Book review by George S: This is an unusual novel, since it imagines a counterfactual history. It gives us an alternative version of the Great War – which it dates as 1914-1917.
The abbreviation of the conflict a year earlier than actuality is due to one man, Henry Berrington Duncan. After a grammar-school education and a ‘successful enough without being distinguished’ time at Cambridge, he had become a colonial administrator. When the war began, he was ‘in charge of an enormous territory in British East Africa,’ where he raised a force to fight against the German colonists in East Africa, and achieved spectacular results by unorthodox tactics.
The novel begins when he and his colonial force arrive in Britain. Randomly dressed, wearing beards that broke regulations, and not following standard drills or procedures, they are looked on with distaste by the conventional military. They are, however, a very well-trained elite force – and above all a thinking army, where each man is encouraged to think for himself, strategically. Their attitudes are the reverse of those found in the conventional, hierarchical Army, with its rigid top-down command structure.
When these men are placed on the Western front, results are immediate. They straight away take control of contested Hill 70, using the tactics that will be Duncan’s hallmarks – surprise, a night infiltration, and then attack from the rear. ‘Noone can survive a night attack from the rear’, is a repeated mantra,
Duncan goes on to bigger and bigger achievements, and Newman imagines an alternative Battle of Amiens where the new tactics are used on a larger scale on a larger scale. These tactics are, of course, the opposite of the established procedures of the Great War, which involved using a mass attack of infantry to try to force a gap in the enemy’s lines – a procedure highly expensive in human lives. Duncan uses small-scale forces making surprise attacks, leaving the enemy confused and vulnerable.
Duncan’s tactics are therefore the opposite of Douglas Haig’s – but in this book Sir John Douglas, a thinly disguised version of Haig, is so impressed by Duncan’s successes that he gives him a free hand. Newman’s novel is implicitly critical of Haig’s tactics, but describes Sir John Douglas admiringly as:
representing the finest type of British regular officer. His gray hair and moustache matched his clean-cut features.
When he and Duncan meet for the first time:
After the formal salute they stood for a moment with hands locked: it seemed as if each instinctively recognised the greatness of the other.
Half way throuigh the book, Douglas conveniently suffers an illness, which means there is no obstacle to Duncan taking over the whole British Army.
Bernard Newman, the author, is rather carried away by Duncan’s brilliance – I’ve never read a novel where the author so clearly hero-worships his main character. Newman sends him on a short interlude eastwards. Using surprise, cunning and diversions, the British take the Gallipoli peninsula in twenty-four hours. (The actual Gallipoli campaign in 1915 had, of course, been a protracted and painful disaster.) After this, they push on to take Constantinople and force Turkey out of the war. It’s all made to seem very simple.
Then it’s back to the Western Front, and a campaign that saves the French who are defending Verdun and drives the Germans back to their borders. Duncan refuses German pleas for an Armistice and insists on Germany’s unconditional surrender, which is forthcoming. This decisive result has other consequences. Because the war is over before November, the Russian Revolution never happens; the Americans have not played a big enough part in the War to play a decisive role in the Peace conference. Britain comes out very much on top.
The book is written as the memoir of a staff officer called Newman. (Bernard Newman had a taste for this; his later spy novels are also the first-person accounts of someone called newman – and were sometimes taken as factual.) He gives us the effect of authenticity by adding footnotes rather enjoyably directing us towards further details of military campaigns in totally imaginary historical works.
The book is a fantasy of what might have been. As a novel it has flaws – an utterly perfect hero who is never wrong and always successful. But it is very grippingly written, with a narrative drive that carries you along.
Bernard Newman
Bernard Newman (born 1897) had fought in the Great War as a young man, and his ability to speak and understand French had actually involved him in some undercover work. In this book he assumes the authority of a tactician, and some contemporaries thought the book’s author must be a distinguished soldier or military theorist. The novel had distinguished fans; Liddell Hart, for example, a critic of Haig’s methods on the Western Front, prescribed it to students at Sandhurst (He also prescibed Georgette Heyer’s The Infamous Army for its detailed depiction of Waterloo)
Newman was not he only author thinking along these lines at the time. In 1929, John Buchan had published The Courts of the Morning, in which his hero Sandy Arbuthnot (an intellectual soldier) is involved in a Soith American war. The enemy general is well-versed in the most effective tactics of the Great War, but Arbuthnot uses lateral thinking to defeat him.
When we think of the war books boom of 1928-30, ten years after the armistice, we generally think of the disillusioned novels and memoirs, like All Quiet on the Western Front, Goodbye to All That, and so on. But there were also books like this that never suggested the war’s futility, but questioned the war differently, thinking about alternative tactics. In the Second World War, the kind of thinking that this book typifies is found in the creation of special units like the SAS, whose tactics were very much Duncan’s – surprise tactical attacks on crucial targets behind enemy lines. Such units played a significant part in the war – but whether a whole army could be organised on Ducan’s principles is more dubious.
