It is hard to find something truly glorious in war, hard, but not impossible. This man was glorious, and it took a terrible war to make him so.
Once in a while you bump into something a bit special that has somehow not gathered the spotlight it should, and this WW1 autobiography fits the bill with bells. Massive loud bells. GUNNER SUBALTERN 1914-18 (published by Leo Cooper of London) by Julian Tyndale-Biscoe consists mainly of letters to his father, not published until 1966 and details a romp through apocalypse. This artillery officer's remorseless cheerfullness while his friends are cut down around him can only be admired, though at times it surely went a long way to placate his father's fear. His survival is a miracle, and there are, in my print anyway, a succession of poignant photographs of his friends who did not. A.C. Cooper is a case in point, gradually shot to bits through the war, photographed by the author in a Dublin fete, armless sleeve pinned to his Sam Browne belt, smiling in the sunshine and already itching to get back. He 'died as a result of being gassed'.
Most people the author describes are 'wonderful fellows', though he targets the fools and maniacs with cutting wit. They all live in the 'lap of luxury'. The experience of spending a night waist deep in freezing water under fire hardly fazes him...though he and the trooper with him had to keep lifting one foot at a time out to keep some feeling going...actually it is hard to know where to start with his experiences. He blithely describes crawling over smashed body parts, wading through gore and the remains of his dear friends, watching German trenches being obliterated by his guns five yards at a time, their occupants flung up as each salvo erupted, then an encounter with an fellow officer left enthroned after a shell hit the officers' latrine, who told him 'It's lucky that shell arrived when it did as I was feeling a bit constipated'. The sheer bravado of it all is breath-taking.
In the Ypres Salient (Toms Dog they called it) during one action they lost a third of their officers. His reaction was that it could have been a 'lot worse'.
He got shot, blown up repeatedly, suffered terrible ailements including dysentry, and still found the energy to set up spoof targets so that HQ would have to get up early (he narrowly escaped courts martial for that little jape) and fills at least a tenth of the book with descriptions of who he met at mess and where he managed to scrounge a meal. His attitude to rank was fabulously blase, and his descriptions of private soldiers and NCO's contains the same respect and honour as anyone from his own 'very middle class'.
It is undoubtedly a book about war, but gradually you realise it is a brilliant and vibrant snapshot into a world that by 1918, largely ceased to exist. Of finding ways round orders that officers should not hunt their chargers in Ireland, of knocking on a general's door simply because someone else sent a letter of introduction, and expecting to be asked to tea. Of laughing in the face of endless danger and violence because that was what your country and your companions expected. Eventually, the sheer bloody minded determination to remain of good cheer in the face of a great and terrible (and endless) experience is in itself the most moving element. I am not ashamed to admit I came close to tears during his description of The Somme, how a very near shell burst became so common-place they 'merely inclined our heads towards the burst, so our tin hats would take the odd bullet'. The officer he was talking to said calmly 'I'm hit', and duly expired. As did the battery clerk. That evening he could find no casualty return forms so instead used an equipment list form: "It seemed cold-blooded, indenting for a subaltern and battery clerk, to replace those 'destroyed by shell fire'."
My copy is inscribed by JTB himself, and he has added in pencil 'MC' after his name. The inscription is to 'George', Jan 1972. He died in December the next year, aged 77. What a character. What a story he tells.
It is, with the exception of 'Good-bye to All That', the most powerful account of that dreadful war I have ever encountered, and I came to it by sheer chance. I recommend this wonderful bloody romp to all those interested in things military and the men who carried (or directed) the guns...recommend it most highly, energetically and with due enthusiasm, as JTB would have said.
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