Bloody Babes
CHILDREN, if not quite on the side of the big battalions, love the victors in war. When they read a book about a battle, they like the man who sheds rivers of enemy blood, displays superior military skill, and wins : Rider Haggard must have set countless children on the road to championship of the oppressed African simply by describing the way in which Chaka and Dingaan obliterated their foes with the assegai. Even in the adult world, one notices how the dis- covery that Rommel had been a good general pre- ceded the discovery that he had been a fine man. Children are French up to Moscow : on the way back to the Beresina they commiserate for a few days and then desert to the Cossacks. Tactical failure is unforgivable.
How far should one, and can one, teach chil-
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dren through novels what war is really like? Children are absorbed by descriptions of mass death by organised violence, perhaps fulfilling early fantasies of anger against the stable arrange- ments which govern them. Writing about slaughter for children is accordingly a profitable job which today squeezes the consciences of those who do it. On the one hand, death can be described in the heroic, unreal terms of regiments immolating themselves on the field of honour, the messy facts transfigured into images like 'mown down,' withered,' and 'sacrifice.' There is a way of writing very sincerely in these terms, which can convey a sort of vague but intense sad- ness over death in war. Or on the other hand the writer can try to put across, while remaining within the child reader's bookish depth, what the death of an individual• soldier really entails.
The novels of G. A. Henty, John Foster Dulles's childhood reading and still being republished, really take neither of these two possible approaches. Under Drake's Flag is packed with fighting, sack and bloodshed, often described in surprising detail but with a brisk callousness which makes it neither heroic nor real. Spanish soldiers plunge on to brightly contrived stakes which im- pale them through the face, and it is all such a jovial business that it would seem square to say anything more than '0, bad luck, Don!' In part, this flatness is due to Henty's morality which allows his four young heroes to kill but never to lie or contemplate saving their lives by abjuring Protestantism. His Devon lads never do anything wrong in their author's eyes, whether they are leading slave rebellions in Puerto Rico or shoot- ing their way free of the Inquisition in Peru. Death is just a richly deserved right to the jaw, delivered with a cannon-ball.
Today it is not the practice to write a child's book about war as if it was a game of toy soldiers, and with the sugar of martial beauty there is usually conveyed a solid pill of moral horror. Captain of Foot, by Ronald Welch, is remarkable in that it does this with real literary skill, for it is the story of a young officer in the Peninsula who is brave and successful but also indifferent to
death around him. In understanding the character of Chris Carey, with his charm, his obsession with his own comfort, and his rather cold heart, the reader understands Carey's limits and realises that his cool acceptance of killing is a very limited - attitude. When at last he is killed, one feels that he who lives by the sword tas been regrettably but also inevitably slain by the sword. The back- ground of the book is rich and well researched, and the illustrations are beautiful.
The Dog That Marched to Moscow, by Ernest Gray, makes its point much more directly, and although it is not nearly so well written, the point is effective enough.. Armand, the hero, is a young doctor with the Grande Armee in the Russian campaign of 1812 who sees and appreciates all the glamour of battle but who is progressively dis- gusted with it as he goes about his job of piecing together the bits afterwards. Mr. Gray is inter- ested in the history of medicine, and much of his book describes techniques of operation in the field and the medical achievements of the his- torical Surgeon-General Larrey. Many men re- turned to duty at once after amputation of an arm, and three-quarters of Larrey's operations were successful. After the battle of Borodino, whose description is the book's set-piece, Armand escapes into adventures with Russian spies which are a little aimless, and the book ends with his
decision to stay behind with the wounded on the Retreat,
Henty would never have heard a word against Queen Elizabeth. But Mr. Henry Treece, who also puts his young Giles Wickham to sea in the Age of Drake, launches him through a London in which Elizabeth's secret police are as un- pleasant as the Gestapo. The book is complicated, highly exciting and yet sharp with irony : as an escaping criminal, Giles is driven temporarily into the company of Catholic spies, then fights in the Netherlands under Sidney, is captured, and sent to Spain, where he owes his life only to a wrong assumption by the Inquisition that he must have been a Catholic agent himself. Sent to England with the Armada, he seizes his ship and sails it to London, where the Queen honours him. Wickham and the Armada honours Spain and literature : Giles meets Sidney, Cervantes, Lope, and on the last page, a brash lad from Stratford who holds horses.
NEAL ASCHERSON
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