British Army

An Honourable Death, by Iain Crichton Smith (1992)

An Honourable Death by Iain Crichton Smith

Iain Crichton Smith is best remembered now as a poet, but he published a dozen novels over the space of 25 years, starting with Consider the Lillies (1968), a now-classic tale of the Clearances of the Scottish Highlands in the 18th and 19th centuries. Like his poems, Smith’s novels are mostly short, spare in their use of words, poetic in their choice of the few telling details that reveal far more than many writers working on much larger canvases.

An Honourable Death is a superb example. It’s a fictional portrait of Hector MacDonald, a lad born in a Ross-shire croft who rose through the ranks of the British Army from private to Major General before being destroyed by insinuations that he was a homosexual who was grooming teenage boys and taking his life in a Paris hotel in 1903. It’s just 135 pages long but manages to span three decades, a half-dozen wars, and three continents.

Convinced the Army is his destiny, he walks out of the tartan shop where he’s working and into a recruiter’s office, thence to be dispatched to a training garrison without a word to his employer or parents. He finds himself in his natural element, drawn to the precision of the parade ground and its regimen:

Hector loved drill and was good at it, as he was at all the tasks he had .to do, including shooting and PT. But it was drill that attracted him most and most moved him. There was about it a mystique, a definiteness, an accuracy that enchanted him. The barked commands evoked exact responses from him. He could see as he looked around him shapelessness becoming form, a pure, severe order emerging.

Sent with his regiment to India, he soon distinguishes himself in battle and earns a commission. Though he understands how to play the Army as a winning game, he is an outsider in the officer class. “They had the casual code, the casual radiance of the privileged. They could sniff each other out. They knew instinctively who was one of them.” Hector is not. He survives by cultivating an air of taciturnity, retreating in a “fortress of silence in which he would make no errors.”

Major-General Sir Hector MacDonald in 1901.

He fights in most of the Empire’s little wars of the late 1800s: Afghanistan, South Africa, the Sudan. He understands war. He is fearless and quick-thinking under fire. His instincts serve him well. It is peacetime that unsettles him. At loose ends in a posting to a garrison in Edinburgh, he is attracted to a lively young woman and is persuaded by her parents to marry her. It is a secret marriage, as the Army forbids officers to marry until they reach the rank of captain. And though his wife bears him a son, it is largely a celibate and distant marriage: ten years can pass without seeing each other.

Meanwhile, the Army sends him on rounds of its standard posts. To India, to South Africa in the final days of the Boer War. His exploits earn him a knighthood and general officership, but he is too much the outsider to be brought into a central leadership role. Instead, he’s sent abroad, to India again, to an official tour of Australia, and finally to Ceylon as the senior officer in the colony. He is bored with training the reserves, irritated by the narrow society of the planters and merchants. He befriends the sons of a Portuguese merchant, takes them on outings, showers them with expensive gifts. There are suggestions, as the Governor General advises him, of “something improper going on.” He is recalled to England, then ordered back to Ceylon to be court-martialed–though the unspoken order is that he “do the honourable thing.”

An Honourable Death follows the historical record faithfully but not slavishly. Years are skimmed in a paragraph. Scenes that other writers would devote a chapter to are dispatched in a page or less. Days of a treacherous sea voyage are summed up in a perfect phrase: “The water was like an infinitude of roofs collapsing.” Millennia of warfare in Afghanistan leaves a land awash with “an ancient, careless, brutal mortality.” It’s a brilliantly written portrait of a man with a limited vocabulary of self-awareness and a world simple and inflexible in its strictures, a thoroughly satisfying creation. I look forward to reading more of Iain Crichton Smith’s work.

An Honourable Death, by Iain Crichton Smith
London: Macmillan, 1992

A Significant Experience, by Gwyn Griffin (1963)

Cover of Avon paperback edition of A Significant Experience

“One of the most ardent pursuits of man is finding excuses to persecute other people.” This chilling observation by Laurie Lee forms the epigraph to A Significant Experience, Gwyn Griffin’s story of the persecution and torture of a naïve young man — really a boy — by the officers of a British Army training base in Egypt during World War Two. It was a setting Gwyn Griffin was familiar with, having been born and raised in Egypt as the son of a Colonial Service officer and having served during the war and after in a variety of Army and police units in the Middle East and Africa.

is an illustration of what happens when an inflexible system encounters a foreign and incompatible body. Van der Haar, the son of a Dutch merchant long settled in Syria and fluent in English, French, and Arabic, is befriended by a British military intelligence officer who wants to use him as an agent and interrogator. To bring him into the Army, however, requires the boy, not yet 18, to complete the short officer training course run at the base.

That Van der Haar is out of his element is obvious:

As individuals, most of the staff would have wised to be kind to Van der Haar, but in their professional capacities they could not be so. He had to be shouted at on the parade ground as much as any other cadet; he had to be officially chased on the square, officially bullied by the N.C.O. instructors, officially harried by the authorities…. To the other cadets — ex-sergeant-majors, sergeants, and corporals, combat soldiers who had often been years in the army — this treatment meant nothing; they knew it for the bluff it was.

to Van der Haar, fresh out of a French-run lycee where he learned the fundamentals of rationalist thinking, the idea that abuse of cadets by the staff was simply a scheme to inculcate a predictable level of regimentation and obedience seems absurd: “when he was shouted at he thought the shouter was really angry, really hating him.”

Van der Haar can’t march straight, can’t handle his rifle properly, can’t respond as required to the stimuli of daily drill. While this perplexes most of the staff (was it really possible that someone “could know absolutely nothing at all about the British Army”?), it maddens Captain Lutwyche, who prides himself on running the best company in the school. Maddens him because Van der Haar’s innocence and beauty stirs the homosexual desires he prefers to satisfy outside the camp, with Arab boys, in alleyways with the safety of the night.

Grumbling about Van der Haar in the officers’ bar, Lutwyche is informed that, because he’s considered a “boy soldier” under Army regulations, he can be punished for his minor infractions by caning. Lutwyche wins the approval of the camp commandant for this course of action and arranges to have this “significant experience” delivered to Van der Haar that evening. He leaves it to Battalion Sergeant Major Ulick to explain the decision and the punishment to Van der Haar:

He paused, frowning, trying with all his might to do something he had never done before: to evaluate and analyze a social concept and to put the result into words. He knew the facts. He knew that the English upper-class, whom he thought of always in terms of “officers,” put a peculiar and irrational value upon corporal punishment; it was almost an obsession with them, and practically every officer he had ever known “believed in it.”

To Ulick, caning is just one of the mysterious tribal rituals of the officer class, and “as such must be jealously retained, guarded, and worshipped.” He neither agrees with nor condemns its application: beating is simply another absurd element in the whole charade of military discipline.

For Major Seligman, an officer with a wartime commission rather than a Sandhurst-trained Regular, however, decision to cane Van der Haar is the action of an institution only capable of existing within its own artificial reality. The Regulars who run the training camp (and the Army itself) were part of “the machine of organized English upper class brutality,” which aims to eliminate “all those feelings and emotions which made the whole difference between man and beasts and which the system so deplored….” His thoughts speak for the millions who took the first opportunity of the General Election in 1945 to put Clement Atlee in place of Winston Churchill.

And likely for Griffin himself. Though he attended a boarding school in England and served the Empire in several of its colonies, he considered it morally and intellectually corrupt. Where Graham Greene saw in colonial stations the signs of moral exhaustion, Griffin saw active and malevolent forces. He and his wife — the daughter of a colonial governor — tried living in various places in Africa and Australia, but it was only when they settled in rural Italy that they were able to distance themselves from these forces.

It’s unfortunate that within a few years of making a home there that he died suddenly, of a blood infection in 1967 at the age of 45. His last novel, An Operational Necessity, a fictional account of the shooting of the survivors of a torpedoed merchant ship, the S. S. Peleus by a German U-boat, had only just hit the bestseller lists and in the U.S. and U.K.. All set in real or fictional British colonies or at sea, his novels might be compared with those of Alistair Maclean or Hammond Innes were it not for the streak of indignation that simmers in all of them.

This book is slight, just under 100 pages, and the comparisons with Billy Budd are obvious, if incidental. I found it hard not to read A Significant Experience and not see parallels with the callous actions and hostility toward “foreigners” of the current government in the U.K.. It makes one wonder whether the “machine of organized English upper class brutality” was in any way seriously affected by the end of the Empire.

A Significant Experience, by Gwyn Griffin
New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1963