After the Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  There are ‘serious’ war poets of the Second World War, but they are not even in the same league as the good-bad poems of Brooke, Owen, Sassoon from the First. One of the best-loved British poems to come out of the Second World War is a comic poem, Henry Reed’s ‘Naming of Parts’: its contrast between the impassible and beautiful world of nature and the dull absurdity of army training evokes the tone of the early Forties as well as any of the patriotic stuff:

  This is the lower sling swivel. And this

  Is the upper sling swivel, whose use you will see,

  When you are given your slings. And this is the piling swivel,

  Which in your case you have not got. The branches

  Hold in the gardens their silent, eloquent gestures,

  Which in our case we have not got.

  As 1941 drew to its close, there was not much for British people to cheer about. It was now over two years since anyone in Britain had eaten a Camembert, or a banana. Eggs were luxuries, sugar in short supply. The radio blared nonsense about carrots helping pilots see in the dark. True, Britain had conquered Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somaliland, Syria and (for about the third time) Iraq. The war news, though, was generally bleak: Crete, the Balkans – the North Sea, where one of the fastest warships afloat in the world, the battle cruiser HMS Hood, was sunk by the Bismarck. The year 1940 had demonstrated Churchill’s pluck, and the collective courage and resilience of the British people. The year 1941 had demonstrated their patchy military skill, and their essential powerlessness. They could temporarily resist conquest, but they could not themselves be European conquerors. Whatever happened at the end of the appalling conflict being waged in Russia, it could not wholly be to Britain’s advantage. In the Far East, Japan, which Churchill believed would never make war, was sniffing hungrily around Malaya; who knows but that that ingenious empire might not train its sights on India itself?

  ‘Forward! Forward to Victory, Enlist now’

  The soldier welcoming his civilian comrade across the channel gives no indication of the bloodshed and mayhem which awaits him in the trenches

  This poster by contrast emphasizes the dangers of war and appeals to the spirit of adventure in the boys whom it urges to enlist

  A Battery Shelled by Percy Wyndham Lewis.

  The Vorticist depiction of modern warfare shows human beings as automata in a mechanized fate.

  Stanley Spencer’s picture of travoys of wounded at a dressing station in Smol, Macedonia, retains a poignant sense of human tragedy

  Paul Nash’s work of 1918 has the ironic title, We are making a New World

  Spencer’s post-war religious paintings, such as this suburban depiction of the Garden of Gethsemane and Judas kissing Christ, owes much to his memories of the war

  The timeless simplicity of William Nicholson’s still lives hid his greatness from many contemporaries, though we see it now

  Here is a gas cooker of 1923

  A German hair-dryer of 1925

  An American washing-machine, 1929

  An electric mixer, also American, of 1918

  These posters for the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley reflect the exoticism of the occasion. This colour lithograph by Gerald Spencer Pryse shows Africans.

  Here Pryse creates the equivalent of a Kipling short-story with his splash of Indian light and colour.

  The Spanish Civil War was seen by many not only as a national tragedy but as an international response to the rivalries between Communism and Fascism. The bombing of the Spanish city of Guernica by German aircraft helped to insure Franco’s victory. Picasso’s canvas of the event became totemic.

  This recruiting poster shows the struggle in its political colours, with the Popular Front of international socialists united against the Church and the Fascists

  Some of the most charming poster-art in the post-war decade was inspired by the Festival of Britain in 1951.

  This poster by Robin Day advertises a celebration of British scientific achievement which coincided with the Festival of Britain.

  The Festival had some innovatory architecture on the South Bank of the Thames includine this fine weather vane with an optimistic sunny face looking forward to the 1950s

  For all the positive achievements of science and democracy, the post-war era was dominated by the now universal knowledge that science had developed the capacity for the human race to destroy itself. This mushroom cloud from Ivy Mike, one of the largest nuclear explosions ever, was photographed on November 1, 1952. The blast completely destroyed Elugelab Island.

  As the dismal Christmas approached, many would have agreed with Martin Bormann’s verdict, though not perhaps when he delivered it (in 1945): ‘Britain should have made peace in 1941. We had each of us triumphed over a Latin race. In the skies over London she had proved her valour. Now she needed to protect her Empire, and concern herself with the Global balance of power, not the narrow European one. Pitt would have seen this – Churchill did not.’23 Bormann was not a noted historian, so we do not know to which Pitt he referred, the Pitt who sent a supportive army to Germany in 1758 or the one who did likewise in 1805. Still, Britain remained ‘alone against the rest of the world’. The Americans were not entering the conflict directly.

  Then, everything altered. On 7 December, over the Hawaiian island of Honolulu where the US fleet lay in Pearl Harbor, 184 Japanese aircraft appeared in the early morning sky. Eighty-six warships lay beneath them. Nineteen warships were sunk or disabled. The US navy was in effect put out of action. One hundred and eighty-eight military aircraft were destroyed, another 159 badly damaged, and 2,403 Americans died that morning. It was hardly good news, especially when to this triumph the Japanese could add the occupation of the Philippines and northern Malaya. On Christmas Day Hong Kong surrendered to the seemingly unconquerable imperial power. But Churchill, together with most of his fellow countrymen, felt enormous relief. American declared war on Japan on the day of Pearl Harbor. With Russia in bloody chaos (on Christmas Day in Leningrad, 37,000 people died of starvation), the whole world was now caught up in a global struggle. For a man who had told Dowding that he did not believe in world harmony, Churchill could not but be stimulated. Speaking to the US Congress on 26 December, having spent Christmas with the Roosevelts in the White House, Churchill gave his famous two-fingered V sign, and asked – of the Germans and the Japanese – ‘What kind of people do they think we are? Is it possible they do not realize we shall never cease to persevere against them until they have been taught a lesson which they and the world will never forget?’ It was fighting talk, and fighting days lay ahead.

  29

  Bombers and the Bombed

  In July 2004, a charming elderly gentleman, Willy Schludecker, aged eighty-two, bespectacled, tweed-clad, paid a visit to Northumberland in the far north-east of England. His appearance is that of a retired Lutheran bishop, or perhaps the headmaster of a gentle, but studious Gymnasium.

  He was coming to see the village of Bolam, near Morpeth. A memorial window in the church there carries the inscription: ‘This window marks the place where, on 1st May 1942, a bomb dropped from a German aircraft entered the Church but did not explode’. Willy Schludecker had been the bomber pilot flying a Dornier 217 from Holland with the intention of bombing Sunderland, then one of the great shipbuilding areas of Britain. Coming under attack from British fighters, the young Schludecker took a split-second decision to jettison his explosive load. One of the four 1,100-lb bombs bounced through a side-wall of the Saxon church before sliding across the tiled floor.

  Joy Scott, four years older than the bomber pilot, was in the village when the explosives fell. ‘It was terrifying. The place shook for five minutes when the bombs dropped. The first bombs blew in the windows of the vicarage. The vicar had got out of bed and the window frame ended up framing him on the bed. The bomber came so low it clipped the trees, which is probably why the bomb that hit the church did not go off.’

  A local historian, investigating the night of the bombing,
discovered that Herr Schludecker was still alive. When contact had been made, the former pilot wanted to come to the village. ‘He was mortified and decided that he would like to come over and tell the people there that it was not his intention to bomb their church.’ The newspaper, on the morning of 13 July 2004, showed the photograph of old Willy Schludecker holding the arm of Joy Scott outside the sturdy little Saxon church.1

  Schludecker’s own nearest city of Cologne on the Rhine was the scene of one of Sir Arthur Harris’s set-piece bombing raids in which Bomber Command proudly flew 1,000 Lancasters over in a single night. The gentleness of the two old people in the July 2004 photograph made it seem totally unimaginable that sophisticated nations should ever have thought to solve their political differences by spending huge sums of money in constructing aeroplanes and explosives for the single purpose of bombing human beings of all ages, and destroying their docks, their factories, their houses, their schools, their hospitals, their altars and their shrines. There had been sieges in the past, from the legendary times of Troy to the horrible Siege of Paris in 1870 when civilians had been caught up in ‘dolorous war’, as Homer calls it. Such atrocities had always been incidental to war’s main business, which was battle between combatants by sea and land. The invention of the aeroplane changed all that. In 1922, the British cabinet had approved the policy of establishing ‘Air Control’ in Iraq. Charles Portal, Arthur Harris and Edward Ellington, the officers who oversaw this policy of cowing the Iraqi population by bombs from the air, were senior officers in the RAF during the run-up to the Second World War. There was an added poignancy in the story of the old Luftwaffe pilot revisiting the English village which he had inadvertently bombed, since, on the day that his visit was reported on the middle pages of the English newspapers, the front pages contained stories of allied air raids on Iraq. Those selfsame targets selected by Portal and Harris in 1922 were still being pounded by expensive Western explosives in the summer of 2004. The policy described sardonically by Field Marshal Wilson as ‘appearing from God knows where, dropping their bombs on God knows what, and going off again God knows where’2 was always going to be popular with politicians, since it could be done with comparatively few casualties – certainly fewer than using infantry to subdue a populace.

  Bombing of civilian targets in the First World War had been frequent. The Germans bombed the suburbs of Paris on 14 August 1914. Hitler’s invasion of Russia fell on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the French scoring a direct hit on a circus at Karlsruhe, during a performance: 110, mainly children, were killed. It is not surprising then that in 1939, at the outbreak of war, all British intelligence, and most of the pundits, assumed that Hitler would direct a bombing campaign against London. Sir John Anderson, Home Secretary and chairman of the Committee of Imperial Defence (a pompous man later to give his name to a semi-effective cheap form of air-raid shelter which people could construct in their back gardens), calculated that 2,000 bombs would fall on London in the first twenty-four hours of war. They worked out that 28,000 would be killed by bombing in the first month. Bertrand Russell in Which Way Peace? envisaged the mayhem: ‘London would be one vast raving bedlam, the hospitals will be stormed, traffic will cease, the homeless shriek for peace, the city will be pandemonium.’

  In fact no British civilian was killed by aerial bombardment until a stray bomb, aiming for the battleships in Scapa Flow – where the old German fleet was scuppered at the end of the First World War – accidentally hit a house and killed James Isbistern, aged twenty-seven, in the village of Waithe Bridge in Loch of Stenness. In the fight between Britain and Germany the policy of bombing civilians was pursued by the British, who mounted their first raid on 11 May 1940. It aimed at targets along the Ruhr the day after Churchill became Prime Minister. The RAF continued, without cessation or interruption, to bomb German civilian targets until the end of the war. It was Churchill who as Secretary for War (combined with air) had directed the first civilian bombings in Iraq in 1922.

  The Germans, of course, had taken part in savage aerial attacks on European cities, including Guernica during the Spanish Civil War, and on Rotterdam, The Hague, and such French towns as Nancy during their conquest of Northern Europe during the summer of 1940. It was Britain from which their bombers were held back, for as long as Hitler entertained any hope of a negotiated peace based on the loose general scheme of Germany running Europe and Britain the rest of the world.

  Whoever fights monsters, decreed Nietzsche in his prophetic text Beyond Good and Evil, ‘should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster; when you look into the abyss, the abyss looks into you’.3 The fear of being bombed, and the knowledge that both sides were prepared to bomb, if necessary upon a limitless scale, changed the whole rhetoric of warfare, and the way in which it was conceived by governments and populace alike. The First World War, with its Angels of Mons, its hymns of knightly valour, its need to dignify the muddied, bloodied battlefields with chivalric glow, had been consciously archaic in its way of selling itself to the people. Hence the appalling and shocking contrast, in the more popular songs, as in the war poets, between the florid calls to war by generals and bishops and the reality of shell-shock, amputated limbs, gas and mechanized slaughter. Techniques of slaughter had improved since 1919. Governments would now in 1939 be capable of effective acts of genocide with greater speed and efficiency than previous generations had dreamed of. The Young Turks, killing their million Armenians, had needed to employ armies, with bayonets, rifles, swords. Such grisly means would still be in use during the 1939–45 war. But the invention of the bomber could distance governments and war leaders imaginatively from what they were doing, and in such circumstances, Homeric or Arthurian metaphor came to be displaced by cosier, chummier injunctions to sing along together in the air-raid shelters as the fire-bombs rained down; to take the medicine, to continue business as usual.

  One of the ways in which the peoples of the twentieth century made tolerable for themselves the scale of mass slaughter was by invoking the language of heroism. The Heroic Age, as perceived through the literature of Epic and Romance, had been one in which weaponry was primitive and the grim business of battle was dignified by focusing upon the deeds of individual combatants. While the mayhem, the casual and painful deaths of Trojans, Greeks, Persians, Spartans, Geats, Arthurian Celts or Brythons, could be attributed to pitiless Fate or capricious deities, the whole grisly business was redeemed by the personal courage of Hector, Patroclus, Lancelot. At a time when modern warfare became a Malthusian slaughter programme; when tanks, advanced artillery, machine guns could mow down tens of thousands by the day, herding together human beings like animals in a highly mechanized slaughterhouse; when sophisticated explosives could wipe out thousands, regardless of their skills as fighters or their moral fortitude, the linguistic convention was revived that anyone who died in war was a hero. The brave became the valiant. Tens of thousands of mutilated young corpses became the slain. Their unwitting and involuntary deaths were described as sacrifice, even as a Calvary.

  Language from Malory’s Morte d’Arthur or Andrew Lang’s Homer tried to hide from the governed and the governors, the generals and the foot soldiers, the fact of which the dictators were all too aware: that human life had become cheap, expendable: that the old metaphysical beliefs in soul or human individuality had all been replaced by various forms of materialism and determinism which made it possible to eliminate human beings on a prodigious scale without any strong underlying intellectual challenge. War was bound to become a projection of Darwinian Fitness rivalry. In the First World War, there were some ‘victories’ and ‘defeats’ in the field, but very few decisive battles. After both sides had demonstrated their willingness to sacrifice tens, hundreds of thousands of young lives month in, month out, the contest became a question of who could bring the winning combination of most active troops and most military hardware. The arrival of over a million Americans in Europe simply crushed the morale of German leadership.


  After the First World War, and the resolve of Western leaders that no such wasteful fighting should be repeated on Western soil, there developed the view that science and technology had in any case made obsolete such methods of war as had carved up France and the Low Countries. The few bombs dropped on European cities by the rivals of the Great War left the statesmen in the ensuing two decades convinced that the power that controlled the air would ultimately win the war. Radar, and anti-aircraft technology, had not been pioneered when Stanley Baldwin told the House of Commons in November 1932: ‘the bomber will always get through’.4

  If the land battles, however mechanized, could be seen as re-enactments of medieval chivalry, air battles could certainly be seen as tournaments. The Battle of Britain had stopped the German advance, made impossible the Nazi invasion of Kent, and created if not the inevitable outcome of an Allied victory, at least a stay of execution. Dowding’s ‘Few’ of Fighter Command had done something which no land battle could have achieved: brought about a decisive change in the destiny of nations with losses in the low thousands, not the tens of thousands of Mons, Ypres or Passchendaele. Those on both sides who engaged as fighter pilots were heroes in the Homeric mould, individuals who actually made a difference.

  Another branch of the Royal Air Force, Bomber Command, called for no less courage on the part of pilots and their crews, but when the war was over, the politicians were sheepish about their achievement. Arthur Harris, C-in-C of Bomber Command, was offered no employment by the RAF in 1945 and left for South Africa. He was not made a peer but offered the minor reward of a baronetcy. No Campaign Medal was struck for the men who took part in the destruction, not only of Germany but of many cities in Holland, France, Italy and Central Europe. The language of heroism could be stretched to include the unfortunates caught up in battles between uniformed combatants in the deserts of North Africa or the beaches of France. But what was heroic about dropping tons of high explosives on medieval churches, on hospitals, on heavily populated and ill-defended towns and cities?