him, which would have been the sensible and proper course, the bemused Bush had to find another ass to kick, and homed in on Afghanistan’s Taliban government with demented slogans about crusades and just causes.
Meanwhile Blair was alarming Britons with deranged rhetoric about British leadership, and “sorting out” various parts of Africa, and generally creating a new heaven and a new earth, in a speech reminiscent of Palmerston’s fictitious comic address to the Improvement Club.* This, when everyone knew that Britain hadn’t the muscle for even another Falklands campaign.
Now, after all this—my disgust and anger at the risking of British lives in Bush’s war; my indignation that millions urgently needed at home should be squandered in rebuilding the country which America had devastated; my conviction that the end being sought in Afghanistan (whatever it was) did not justify the means; my despair at the sheer ignorance of Islam displayed by Western leaders;† my doubt whether disposing of the Taliban and Bin Laden would advance the campaign against terrorism very far; my fear that America’s blind belligerence might really let the terrorist genie out of the bottle; my impatience at their inability to understand (not just in Washington but in Little Rock and Shaker Heights) that by ill-treating captives and committing the crowning folly of photographing their cruelty for all the world to see,‡ they were creating a public relations disaster, reinforcing their enemies’ hatred, and setting an example for other ruthless regimes to follow; my total lack of confidence in the leadership of the US and Britain—after all this, it will surely be concluded that I am disloyal, unpatriotic, and above all anti-American, and deserving of the wrath and scorn (often quite venomous) poured on any who dare to oppose or even to criticise Anglo-American policies. Some writers in the British press whom I normally respect waxed almost hysterical about this, damning me and my like as doves if not traitors, and crying a rousing “Gung-ho!” from their armchairs.
Well, I am not anti-American. I’m pro-American to my backbone, and I share their grief and rage at the horror of Manhattan—but I am not prepared to stand shoulder to shoulder with them or anyone else unconditionally, I am not prepared to accept their leadership when they are manifestly unfit to provide it, I am not prepared (unlike Blair) to put our soldiers’ precious lives at Bush’s disposal, and most of all, I am not prepared to regard US policies and decisions as infallible and beyond criticism. In spite of Bush’s inanities, it is possible to be a true friend without giving slavish allegiance, to recognise that the special relationship is not a bed of roses, to be eternally grateful for support in the Falklands while not forgetting Eisenhower’s despicable stab in the back at the time of Suez, and to reserve the right to disagree. It’s called democracy, but truthfully I would not expect either Bush or Blair to have much notion of it; they’ve shown none so far.
But nobody seemed to mind that; both men stood high in the opinion polls, and there was general support for Bush’s war, except among a small minority who included seventeen very old men with whom I attended a reunion shortly after the crisis began: we were the remnants of the 9th Battalion Border Regiment, part of the 17th Indian Division, the “Black Cats”, who fought through the Burma war, spearheaded the last great drive south behind the enemy lines and, in General Slim’s words, tore the Japanese Army apart. If there were seventeen good men and ready soldiers in Britain, with nothing to learn about what are called the horrors of war, and never a moment’s hesitation in going to battle in a good cause, those were they. Without exception they were against an Afghan war—not only because as one elderly Cumbrian said: “They’ll ’ev a bloody rough shift if they ga intil Afghanistan”, but because like all old soldiers who have been there and done it, they were pacifists to a man, knowing the wisdom of patience and diplomacy and only fighting when no other honourable course is open. It would have taken a very big man, a real leader, to stay America’s hand after September 11, resist the perfectly natural demand of his countrymen for vengeance, and look for a peaceful way.
Also, those seventeen old trained killers (for that is what they once were) felt a distaste at the prospect of the world’s most powerful superpower bombing one of the most primitive nations on earth into a bloody rubble; perhaps some of them remembered that the grandfathers of those Pathans and Baluch and Afghans of the Taliban had been comrades in XIVth Army.
I heard one reflecting caustically—and no doubt unfairly—that it struck a jarring note when a prime minister cocooned by the tightest security with armed police and bodyguards, talked of soldiers laying their lives on the line; that is a view straight from the slit-trench, and I was reminded of Dennis Wheatley’s “Pills of Honour”—the suicide pills to be taken by any Cabinet declaring war and so inevitably sending others to certain death. Not an option that would appeal to politicians. One would have to go back to Regulus for that kind of honour.
Of course time may prove me absolutely wrong. Perhaps posterity will acclaim Bush’s and Blair’s behaviour as courageous and statesmanlike. But I doubt it, just as I doubt (whatever the course of events in Afghanistan, whatever terrorist leaders are killed or captured, whatever so-called government exists in Kabul) whether it will be possible to talk of victory until the Palestine question, which is at the heart of the matter, has been resolved. Everyone knows that this is crucial, and that while it remains unsettled, terrorism will continue. Western leaders talk of an indefinite campaign which, although they can never admit it, is an admission that terrorism can’t be beaten. It always wins, as we have seen in Northern Ireland and elsewhere, and in the end it has to be looked at across a table, with talk of jihads and just causes forgotten, and reality faced by both sides. Easier said than done, but that’s the truth of it, and perhaps when the guns of Gaza and the West Bank are silent, as they have seldom been since I heard them as a young subaltern more than fifty years ago, it will be possible to say that the world has changed indeed.
* Lord Palmerston’s address to the Reform Club on March 7, 1854, on the eve of the Crimean War, was memorably lampooned in Punch.
† And sections of the Western media, like the American news magazine which under the heading why they hate america, told its readers that “Bin Laden’s fanatics are the offspring of failed societies”, adding that “We stand for freedom and they hate it. We are rich and they envy us. We are strong and they resent this.” God help us.
‡ Mr Rumsfeld’s contention that the Afghan captives were not prisoners of war prompted an interesting question: would he define the civilian farmers of Lexington and Concord who fired the first shots in the American Revolution as “unlawful combatants”, and would he have regarded as “appropriate” the hooding, blindfolding, caging, and sensory deprivation of any taken prisoner?
INTERLUDE
Law for Sale?
NEVER MIND PEERAGES, can law-making be bought? If an animal rights organisation were to contribute to a governing party’s funds, would this assist the passage of a bill against parrot-kicking or butterfly-baiting or some similar blood sport? And if the Fruit of the Month Society made a similar donation, would this win government support for lowering the age of consent for homosexuals? I ask these questions in all innocence, and am ready to be told that it is disgraceful even to mention them—which usually means that the question has hit uncomfortably close to home.
On this head, I was an interested observer of the campaign to ban fox-hunting, deer-hunting, coursing, etc., and found myself wondering whether the proposed bill was the result of judicious investment or just mental derangement. I have never hunted, and never would, but I have a foolishly sentimental affection for it which comes of reading Surtees and Trollope and singing at school hearty songs like “Drink, Puppy, Drink”, and “A-Hunting We Will Go”, and of course “John Peel”, and I should be sorry to learn that they were no longer sung in this politically correct age.
This is very wrong of me, but there it is. I haven�
�t shot an animal since I was nine, when I nailed a rabbit and promptly burst into tears. And once I had my copy ruthlessly spiked when I was sent to write an article celebrating the Waterloo Cup, and turned in a passionate denunciation of coursing.
So I understand the position of the anti-blood-sports people (and would gladly shoot those of them who commit evil acts of terrorism, but that’s not germane to the argument). I’m neutral to the extent that I don’t give a dam about the morality of hunting, but as a country lover I have to defend rural traditions and the right of people to make a living from them. But my real interest, I confess, would be to watch the attempted enforcement of a hunting ban, something which I suspect the banners haven’t really thought about. I’m not sure how the police are going to proceed against law-breaking huntsmen—when they assemble, when they set off, when they first get on the trail of a fox, or when they kill it? Assuming they do. I would truly enjoy the sight of PC Plod in pursuit of the Blencathra, running up and down the fells crying: “Stop, in the name of Blair!”
I mustn’t be cynical, or wonder why the government debated fox-hunting while the countryside was dying from foot and mouth disease; whom the gods would destroy they first make mad. But I would like to know why the ban-the-hunt brigade don’t demand the outlawing of angling, which is horribly cruel, consisting as it does of the slow torturing to death of a fish with a barbed hook in its jaws. Could it be that while they inveigh against people who chase foxes and deer and blow the hell out of grouse and pheasants, on the erroneous assumption that they are all “toffs” and fair game, the antis are scared to tackle the anglers, vast numbers of whom are working-class? Of course it is. They know, too, that a bill against angling wouldn’t stand a chance—but being men and women of stainless principle, shouldn’t they try for one, or at least state boldly where they stand? Or don’t they care about fish?