One Man's War
My First War. By Captain Sir Basil Bartlett. (Chatto and Windus. 3s. 6d.)
IF war were only as the pacifists describe it—violent, unjust, horrible, useless—it would have fallen out of favour long ago. There is a side of war, however, which is capable of appealing even to a sensitive mind, and it is possible to envy Sir Basil Bartlett the experiences he describes in his one month's journal, which begins in the " phoney " quietude of May 1st, and ends in the triumphant disaster of the Dunkirk beaches. His duties as Field Security Officer of a Division, first in France and then in Flanders, brought him in touch with a bizarre surrealist conflict fought against a background of disreputable cafés—the characters unreliable police agents, German carrier pigeons, smugglers, suspects of all kinds, mixed with French officers of high rank capable of the oddest spontaneities.
While we were walking along a dried-up marsh near Halluin the
French General suddently knelt down. Tiens," he said. " Des violettes." And he began to pick them. Soon the whole French Mission was on its knees picking violets and ecstatically smelling them. Having picked them, like children they didn't know what to do with them. So they presented them to an English Colonel, who was forced to walk about with them for the rest of the afternoon, looking furious.
One is struck by the casualness of this May-time war: the quality of vivid unreality. Sir Basil himself writes : " I've spent so many years in the theatre that red tabs and medals and riding-boots remind me irresistibly of old actors dressed up to play in war plays," but the day-dream wasn't only in the author's mind. The clottaniers who resented any attempt to stop the lucrative business of smuggling, the reinforcements indefi- nitely delayed because the Ministry of War and the Ministry of the Interior couldn't decide who ought to pay for the train, the C.O. who sat down after dinner every night to play Bridge with three of his officers and four bottles of champagne—they were all like people who couldn't really believe that war had happened again—and played it without conviction in the old way.
It is all fascinating and funny and a little sad, told with an exquisite skill one expects of the translator of Asmodie. The balloons go up, the Germans invade Belgium, break through at Sedan: war has become suddenly serious, but the bizarre, the unaccountable, the surrealist elements continue—the King of the Belgians requests the Mayor of Courtrai not to destroy a certain power-house, even if the alternative is capture by the Germans; a fat Portuguese Jew tries to dynamite a bridge; all German Jews with a red J on their passports become suddenly suspect— the black J's are all right—and so in a general bewilderment and confusion to the beaches of Dunkirk. " I suppose that, in history," Sir Basil writes, " this campaign will count as a first- class military defeat. But it wasn't." To one man who took part in it, it was obviously nearer to a fantastic dream.
GRAHAM GREEN!
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