HQ for high-IQ GIs D. J. Taylor William Wharton A MIDNIGHT CLEAR SHRAPNEL The Friday Project Published: 31 July 2013 Soldiers of a US chemical mortar battalion in eastern France, December 1944 Soldiers of a US chemical mortar battalion in eastern France, December 1944 Photograph: Photo12/UIG/Getty Images A Midnight Clear, first published in 1982, all of thirty-eight years after the events it purports to describe, is set in the heart of the Ardennes forest shortly before Christmas 1944. Here, in an abandoned chateau, high on a snowcovered hill, with the temperature dropping by the hour and the radio link steadily more uncertain, are quartered six members of a US infantry I&R (“Intelligence and Reconnaissance”) Unit under the far from enthusiastic command of their nineteen-year-old Sergeant William “Will” Knott, known to his subordinates as “Wont” or, occasionally – the boys are pedants to a man – “Won’t”. Wont’s squad – including the increasingly unstable “Mother Hen” Wilkins, “professional Jew” Sam Shutzer, Bud Miller (“our mechanical genius”), Catholic guilt-ridden “Father” Paul Murphy, and Mel Gordon – are a comically unrepresentative selection of wartime GI Joes. Having been schooled in a top-grade experimental training camp (since disbanded) they are all highly intelligent, and rather than succumbing to boredom, or mooning over the girls they left behind them – only one, Wilkins, is married – they devote their free time to chess, abstruse word games, cryptograms, “which made the New York Times Sunday puzzles seem as simple as tic-tac-toe”, and a fiendish pastime known as “compact, cardless, replay duplicate bridge”. If their constant intellectualizing gives the unit an agreeable sense of solidarity, then it is also – or so we deduce – storing up trouble. In the meantime, the chateau, though freezing, is not without its amenities. These include several bottles of wine, crates of tinned sardines, roomfuls of books, albeit in French and German, and a quantity of paintings, their frames, despite Wilkins’s best efforts to preserve them, ideal for firewood. There remains the question of the enemy, holed up in a nearby hunting lodge and even more war-weary than Wont and his virtual bridge players. Eventually contact is made, carols are sung beneath an improvised Christmas tree, gifts exchanged and a plan is hatched to contrive a mock battle and a pre-arranged surrender. But out beyond the tree-line, the Battle of the Bulge is about to kick into gear. HQ is desperate for a prisoner, if only to corroborate the rumours of an impending Nazi break- out. At this point Wont and his conspirators overplay their hand. Sympathetic to the strung-out Wilkins, his abandoned wife and still-born daughter, they spend long hours devising a scenario in which Mother Hen, however unwittingly, can secure his slice of military glory (“he’ll become a legend. Maybe we can work this up into a Congressional Medal of Honour”). Alas, the unbriefed hero, convinced that a genuine firefight is taking place, runs amok with a machine gun. Written in the first-person present tense, with Wont as the raissoneur, excellent on military detail and sustained by a no-nonsense, staccato style (“He smiles and blows two smoke rings. He can blow the most solid, holding-together smoke rings I’ve ever seen. These two he churns out now are blue and thin against the snow”), A Midnight Clear bears superficial resemblances to many a celebrated war novel of the period while belonging to a class entirely of its own. Part of this is down to its keen eye for the literary tradition in which it resides. Not content with parading their 150-plus IQs over the miniature chess boards, the soldiers are busy reading fiction from the genre in which their own adventures are framed. At the beginning they are making their collective way through A Farewell to Arms, having previously completed All Quiet on the Western Front, after which “we talked it over and voted as a squad to quit the first chance we got”. To a high degree of literariness can be added a procedural menu in which large amounts of narratival cake are had and eaten too. The tightly controlled plot, which unfolds in fixed, present-tense bursts, giving the illusion of immediacy, also benefits from moments of retrospect. Coming across the bizarre tableau of two frozen corpses – one German, one American – arranged by persons unknown as if waltzing together in the snow, Wont reflects that he is looking down “on something I’ve seen in dreams at least a thousand times in the past thirty-seven years”. All of this gives a curious sheen to Wharton’s atmospherics. Suspecting that Wont really does know everything, from the vantage point of hindsight, the reader constantly comes up against hard evidence of individual destiny. Mel Gordon, for example, is introduced as the “squad health nut; he intends to become a doctor if he lives through the war”. In fact, Mel does survive the war, for Wharton tells us so in the very next sentence. At the same time these narrative forfeits are never allowed to get in the way of the suspense. Knowing on one level that Gordon is safe, the reader is nonetheless convinced that he could die at any moment if Wont (or Wharton) wanted him to. Inevitably, the questions this sleight-of-hand throws up are less to do with the techniques of novel writing, fascinating though they are, than with the author himself. Not very much is known about William Wharton – real name Albert William Du Aime (1925–2008) – who, at certain points in his life, notably in the wake of his highly successful debut novel Birdy (1978), seems to have enjoyed cultivating the legend of his own anonymity. One could infer from A Midnight Clear that its author had fought in the Battle of the Bulge, that he was a martyr to gastroenteritis (“I shat five times going and only three coming back”), that in later life he worked as a street painter in Paris, and that his time in the army was punctuated by serious trouble with the military authorities. On the evidence of Shrapnel, his posthumously published memoir of his wartime experiences, all of these assumptions are correct. Introduced as a collection of “war stories”, which Wharton had hesitated from telling his audience of admiring grandchildren, Shrapnel offers a series of vignettes from the two-year period that took his conscripted teenage self from military training at Forts Benning and Jackson to the invasion of continental Europe. Some of these are no more than brief portraits of individuals met along the way – Birnbaum the platoon dullard, Corbeil who gets invalided out after feigning enuresis – but by the time Wharton fetches up in England, longer and more sophisticated pieces of reportage are in prospect. Stationed in a Midlands town, and instructed to use his cartographic skills to produce a map of the area, he conducts a respectful semi-romance with a local girl named Violet. Then, on the cusp of D-Day, comes an extraordinary incident in which he is parachuted into the Normandy countryside with instructions to make contact with the Resistance. The Maquis never show up and in the end he skulks back to the beachhead. As in A Midnight Clear (which contains several of the same names) the heroics, when they come, are never self-consciously heroic, and courage is always manifested by default. Wharton’s real aim, as he frequently admits, is to get himself sent home as rapidly as possible. Any excuse will do, but neither his assortment of medical conditions – these include a variocele on one of his testicles and a calcaneus spur on his heel – or the wounds he receives in battle are judged to be serious enough. Meanwhile, like Wont, he is in regular conflict with the authorities, courtmartialled for assaulting an officer who has sent men needlessly to their death, arraigned for a second time for supposedly conniving at “fraternisation” between GIs and German women, and finally present at the trial of a Tiger Patrol – “vicious, violent animals”, who have massacred a file of prisoners. The only thing Wharton learns from these experiences, he decides, is “that I don’t ever want vested authority again”. On Shrapnel’s jacket somebody has identified “a real-life counterpart to the World War Two novels of Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell – an indictment of the blundering incompetence that leads to death, injustice and sometimes, almost miraculously, victory”. This is true, up to a point, while also gesturing at the considerable gap that exists between American and English versions of the Second World War. This disparity is partly down to the fact that the English version tends to have been told by men of the officer class, or, alternatively, by people who never got anywhere near the battlefield (see, for example, Julian Maclaren-Ross’s The Stuff To Give the Troops, 1944, which is set in a variety of army camps in the Home Counties, with never a shot fired in anger). What unites the two versions, on the other hand, is a grasp of the peculiar manifestations of collective psychology that affect groups of men from very different walks of life brought together in conditions of maximal stress and uncertainty. Wharton tells the tale – absolutely routine for a book of this sort – of a squad of infantrymen, newly arrived in Occupied France, who are outraged to discover that the village church has a rooster atop its steeple in place of a cross. “We’re convinced the filthy, Godless Nazis have done this.” After a certain amount of discussion, Sergeant Gray, a former steeplejack, climbs to the top of the spire and substitutes a hand-carved cross. Priestly complaints are dismissed on the grounds that “we figure he must have been a Nazi sympathiser”. It then transpires that roosters are a typical adornment of French churches. The strongest connection here, curiously enough, is with Simon Raven’s army tales, included in novels such as The Sabre Squadron (1966) and Sound the Retreat (1971), and his collection of stories The Fortunes of Fingel (1976). Though (mostly) comic in tone, involving the playing of practical jokes on humourless officialdom or the writing of risqué company pantomimes, Raven’s dispatches give off exactly the same air of communal resource, ingenious contrivance, collective hatches battened down against real and figurative attack. Were Sergeant Knott’s I&R patrol and Raven’s conscripts to have met in the same training camp, you suspect that each would have appreciated the others’ solidarity, their oddity, their resolute determination – so characteristic of army novels of any kind – to make the best of things before things are made of them. D. J. Taylor’s new novel, The Windsor Faction, is due to be published in September. Secondhand Daylight appeared in 2011 and What You Didn’t Miss: A book of literary parodies appeared last year.
Posted on: Sun, 15 Sep 2013 21:30:01 +0000
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