Until recently I had not heard of the British novelist John Harris, although I had heard of his novel The Sea Shall Not Have Them, which became a famous film starring Michael Redgrave and Dirk Bogarde. There will be many reading this who have a better knowledge of his literary output than I have. In the early 1960s, when Harris wrote his novel about the Battle of the Somme, Covenant with Death, the public was still coming to terms with the knowledge that poor planning and inept actions on the part of some commanding officers had resulted in rather a lot of unnecessary deaths during the First World War.
Harris was not born until 1916, the year of the Somme debacle, so he could not have witnessed the carnage at first hand (though he did serve in the RAF during the Second World War), but his telling of the story of a "Pals" battalion consisting of local newspaper reporters from a Yorkshire city puts the reader absolutely on the spot, which is why it has been called one of the five best novels about warfare ever written.. Perhaps his own background, as a reporter on a paper in the Rotherham area, helped him get under the skin of the men who sign up eagerly at the start of the war and, like Siegfried Sassoon, spend many months being trained and drilled, impatient to get to where the action is, only to find themselves abandoned to a fate their skills and bravado cannot change, however determined they may be.
I often wonder how many of today's young men would have agreed to go into battle against an enemy under such conditions. It is one thing to have the odds stacked against you, but quite another to know that the battle is already lost because those in authority lacked the foresight and/or intelligence to muster their resources sensibly and humanely, still less the moral courage to call it off when it became clear that failure was inevitable. It could all have turned out so differently at the Somme, a campaign that could have been won quickly and easily if more attention had been paid to the evidence of their own eyes and less to traditional beliefs and methods.
Men are no longer shot for desertion; regardless of that, I cannot imagine that the better-educated youths of the 21st century, who have almost lost their awareness of the class distinction that prevailed a hundred years ago, would have obeyed their commanding officers so unquestioningly. They may be willing to take risks, but those risks are nowadays calculated and understood much better than they were in times when poor communications between the top and bottom of the hierarchy meant that those leading the campaign had little appreciation of front-line conditions. Siegfried Sassoon was not one of those who were called upon to go over the top. His duties on the first day of the Somme were barely dangerous, let alone suicidal. Perhaps it was worse for him, having to watch it all without being able to make a difference. It took a year, but eventually he felt he had to try to put a stop to it all. After his protests were ignored, he agreed to return to duty, not because he thought it was the right thing to do, but because it gave him a degree of power to help his comrades which he could not have as long as he stayed at Craiglockhart.
Men are no longer shot for desertion; regardless of that, I cannot imagine that the better-educated youths of the 21st century, who have almost lost their awareness of the class distinction that prevailed a hundred years ago, would have obeyed their commanding officers so unquestioningly. They may be willing to take risks, but those risks are nowadays calculated and understood much better than they were in times when poor communications between the top and bottom of the hierarchy meant that those leading the campaign had little appreciation of front-line conditions. Siegfried Sassoon was not one of those who were called upon to go over the top. His duties on the first day of the Somme were barely dangerous, let alone suicidal. Perhaps it was worse for him, having to watch it all without being able to make a difference. It took a year, but eventually he felt he had to try to put a stop to it all. After his protests were ignored, he agreed to return to duty, not because he thought it was the right thing to do, but because it gave him a degree of power to help his comrades which he could not have as long as he stayed at Craiglockhart.
The drawback of writing about historical events is that the reader knows, from the beginning, how things turn out. The moment Mark Fenner joins up, in the early chapters of Covenant with Death, we can anticipate the deaths of most of his comrades; the only thing we don't know is which few will survive. When watching old films about the Second World War, we instinctively know that the boy who lied about his age and the one that keeps talking about his girl back home are going to be among the casualties, but somehow the First World War generates a different kind of guessing game. I particularly liked the ending, or non-ending, of John Harris's novel, which holds back from the usual sentimental reunion of the survivor with his loving family. This is a cut above the average formulaic war story. If you can find a copy, read it.
