Category Archives: History

Arts, Britain, Films, History, Second World War

Film Review: Dunkirk

LITERARY REVIEW

THERE haven’t been many good films about the mass evacuation of Allied troops from the beaches of Dunkirk in the early summer of 1940. Strangely, however, two of the most notable were made in the same year, with World War II still raging. William Wyler’s Oscars-festooned Mrs Miniver, and David Lean’s In Which We Serve, both came out in 1942.

In 1958, the film Dunkirk directed by Barry Norman’s father Leslie, made a pretty decent fist of showing why Churchill called the events of May 26 to June 4, 1940, “a colossal military disaster”.

That is perhaps why not too many movies have been made about it. By contrast, D-Day and its aftermath, received oodles of cinematic attention. That event was just four months after the events at Dunkirk. But that was based on an advance; Dunkirk was merely about the definitive retreat.

Writer-director Christopher Nolan receives plaudits from many for tackling it again now, so unambiguously many of the protagonists say. Despite some of the gaps that historians will exploit, such as the absence from the film of some 15,000 Scottish soldiers of the Highland Regiments nearby, or even that of the assistance provided by India and its soldiers, this gripping and unconventional film is a mighty accomplishment all the same. It will be interesting to see whether the film will collect as many Academy Awards as Wyler’s Mrs Miniver (six).

Contrary to some over-excited reports, its main achievement is not to offer proof that the One Direction boyband star Harry Styles, who makes his screen debut can really act. Rather, it is to show, in much more vivid detail than Norman’s 1958 film, why a French place-name that is synonymous with British stoicism more accurately reflects Churchill’s infamous and grave assessment. Read enough reports, for example, of townsfolk battling against rising floodwaters, and it won’t be too long before you come across the evocative phrase “Dunkirk spirit”.

The new Prime Minister’s famous bulldog exhortation to fight on the beaches, in the fields and in the streets, was delivered in response to Dunkirk. But the same speech included the declaration that “wars are not won by evacuations”.

EMOTIVE

NOLAN uses that line as his mantra. From the film’s first frame to its last, there is never any doubt that we are witnessing a catastrophe. After all, some 338,000 members of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) returned home, but around 68,000 were lost.

The film begins, quite dramatically, with a young soldier, Tommy (Fionn Whitehead), running from German gunfire through the streets of the small French seaside town.

His arrival on the beach yields a breathtaking sight, for him and us alike. Tens of thousands of men are lined up, almost as far as the eye can see, waiting to climb into boats that have yet to arrive. And there are German bombers overhead.

Tommy hooks up with a French soldier and together they carry a wounded man on a stretcher towards the sea, not so much to save his skin as theirs. Indeed, one of the reasons this film is so moving is not so much its frequent displays of doughty heroism (not least from Mark Rylance as Mr Dawson, one of the many civilian skippers who took their boats to help with the evacuation), but more its powerful depiction of an intense will to live, against seemingly insuperable odds.

Survival instincts can sometimes look like the very opposite of bravery. Cillian Murphy plays a shellshocked soldier, saved from the sea by Mr Dawson, who cannot bear to return to Dunkirk. However, we are encouraged not to judge him, even when he does something with terrible consequences.

The film has emotive scenes. One is where an elderly blind man, back in Blighty, welcomes home the bedraggled returning soldiers by telling them “well done”. But all they did, one of them responds, was survive. “That’s enough,” says the old man.

Another is when Kenneth Branagh’s naval commander first spots salvation in the form of all those fishing-boats and pleasure crafts helping in the rescue effort. Yet, the film does not feel manipulative. Nolan could have made more of his opening shot of the rescuing flotilla. It could have been breathtaking; thousands of boats bobbing all the way to the horizon. But he keeps it real, with a suitably motley, but relatively small, advance fleet.

With astute screenwriting, Nolan offers us a series of small, personal dramas rather than any overall narrative thread, which we must suppose is precisely what war is.

There are no scenes with Churchill and his top brass back in Whitehall trying to orchestrate Operation Dynamo, the somewhat grandiose seat-of-the-pants exercise. Instead, Nolan is far more intent on evoking the frantic chaos of that momentous week.

There is a strong sense, too, which even the best war films sometimes fail to convey, of nobody quite knowing what’s going to happen next. The director communicates this by keeping dialogue to a minimum, daringly considering his heavyweight cast. Hoyte van Hoytema’s rousing cinematography tells the story just as eloquently and powerful as any words. At times, though, there is an almost documentary realism to proceedings, which won’t please everyone. Not all viewers will be spellbound.

The film is presented from three perspectives – from land, sea and air – each within a different time frame. The fate of Tommy and a few other desperate soldiers unfolds over a week. Another is played, splendidly, by Styles, who reportedly auditioned without Nolan having the slightest idea who he was, but whose presence should tempt youngsters to watch this film. Let’s hope so. They’ll perhaps realise that ‘one direction’ has a much more solemn meaning when applied to Dunkirk.

Dunkirk (12A)

Verdict: Unmissable epic ★★★★★

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Books, France, History

Book Review: At The Edge of The World

REVIEW

The remarkable story of the French Foreign Legion, and its dramatic rise throughout the nineteenth century.

Intro: Murderers, gamblers, criminals on the run – French Foreign Legion soldiers were the toughest in the world and would march in 50C heat till their . . . Boots filled with blood.

You may not have been alone when younger if you more than half-wondered if the French Foreign Legion was an invention of Hollywood.

Cary Grant and Gary Cooper capered about in the desert wearing those distinctive hats with the white hankies dangling down the backs of their necks.

Laurel and Hardy ran away to join the Foreign Legion, as did Jim Dale in Carry On… Follow That Camel, which was filmed in exotic Camber Sands. Marty Fieldman directed, co-wrote and starred in The Last Remake Of Beau Geste, with Peter Ustinov as the sadistic sergeant.

Edith Piaf had a famous song about a night of hectic passion with a tattooed recruit, which she compared to “a thunderstorm through the sky”. And it is her image of the moody and uncompromising Legionnaire, attracted by the promise of “blood, bullets, bayonets and women in an Arab land”, that gets closest to the historical and psychological truth, as laid before us in this gripping, disturbing and controversial account of the Legion’s first century.

For the all-volunteer corps of the French Army, founded in 1831, was neither comical, nor an excuse for high-spirited larks. It was brutal and often monstrous.

Created to participate in France’s colonial expansion to Algeria, Morocco, Madagascar, Indochina and Mexico, “we scare people, we inspire fear and perhaps admiration, which is a little too thin a reward sometimes; but love, never”.

Even the unique right to hire men regardless of their nationality was a cynical move.

 

SINCE Napoleon and his casualties were still a living memory, the French government wanted an army “that could face danger and human losses without drawing the political backlash that French-born victims would elicit”.

Out of this came the Legion’s legendary appeal to ne’er-do-wells, broken-hearted lovers, criminals, political refugees and ‘scions of aristocratic families leaving behind gambling debts’.

Anyone physically fit was accepted, especially if they had teeth strong enough to bite the biscuit rations. No questions were asked at the headquarters in Sidi Bel Abbes, Algeria.

“You can choose a new name if you like,” recruits were told. “We don’t ask for documents.”

As mercenaries, the men fought for the Legion itself, united against everyone else.

‘Legio Patria Nostra,’ ran the motto – the Legion is our country. ‘We don’t give a damn what we fight for. It’s our job. We’ve nothing else in life. No families, no ideals, no loves.’

By 1900, there were 11,500 men in this band of scary outcasts. Blanchard calculates that between 1831 and 1962, when Algeria was grudgingly granted independence and the French left North Africa, approximately 600,000 people had enlisted.

“The substantial majority of them were Germans or Northern Europeans,” we are informed. The rest were Belgians, Spaniards and Britons. There was one Turk, one New Zealander and lots of Americans during the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Exhausting route-marches in Saharan temperatures of 50C with heavy backpacks, where “acid sweat burned your skin” and “you march with your shoes full of blood”, would not be many people’s idea of military adventure. But, according to Blanchard, the typical Legionnaire was a man who found “redemption and an existential purpose through camaraderie and abnegation”.

A Legionnaire who was shot in the stomach and lying on the ground with his intestines escaping was heard to murmur to his captain: “Are you happy with me?” This is the kind of stoicism that was expected.

“Excessive revelry” was condoned by the generals, who believed “one did not build empires with virgins”. Sex with prostitutes was encouraged, despite the risk of sexually transmitted diseases, as were heavy drinking and brawling. How hilarious it must have been to terrorise the natives – the Legionnaires “can hardly keep beating, so hard they laugh”, ran a report.

The French government maintained that this imperial experiment was to bring ‘reason, progress, science, culture and freedom’ to backward jungle regions and wildernesses.

The Legionnaires were expected to fight ‘in the professed name of civilisation and’ – here comes the catch – ‘in the name of racial superiority’.

While we can applaud their achievements as engineers – digging and building roads, constructing forts and laying telephone lines – the fact remains that, for these mercenaries, “the gift of French civilisation” in practice meant the opportunity for the savage conquest of African tribes and, in Indochina, the Vietnamese patriotic resistance.

Legionnaires went about “civilising the barbarians of this world with cannonballs”. Villages were pillaged, ransacked and burned, the women raped, the men decapitated. “We were allowed to kill and plunder everything,” recalled a soldier. “We went to the villages and surprised the people in bed.”

One Legionnaire received no censure when he made a tobacco pouch from cured human skin. Nevertheless, killing civilians must have taken its toll – indeed, Legionnaires were among the most screwed-up soldiers in history.

In a group of 350 men, 11 deaths were put down to suicide, but there may have been many more, disguised in the record as death from disease. The belief was: ‘It was better to be dead than go through hell.’ There was alcoholism and much illness – typhoid, tropical fever, dysentery, malaria.

The deliberate hardship was not unlike that of a religious order, with its renunciation of worldly comforts – though entertainment involved lots of drag shows.

 

LEGIONNAIRES made “splendid female impersonators”. Homosexual activity was commonplace with “5,000 young solid males, boiling with vigour and vitality” at a loose end in the fort.

When Kaiser Wilhelm tried to discourage Germans from joining up by publishing articles warning against sexual abuse in the desert, men with Heidelberg duelling scars raced to enlist.

As 43 per cent of the corps was German, perhaps it is no surprise the Foreign Legion didn’t rescue France when the country was occupied by Nazis during World War II.

Blanchard’s story concludes with the centenary of the corps in 1931, the parades and so forth.

Reading about post-colonial activities in a further volume might be appealing, particularly because, since 1962 when Sidi Bel Abbes was abandoned for a new HQ in Marseille, some 50,000 men have felt the need to run away by joining the Legion.

It is perhaps chilling to discover that Jean-Marie Le Pen spent a formative three years in the Legion, and that recently a retired commander was arrested for making anti-Islam protests in Calais.

To avoid any confusion of doubt, it is only officers enlisted to the French Foreign Legion who must be of indigenous French origin and nationality.

–   At The Edge of The World by Jean-Vincent Blanchard is published by Bloomsbury for £20.

 

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Arts, Books, Britain, History

Book Review – ‘Collecting The World: The Life And Curiosity of Hans Sloane’

HANS SLOANE’S CURIOUS LIFE

Collecting The World

Collecting The World is published by Allen Lane for £25.

Intro: Hans Sloane was a medical doctor to royalty and collector supreme who created Britain’s first public museums. But he couldn’t have cared less that his treasures were tainted by the blood of slaves.

‘Admission Free’ . . . When you next read those words at the entrance to one of our national museums, thank Hans Sloane (1660 – 1753), whose collection, built up over his lifetime, formed the core of the British Museum.

In those days of endemic British snobbery, when collections of antiquities and curiosities were normally viewed only by gentleman scholars by appointment in private houses, Sloane’s concept of creating a museum to all was ground-breaking.

In his Last Will of Testament he stipulated: ‘I do hereby declare that it is my desire and intention that my said musaeum (sic) … be visited and seen by all persons desirous of seeing and viewing the same.’

This led to the passing of the British Museum Act in 1753, which stated that Sloane’s collection was ‘not only for the inspection and entertainment of the learned and curious, but for the general use and benefit of the publick (sic)’.

Some trustees were not happy with this arrangement, worrying that the dirty common people would wreck the furniture and gardens ‘and put the whole economy of the museum into disorder’.

Hans Sloane

Hans Sloane, Museum pioneer. Picture: National Portrait Gallery

THIS BOOK tells the story of Hans Sloane’s life. Having read it, I’m sure I will never look at my old Sloane Ranger Handbook again without thinking of the original Mr Sloane – or Sir Hans, as he became. A visit to Sloane Square, too, might take on a different perspective than one would otherwise have had.

Whether the blue-blooded Sloane Rangers would quite approve of him, given that he was a bit of an arriviste, is an open question.

Born the child of servants to aristocracy in Ulster, he came to London aged 19 and made it his business to climb the social ladder, achieving the first rung by learning medicine and becoming the personal physician to the Duke of Albemarie, whom he accompanied to Jamaica in 1687 to visit the Duke’s slave plantations.

When reading any book about the wealthy British in the 17th and 18th centuries, it’s never long before one’s nose is rubbed in the dark story of what helped make everyone so rich. Here, though, we get a first-hand glimpse into how the slavery system worked, and what life was like for slaves in Jamaica.

As soon as the Duke and Sloane disembarked, the Duke acquired 69 slaves, which was totally normal for a Thursday afternoon.

In the last quarter of the 17th century, the British transported 77,000 Africans to Jamaica; the crossings took three months and the mortality rate was 30 per cent.

What is striking is that Sloane, a Protestant who believed all nature was created by a benign God, had absolutely no interest in slaves as human beings.

Utterly dispassionately he describes the punishments meted out to them: ‘After they are whip’t (sic) till they are raw, some put on their skins pepper and salt to make them smart . . . they put iron rings of great weight on their ankles . . . these punishments are sometimes merited by the blacks, who are a very perverse generation of people’.

He did take an interest in slaves’ physiognomies, but this was purely commercial, gauging the degree to which different Africans made good slaves.

Sloane’s life as an obsessive collector of curiosities began in Jamaica. He started accumulating specimens of the plants and animals on the island with the help of slaves, who knew their way around and were useful for climbing trees.

Purely in passing, he gives glimpses of how the slaves lived, describing ‘the stench of a ship in from Guinea loaded with blacks to sell’.

He visited the slaves’ enclosures where they were allowed to grow a few crops to supplement the rotting carcasses they were fed by their owners. Some had managed to conceal a grain or two of rice in their hair before being hounded on to ships in Africa, and these were planted to sustain their families.

Sloane collected samples from these grounds that remain immaculately preserved in the Sloane Herbarium (now at the Natural History Museum). He also obtained an example of African music, taken down at his request by one of the ‘negroes’ – it’s the earliest sample of African music in the Americas. Proudly, Sloane noted: ‘I desired Mr Baptiste, the best Musician, to take the words they sung and set them to Musick (sic).’

For the modern reader, to look at the illustration of that snatch of music is to witness a fleeting glimpse of the deep yearnings of slaves for their homeland. For Sloane, it was an amazing souvenir.

The Duke died of drink and his corpse was embalmed and brought back to England – but not before Sloane had met Elizabeth Rose, the daughter of a wealthy planter, whom he would marry, bringing him a one-third share of the net profits from her father’s vast plantations.

Back in London, he built up his reputation as a great physician, living in fashionable Bloomsbury where his patients included Samuel Pepys, Robert Walpole, Queen Anne and two King Georges.

‘I’m almost wishing myself sick, that I might have a pretence to invite you for an hour or two,’ Pepys wrote to him – Sloane was clearly good company.

He became President of the Royal College of Physicians and aimed to bring medicine away from magic and quackery and into the new world of science.

He inoculated Queen Caroline’s children against small pox, but not before trying out the inoculation on prisoners in Newgate and then on charity children – just in case.

But it was a collector of objects from all over the world that Sloane became famous. He moved to Chelsea Manor and bought the house next door, which he filled with his burgeoning collection of natural specimens and man-made curiosities: he was at the helm of a new mania for treasure-hunting.

 

SOME people (including William Hogarth) mocked him for being a shallow collector of nonsense, ‘a mere trafficker of baubles’. But there was no stopping him.

Raking in money from Jamaica (on a single day in 1723 his books record proceeds from sugar shipments of more than £20,000 in today’s money), and with a genius for making contact with travellers to China, Japan and the South Seas, he could never resist a new offering, and seemed to collect everything.

His treasures ranged from ‘a long worm drawn piece meal from a Guinea negro’s legs and other muscular parts’ to drums, shoes, scientific instruments, thousands of medals, coins, birds’ eggs, fossils, sea urchins, human skeletons and an Egyptian mummy.

He collected other collectors’ collections in a way the author describes as ‘cannibalistic’. Visitors marvelled at ‘God’s power to create and Sloane’s power to collect.’

He was canny enough to choreograph his own legacy, appointing 63 trustees to ensure the creation of the ‘musaeum’ in which his collections would be preserved.

From the day of its opening in what was Montagu House, before the new Parthenon-like structure replaced it in the 1850s, the British Museum was a showroom for celebrating the global reach of British power.

This book succeeds in paying tribute to the man who was a living embodiment of that global reach, but it never shirks from exposing the dark side of his story: his unashamed acceptance of slavery as the engine of his wealth.

–     Collecting The World: The Life And Curiosity of Hans Sloane by James Delbourgo is published by Allen Lane for £25.

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