By Land and Sea
To SEA IN A SIEVE. By Peter Bull. (Peter Davies, 15s.)
The difference between the best type of British naval war memoir and the average German one is to be found in the opening paragraphs of the first two of these books. Peter Bull, the actor (you may have seen him in Waiting for Godot—he was the large man with the whip), starts off breezily with : 'I had better make it clear at the outset that the sea was not in my blood, and I took jolly good care that my blood was not in the sea.' Captain Busch opens with some familiar remarks about ships being living things and then owlishly tells us : 'The Scharnhorst definitely had a soul.' Admittedly Captain Busch's bromides are treasured equally by English writers, but no German alive is capable of composing such a sentence as Mr. Bull's.
The Drama of the Scharnhorst is no better or worse than a dozen similar books which have come out of Germany during the last few years. It suffers, as they all do, from over-dramatisa- tion, sentiment and superficiality. Two-thirds of it are devoted to the ship's last operation, but as only thirty-six men survived this and only one of them, Petty Officer Godde, was articulate, the veracity of what is described is often in doubt. Most of the time one is, so to speak, waiting for Godde; and Captain Busch's flights of fancy as to how Admiral Fraser is faring meanwhile do not make this any easier :
`Should we encounter the .Scharnhorst,' said Sir Bruce, rising slightly on his toes (did he have the hiccups? one wonders) have decided first to close with the enemy at once and to open fire with starshell at a range of about 12,000 yards.' He paused and looked at the commander of the flagship, Captain the Hon. G. H. E. Russell. The Captain nodded gravely.
This is good Boy's Own Paper stuff, but nothing more. Mr. Bull on the other hand has achieved that rare thing, a war memoir to satisfy both the intelligentsia and the extrovert. It is a funny book, based (like most funny war books) on the comedy of errors. While the Germans solemnly scan enemy horizons. exchanging dialogue of inordinate tedium, clumsiness and length, Mr. Bull goes crashing gaily from harbour to harbour on his Rosinante of a landing craft. He invites us to laugh at his con- fusion and inefficiency, and we do; yet never far away is the reverse of the coin, the power and the glory. When we read that Mr. Bull finished the war as a flotilla commander with a medal for gallantry, we are not surprised; that the fool should make good is the necessary denouement of such a story.
In The Cape Horn Breed Captain William Jones tells P. R. Stephenson the story of his apprenticeship in the sailing ship British Isles from 1905 to 1909. It is an enthralling story, and thanks to Captain Jones's remarkable memory for detail, the atmosphere of the life on board is vividly conveyed. The charac- ters too—Captain Barker and the Bucko Mate especially—come beautifully alive, and the description of that first terrible voyage round the Horn is as good as anything in Conrad.
The Long Road Home is a private soldier's account of five years' captivity as prisoner of war, and as such, valuable. Officers who have criticised the not very creditable things that happen 111 it should remember that they teach their men to obey, not to question, and that their involuntary abandonment of them as prisoners of war leaves them without leadership, encouragement or example at a time when they most need it. In Their Shallow Graves is about the war in Russia, and the publishers have put the book together in a very novel way. This is to print pages 113-128 after pages 1-16, then to take a deep breath and start again with page 33. This means that pages 16-33 we don't get . at all, and pages 113-128 we get twice. An original idea certainly, but I fear it hasn't quite come off. Behind the Lines consists of twenty-eight stories of guerrilla warfare by such practised hands as Stanley Moss, Fitzroy Maclean, George Millar, Otto Skorzeny and Bernard Fergusson. Good for the bedside table.
LUDOVIC KENNEDY
Previous page
