Cassell, 1959, 214 p including 2 p Preface, 1 p Bibliography, 8 p Index.

The book’s title is 1914 and it is a history of the events of that fateful year but of course it is its latter half which will inevitably predominate any such undertaking. The year’s early months are all but ignored, Chapter 1 beginning with “That year the summer came ungrudgingly early.” Nevertheless, Cameron sets the scene of that last hurrah of Edwardian life. (Okay, the old King had died four years before but nothing much had changed in the interim.) He runs through life in Britain in the realms of painting, music, theatre (and music-hall,) dance, literature, fashion, and the nascent cinema with some detail. (At the White City, the Anglo-American Exposition proclaimed the “Wonders of the Panama Canal – the Grand Canyon – America’s skyscrapers.”)

In British politics, though the calls for votes for women were becoming ever louder, the Irish question was to the fore: this was the year of the mutiny at the Curragh. Other more normal political divisions were evident. In one of the broadsheets a Mr John Littlejohns from Pontypridd alliteratively thundered, “Mr W Churchill is the biggest braggart of blatant braggadocio in the brutish trituration of bombastic Radicalism!” continuing his diatribe with, “Mr Lloyd George addresses public meetings with the grimace of a mountebank and the spite of a viper. The present Government is a mawkish medley of parasitical lugubriousness, a neurotic contemporary amalgam of mental profligacy, which seeks to disintegrate the empire with persuasive pasquinades, Liberal levity, volatile vivacity, and designed deception.”

No one thought of war. When the crisis came there was no immediate consensus for war; the Manchester Guardian was for neutrality. Yet Europe, and Britain, slid into it just the same.

Despite the warnings from the last century, the US Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 (whose treaty arguably pointed directly to this later conflict,) the cost in lives still came to many as a shock. France lost 800,000 men in the five months of fighting in 1914; most in the Battle of the Frontiers. Cameron says, “It was not to recover from this for many a generation.” (It certainly hadn’t by 1940.)

British troops took things stoically for the most part. Unlike the Germans, known to sing ‘Die Wacht am Rhein’ or the French with their ‘Marseillaise’ or ‘Brabançonne’ they did not march to tunes of patriotism, honour, or glory but instead to songs irreverent and frequently obscene: above all to “an inconsequential ditty called ‘Tipperary’, a mild, music-hall number the uproarious, passionate, almost immortal success of which was a mystery never in history to be explained, or indeed repeated.” Its triumph astonished its jobbing vaudeville composer Jack Judge “to his dying day.”

Yet when they had to the Tommies fought fiercely. On August 27 a battalion of Munster Fusiliers, acting as a sort of rearguard during the retreat from Mons, “became detached from the main body of the 1st Guards Brigade. They fought for almost twelve continuous hours against huge odds, and died, as far as was ever learned, to a man.” Cameron says, “Mons itself could have been, almost was a disaster.”

At home rumours abounded – myths of Cossacks with snow-caked boots landing all over Britain to defend the West. This was around the same time as the Russian armies were being surrounded at Tannenberg, where almost every man was captured or killed, including General Samsonoff. (In Solzhenitsyn’s August 1914 Samsonoff is portrayed as committing suicide.) News of this defeat did not pass the Allied censor. Spy fever ensured that “every pull-up and tea-room … fell over themselves to dismiss anyone remotely suspected of alien blood; not a hard thing to detect in the catering trade.”

Though the Germans undoubtedly committed what would now be called war crimes, the soldiers of the BEF was not deceived by the word pictures in the British or even more furious French press. They knew their enemy: “Jerry was a coarse bastard, but if he was the undisciplined sot he was said to be, would he make such a superbly professional job of his sandbag barricades and his trenchings, would he stand in his defensive positions so resolutely and long?”

The steel helmet when it eventually came was apparently “accepted reluctantly, even derisively; it was finally sanctified by a black-and-white artist called Bruce Bairnsfather, who had invented a strange philosophical, whiskered archetype for the middle-aged Tommy whom he called ‘Old Bill’.”

Towards the end of the year income tax was raised for earned income from 9d in the pound to one shilling and for unearned income from 1/3d to 1/6d. Beer went up a penny a pint (a staggering 25% increase,) tea duty from 5d to 8d a pound. All the new taxes would bring in only £65 million. The war was costing £8 million a week. France, Russia, Belgium and Serbia all requested loans from the pre-eminent financial power, Britain.

It was a strange war. Days after the naval defeat at Coronel had been avenged by the sinking of the Scharnhorst, the Gneisenau, the Nurnberg and the Liepzig in the Battle of the Falkland Islands, HMS Bulwark, a pre-dreadnought battleship, inexplicably exploded in Sheerness harbour, with only twelve survivors of its nearly 800 crew. As Beatty was to say at Jutland two years later, there was “something wrong with our bloody ships.”)

This book is an intensely readable overview of those months of peace and war. Though its focus is understandably for the most part on Britain it covers the salient points of the war’s spread into the wider world. It is all the more readable for not concentrating on events in diplomacy or on the battlefields.

Sensitivity notes: Lenin is referred to as having ‘Jewish’ eyes and there is a reference to the thudding music of the negroes.

Pedant’s corner:- The words ‘England’ or ‘English’ is frequently employed to mean ‘Britain’ or ‘British’, England is at one point described as an island. Otherwise; “the land-locked harbour of Port Stanley” (I had no idea of the precise geography here but wondered: how can a harbour be land-locked? I have since looked it up. There is indeed a channel to the sea.)

Vintage, 1991, 235 p.

I first became aware of Shelby Foote through Ken Burns’s TV documentary on the US Civil War where his knowledge of the conflict in all its aspects seemed encyclopædic, his recall of incidents from it almost as if he had been there to witness the events himself. Then I found his three-volume narrative history of the war gracing the shelves of bookshops. I hadn’t really realised till I picked this book up that Foote had been a novelist before embarking on that historical venture. Five others of his fictional works are listed herein. It may indeed be fiction but this book could be read as a historical account of the battle of Shiloh with added humanising narrative touches giving personal perspectives on the battle. The tale is told via six points of view (three Confederate, three Yankee) spread over seven chapters, topped and tailed by the account of Lieutenant Palmer Metcalfe, aide de camp to General Sidney Johnston at the start of the battle.
One of the characters quotes an acquaintance as saying, “He said books about war were written to be read by God Almighty, because no one but God ever saw it that way. A book about war, to be read by men, ought to tell what each of the twelve of us saw in our own little corner. Then it would be the way it was – not to God but to us.
I saw what he meant but it was useless talking. Nobody would do it that way. It would be too jumbled. People when they read, and people when they write, want to be looking out of that big Eye in the sky, playing God.”

Foote does do it that way though, and it isn’t too jumbled.

He also brings out the contrast between how the Confederate soldiers thought about the war – as a crusade to build a new country – and the Yankee, simply doing what had to be done, fighting against something rather than for something.

Metcalfe tells us his father, a one-armed veteran of the Mexican War, was of the opinion the South always bore within itself the seeds of defeat, the Confederacy being conceived already moribund, sick from an old malady, incurable romanticism and misplaced chivalry, in love with the past, in love with death and also once told him, ‘War is more shovelry than chivalry.’

Foote voiced a similar sentiment in the Civil War series saying the South could never have won as the North always fought with one hand behind its back. He does, however, show Metcalfe thinking that pluck, élan, sheer force of will, as exemplified here, and in reality, in the person of Nathan Bedford Forrest can weigh more in the balance of fighting. Well, perhaps in one battle but not in a long war.

As far as Shiloh itself goes Metcalfe realizes the battle was lost through its orderly plan which he was so proud of helping create, that the way the Confederate lines were fed into each other resulted in their hopeless intermingling.

This is a superb book, bringing to life a time past and an experience of war which those of us who never had can appreciate and give thanks for missing.

Pedant’s corner:- verbal contractions are routinely given without apostrophes, wouldnt, couldnt, theyd, Ive, thats, its, youd, weren’t, etc, no matter who the narrator is. Exceptions are ‘I’m’, ‘We’ll’ and ‘I’d’. Prentiss’ (Prentiss’s,) Amighty (Almighty.)

General Custer and the Battle of the Little Bighorn.

Pavilion Books (Michael Joseph), 1985, 447 p.

This book does what it says on the (subtitle of the) tin. It is an account of the fatal (to Custer’s Seventh Cavalry troop) encounter at the Little Bighorn. I say encounter, as to describe an engagement involving so few combatants on the one side as a battle is stretching things a bit. Compared to those of the US Civil War in the previous decade and of the century following it was really only a firefight. Account is also misleading. Along with everyone else Connell does not really know exactly what happened. None of Custer’s troops survived, the Native Americans who fought them did not know till later it was Custer attacking their camps and their recollections are beset by translation difficulties and their custom of noticing those things which made sense to them rather than to historians from outwith their culture.

The narrative begins a little oddly, with a description of the engagement’s aftermath, specifically of Major Reno’s and Captain Benteen’s commands whom Custer had detached from his own to attempt a pincer movement. Here is a first indicator of the range of Connell’s project. He goes into details of both these officers’ lives – before and after the Little Bighorn – and when referred to gives us biographies of all the notable characters who had anything to do with the events of that day (and even of some of those who didn’t.) All interesting stuff, but leading to a certain lack of focus.

Custer’s misjudgement in attacking a force of whose size he was unaware was not a one-off. He had acted similarly in the Civil War, where his tendency to charge at anything without adequate reconnaissance and (not) think later became almost a trademark (and he got away with this against Indians at the Battle of the Washita, gaining his unearned reputation as an Indian fighter.) But then, what else is to be expected of a man who graduated twenty-fourth out of twenty four in his year at West Point, with the most demerits of any such student to that time? Indeed his rise in the ranks during the Civil War could be said to be without trace as none of the actions in which he was involved (not that they are explored in great detail in the text) indicated any intrinsic military ability. But they did catch the eye of his superiors.

In an interesting aside Connell states that any photographs said to be of Crazy Horse are most likely of someone else. He would apparently sit for paintings but felt a photograph would steal something from him and refused to have his picture taken. Also, one observer noted he lacked the usual high cheekbones of the North American Indian and had a pale skin colour. Connell does not suggest this but that seems to me to imply he could have been of white ancestry, though brought up as a Cheyenne.

There are no fewer than thirteen pages of bibliography – in smallish print – in this book (and only three for the index.)

So what makes Custer’s story endure? Why has so much been written about it? The Little Bighorn was not the greatest defeat suffered by US soldiers at the hands of Indians. So why is it remembered? The text quotes a Professor Rosenburg* as saying, “Custer meeting death at the Little Bighorn descends to some impalpable region of the American psyche.” This is perhaps the nub. The legend persists of a lone survivor – dog, or horse – and that at the climactic moment Custer “must have flowing locks”. He didn’t; his hair had been cut before the expedition set out – for practical reasons. And too, “Reaction throughout the country was no different in 1876 than it is today on receipt of similar news: shock, followed by disbelief, fury, and a slavering appetite for revenge.”

Then there are the numerous representations of the battle on canvas and, later, film, so that “Custer’s last stand remains an inviolate myth.” According to Walt Whitman, there is “nothing in the books like” John Mulvany’s painting of the battle, “nothing in Homer, nothing in Shakespeare; more grim and sublime than either, all native, all our own, and all a fact.”

And all for what? Canada had no Indian problem – mainly due to the fact that the Canadian government kept its word. It wasn’t the Indians who broke treaties. Custer’s fate was sealed as soon as the presence of gold was confirmed in the Black Hills of Dakota. Nothing could then have stopped the influx of prospectors and the inevitable protection they demanded from the US government in the name of progress.

But even then it could perhaps have been avoided. Feather Earring in 1919 told General H L Scott, “‘If Custer had come up and talked with us, we had all agreed we would have surrendered and gone with him,’ if he had approached diplomatically the Indians would have gone back to the reservation. General Scott observed that such a method of dealing with the hostiles had not occurred to anybody.”

Pedant’s corner:- *Is this the Bruce A Rosenberg of the bibliography, author of Custer and the Epic of Defeat? Otherwise; Sturgis’ (Sturgis’s: the possessives of all names in the text ending in “s” are rendered similarly,) teepees (tepees,) diety (deity,) Macawber (Micawber,) idyls (idylls,) witnesss (witness,) Congressional stationary (stationery,) as to “knobby days”, and “whiffenpoof” I can’t find a definition.