Wednesday, 13 November 2024

Anthony Burgess: The Smell of War

Almost 80 years since the end of the Second World War we are constantly reminded of the heroism and sacrifices of those who lived through those times, and the wearing of a poppy each November has now become emblematic of a certain view of our past and our future. The recent Steve McQueen film "The Blitz" has portrayed a less heroic world of sheer survival amidst the profiteering, criminality and petty officialdom as well as the actions of the official enemy from the air. Anthony Burgess's account of his war years reveals a similarly unheroic picture.

For a man whose father said at his birth "that he may be a new Napoleon ", John Burgess Wilson as he was christened, had a rather undistinguished military career. First as a recent graduate of Manchester University he was recruited into the Army Medical Corps, where his musical aspirations faciliated a move into the Entertainments Section. He then moved into the Army Educational Corps and in 1943 was posted to Gibraltar where he stayed until 1946.

He regarded his war time experience, and that of millions of others, as a complete waste of six years of his life, and through it he developed a great contempt for the officer class.

Never in the whole history of human conflict, as Wilson Churchill ought to have said, have so many been buggered about by so few. (1)

Newly inducted into the Educational Corps he was "impressed by the intellectual quality" of some of his fellow recruits who were employed doing highly menial tasks.

Men of great academic distinction had been clearing parade grounds of scraps of paper and specialising in the disposal of kitchen swill.(2)

Burgess was unimpressed with the British Way and Purpose, a mildly liberal collection of booklets designed to give troops a view of the world they were fighting for, which included a belief that the British Empire would remain for some time. Among the other topics to be addressed were their American and Russian allies, "The Housing of the Future" and "Health Services in a Democracy". (3)


Burgess was very sceptical about this programme's relevance to soldiers. The more cynical officials had told him that "the whole bloody thing was a sham and ..our real job was to bring some comfort to the men".
My duty as a purveyor of the British Way and Purpose was to uphold an inveterate political system kindly being modified in the direction of a philosophy of state welfare. I had to make a negative war (defend the bad against the worse) appear positive. War itself was turning into a methaphor: we were enacting the charade of a struggle to turn Britain into a democracy. Equality of rights was one of the shibboleths.
Burgess himself had what now in a post-Thatcherite world seem culturally elitist and totally unrealistic views, but these were relatively widely shared in educational circles in the post-war years up to the 1980s, and led to the introduction of Liberal Studies in most UK technical colleges: the programme should focus less on material concerns, but instead aim to get the soldiers to "think rationally, examine prejudice in the glare of reason, to read, look at pictures, listen to music." (4)

The troops that Burgess was required to lecture to in Gibraltar were he said "fed up, fucked up, and far from home", deeply cynical about the war, antipathetic towards Montgomery and Churchill who were ostensibly leading them to victory, and convinced that the war had been handed over to the Americans and the Russians. (5) He claimed that his posting to Gibraltar clarified for him the Imperial context and class nature of the war.

We had, it was assumed, gone to war to defend the rights of Poland. But not one British brigade had made its way to Eastern Europe, and the whole of Europe, anyway, was now locked into the Nazi embrace. The war was proceeding in the Balkans, which had nothing to do with Poland, and the British Empire was being attacked. What did we care about the British Empire? Very little. It was remote, exotic, and, we presumed, only there to enrich commercial nabobs. What the war was about, we began to think, was the British class system. The troops, who represented the working class, learned to hate the ruling class which, at that time, was encased in officer’s uniform. Nobody hated the Germans or the Italians — they were too far away. We assumed that the Italian and the German troops had an equal hatred of their own officer class. Our sympathies were with any soldiers who had been herded into what seemed a pointless war. We knew nothing of the Nazi death camps, the Gestapo, the SS. If we were fighting at all, it was to ensure that post-war Britain would be rather different from the pre-war mess.(6)
Burgess was not surprised at Churchill's rejection by the electorate, and particularly by the serving troops. The men wanted to get home, and they saw Churchill as a warmonger preparing to stand up to their Russian allies now entrenched in Central Europe.
They heard in his Edwardian twang .. that of a ruling class more deeply entrenched than that represented by their haw-haw officers.(5)
Amongst his writings Burgess supplied what may be a unique, certainly an unusual perspective on wartime, its smell:
What nobody can know who did not live through that war is the smell of it. The smell of sulphuretted hydrogen in the railway stations as the steam engines puffed in. The smell of khaki serge in the rain. The brilliantine smell of the leathery inside of a steel helmet. The smell of unwashed bodies that were due to be marched into the weekly bath-house. The smell of corned beef and mashed potatoes and beetroot in vinegar, the regular Saturday dinner. The smell of cheap cigarettes. The smell of the perfume of our girlfriends, when, on leave, we were permitted to see them again. But the real smell of the war — the putrefaction of the death camps — was denied to us. It is still something that defies the olfactory imagination.(7)
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1. Little Wilson and Big God, Being the First Part of the Confessions of Anthony Burgess Vintage 2002, p 242.
2. Little Wilson pp. 267-269.
3. Little Wilson p. 306
4. Little Wilson pp. 268,305. see also Simmons, R., Waugh, C., Hopkins, M., Perry, L. & Stafford, R., (2014) “Liberal And General Studies In Further Education: Voices From The ‘Chalk Face’”, Teaching in Lifelong Learning 6(1)., and also https://www.edge.co.uk/documents/488/DD1338_-_Edge_Liberal_Studies_in_English_FE2.pdf
5 Little Wilson p. 303
6. Unpublished article (1990) in Burgess Archives in Manchester, "Anthony Burgess News" (email) June 2024
7. Ibid

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