Sicily

This is the third novel in Alexander Baron’s WW2 trilogy, and it is rather different to the previous books, although there are obvious links. From The City, From The Plough tells the story of a group of soldiers preparing for, and then taking part in, the invasion of Normandy in 1944, while in There’s No Home the focus is on just a few weeks where an army company takes up residence in the Sicilian town of Catania in 1943. The titles are hyperlinked to my reviews of the novels.

The Human Kind is a sequence of short stories or vignettes, presented as being mainly autobiographical, and they reflect a wide variety of incidents and experiences involving men at arms. I use that phrase intentionally. I an surely not the first person to compare Baron’s trilogy with Evelyn Waugh’s magisterial Sword of Honour trilogy, which comprised Men at Arms, Officers and Gentlemen and Unconditional Surrender. There are stark differences, obviously, in that Waugh’s novels saw soldiering through the eyes of middle class officers. The central character, Guy Crouchback, is from a minor-aristocratic Roman Catholic family, while Baron was a Jewish man from London’s East End. What connects the two trilogies, however, is keen social observation, repeated ironies of circumstance and – most importantly – the fact that for many men the war and military life became central to their very being, despite the obvious hazards and unpleasantness. Baron – a communist in his youth – himself probably despised Waugh’s upper-middle-class reactionary views but he admired his writing, saying it was, “a magnificent illumination of a whole complex of human problems.”

Each of the stories except one, which I will return to, references the military campaigns – Italy, Normandy and Belgium – described in the earlier books. The one that affected me most was Mrs Grocott’s Boy. Raymond Grocott comes from The Potteries, where he lives with his widowed mother. He is, to use an old word, gormless. Nowadays, I suppose, he would have been long since diagnosed with ‘special needs’, and he has failed the basic intelligence test required to be admitted to the army. Having persuaded those in authority to let him join, he takes part in the invasion of Sicily. Contracting malaria, he is invalided out, but is desperate to rejoin his unit which, with some degree of innate cunning, he does. In a stroke of irony that Thomas Hardy would have loved, his company is selected to be shipped home to prepare for the Normandy landings. Out of a misplaced sense of kindness, Raymond’s fellow soldiers cover for him and try to keep him on the straight and narrow paths but, as the landing craft approaches the French beach it finally dawns on him that he could be killed, and he pleads to be sent to the rear for medical attention. It is too late. Somehow, he survives, having been driven on by an NCO. But when what remains of the platoon finally bivouacs in a relatively safe place, he is handed a written order transferring him away from danger and into the care of the medics. As he trudges away, he has a solitary flash of self awareness and he curses the well-meaning men who have delivered him to a place of shame. His parting words to his colleagues are, “I hope you die. I hope you all die.”

There is black humour in some of the stories, as well as a dark awareness of sexuality. In Chicolino, the soldiers in Baron’s platoon ‘adopt’ a homeless Sicilian boy, just into his teens. They share rations with him and treat him kindly, but are shocked to the core when he assumes that they will want to have sex with him in return for their kindness. He would have been quite happy to oblige, and is hurt and humiliated by their rejection. In The Indian, Baron retells the story from There’s No Home of how Sergeant Craddock comes to sleep with the beautiful Graziela. It is the appearance of a drunk but harmless Indian soldier that brings them into each other’s arms. Readers who, like me, are long in the tooth, will remember watching a 1963 movie called The Victors, directed by Carl Foreman. Alexander Baron was the screenwriter, and the story Everybody Loves a Dog, which relates the unfortunate consequences of a friendless and inarticulate Yorkshire soldier befriending a stray dog, was one of many memorable scenes in the film.

One of Baron’s colleagues is an intelligent and educated man called Frank Chase. In The Venus Bar, we read of his liaison with a beautiful but ruthless Ostend brothel owner. but in Victory Night, the war has taken its toll and Chase is shipped home, psychologically broken. He is hospitalised, but can make no sense of his situation.

“He was too bewildered to fight against his loneliness. He did not visit London. It was only to the immediate past, to us, that his memory was able to reach. Peace time had passed out of his life. He was afraid to go to London in search of the ends of long-broken threads. He wondered about in a days, hardly aware of anything that happened except the arrival of letters from his old comrades. He hugged these to him, for they were the raw material of dreams, daydreams that burst inside him like magnesium flares, illuminating with brief, ghostly intensity the supreme experiences he had to live through.”

When victory in Europe is finally declared, Chase is horrified by the drunken celebrations in an English village.

“The faces streamed past him, faces for a Bruegel, red and ugly with drink, the fat faces of alewives glistening with the distant firelight, the suet- lump faces of men who had not been judged young or intelligent enough to die, the vacuous whore-faces, pathetically greedy for pleasure, of little village girls. They squealed and shrieked, filled the night with graceless laughter, bawled idiot songs, coughed, screamed, yelled and belched.”

There are twenty five stories in all in The Human Kind, and all but two are reflections on Baron’s war service. The last one, An Epilogue, is a brief story of something that happened in the Korean War, by which time Baron had been in ‘civvy street’ for some time, but Strangers To Death, the first tale in the book, recounts an incident from Baron’s childhood. He says he was sixteen at the time, so this would place the events in the summer of 1933. He is the proud owner of a new sports bicycle, and he joins a group of local youngsters who cycle out from their East End homes to nearby countryside to camp on the banks of the River Lea. Here, they swim, smoke, cook meals and relish the fresh air, but when one of their number is trapped in the silk-weed growing from the river bed, and drowns, the atmosphere becomes sombre. It was probably Baron’s first intimate encounter with death, but with the insouciance of youth, he and his mates are soon back in the river, daring each other to play tug-of-war with the silk-weed and trying to get as close to the treacherous currents of a weir as they dare. On the way home, Baron comes even closer to death when, his spectacles blurred by rain, he collides with a tram. Miraculously, he is thrown clear, unharmed apart from a graze, and even his precious ‘Silver Wing’ bicycle is undamaged. He would of course, come to stare death in the face all too frequently just ten years later.

It would be inaccurate to say that Baron is a ‘forgotten’ writer, but his name would not be included in most people’s list of great English writers of the final decades of the twentieth century. Many of his other novels, often set in the Jewish London of his youth, are still in print, but his take on what war does to men, women and children is astonishing. His compassion, empathy and simple understanding of humanity should put his books up there with the best contemporary accounts of a disastrous – but necessary – conflict. The Human Kind is republished by The Imperial War Museums,and is available now.

Sicily, 1943. A company of British soldiers, serving with the Eighth Army, has arrived in Catania, an ancient port that sits at the foot of Mt Etna. A full size army company would have numbered around 150 men, but this unit is much reduced in size. Although they have experienced battle in North Africa, by the time they get to Sicily, the war has moved on, as the Germans are engaged in a fighting retreat towards the Straits of Messina, where they will hope to cross – with as many men and as much materiel as possible – to the mainland. The Italian army is no longer a viable force,and it would officially surrender in September.

In Alexander Baron’s book – part of a trilogy based on his own war service – the British soldiers are not engaged directly with the enemy. Instead, they arrive in Catania and are assigned billets in the Via Martiri. For both themselves and the residents, it is something of a shock:

“They studied each other with a hostile curiosity. Each group looked the same to the other: filthy, exhausted, more animal than human, the soldiers swaying over their rifles, the civilians at bay before their houses. Each was looking at ‘the enemy’. There across the road (on which ever side one stood)were the people responsible for these last three weeks of suffering. The roadway was wide-miles wide, it seemed at this moment-sunlit and empty. A baby squalled and the children began to creep out from amongst their elders. The people looked at their children with a dullness that was worse than a visible agony. The distress that came into the soldiers eyes was the first human feeling they had betrayed since their arrival. The children all had the same appearance; heads that seemed monstrous on their shrunken bodies; big, appealing eyes; twisted, scabby little legs; and flesh whose colour, beneath the dirt, was a deathly toadstool whiteness.”

As in most of the rest of Catania, there are (with a couple of exceptions) no men in the Via Martiri. All are gone for soldiers. Many are now dead, and the rest are prisoners of the Allies. This creates an unusual problem for the officer in command of the company, Captain Rumbold. He is puzzled when, after a few days, many of his men are unofficially ‘adopted by various women in the street. Publicly, he says nothing, but he views his clerk as something of a confessor: To Piggott, however, who was his confidant as well as his clerk, he was indignantly eloquent.

“Would you have believed it? Chaps out of decent homes! You’d have thought wild horses wouldn’t have dragged them into the kind of pigsties that these people live in. Dark, dirty, smelly, bloody holes – that’s all they are – holes in the wall-full of flies and bugs and fleas. People in rags, scratching themselves day and night, look as if they’ve never had a bath in their lives! I can’t imagine what’s got into the chaps.”

One such soldier is Sergeant Joe Craddock. He has a wife and young child at home but, as the book’s title ominously suggests, ‘home’ has become a foreign concept for many men. They are where they are, with little or no expectation of being reconciled with their families. All they can do is adapt to what the ‘here and now’ offers. In Craddock’s case this takes the shape of a beautiful woman called Graziella. Her husband has gone away to fight, and she has no idea if he is living or dead. After a brief tussle with her conscience, she enthusiastically embraces – in every sense of the word – what Craddock has to offer.

Many of the company have been ‘adopted’ by women in the street. It is a symbiotic process; the men have their washing done, get a break from the abrasive all male life in the billet; not all of the men are claiming conjugal rights, but they can provide basic army rations, and their pay can buy luxuries from the shops and market stalls gradually re-opening after the fighting which caused the departure of the Germans. Inevitably the orders eventually come for the company to move out, and for Graziella and Craddock this is traumatic. She begs him to stay, but the thought of desertion appalls him.

As William Tecumseh Sherman once said, “War is all hell, boys”, but despite the privations and the real chance of serious injury or death, for many men, the army provides a structure, imposes boundaries, and obviates the need to make decisions or wrestle with moral problems. As the weeks of casual life end and the company prepares to move on, the army reasserts itself:

“Pride returned at the sight of the company forming up, the shuffling ranks closing into a neat, solid block of khaki that filled the whole length of the street; the straight lines of helmets swathed in dun sacking, the straight lines of rifles, the straight lines of packs, the straight lines of red faces. It was a single organism into which all individualities and all worries vanished, self sufficient and aloof from the untidy throng of civilians who surged around it as a tall ship is from the sea through which it cleaves.”

Baron’s writing is immensely powerful, and his understanding of fighting men is deep and thorough. In another time and place, he might have been a poet. As the company boards the train taking them who knows where, it is the end of something for the people of the Via Martiri.

“The train gathered speed and passed round the bend. Now there was only the blank end of the rear truck. Now it was gone. The sun’s glare, pitiless, blanched the blue sky, glittered on the deep blue sea, reflected, dazzling, from the walls of the tumbled white houses and drew an oven heat from the bleached pavements. The last tremor died from the rails. Now there was no sound in the blinding white sunlight; no sound but the weeping of women.”

First published in 1950, There’s No Home is republished by The Imperial War Museums, and is available now. For other titles in this superb series, click the link below.