Andrew Murray Scott (Scots Independent, June 2025)
If the first casualty of war is truth it is right that we consider the glorious myths of the 80th anniversary of VE Day. That everyone pulled together ‘for Blighty’ is broadly true but ignores soaring rates of rape, murder, racketeering and disaffection in the black out that were not publicised for reasons of morale. More insidiously, the class-ridden nature of the British war effort and the racism of Churchill and other leaders such that the efforts of commonwealth troops was recognised belatedly, if at all. Films and novels embedded these myths and made dashing heroes of upper and middle class officers who often got the medals their soldiers died for.
Few novels feature the ordinary ‘tommy’ but one of the best is Alexander Baron’s There’s No Home (1950) prefaced with a quotation from Hamish Henderson’s poem The Highland Division’s Farewell To Sicily. Henderson of course was heavily involved in these campaigns and it is a line from the poem, ‘there’s nae hame’, translated into English, that provides the title.
Set in a two month lull after the fighting in Sicily in summer 1943 as the Allies regroup to launch an invasion on the Italian mainland, the remnants of a British Battalion is quartered in the bombed-out and poverty-stricken backstreets of the town of Catania and gradually begin to form attachments with the local, mainly female, population.
Observed through the eyes of Sergeant Craddock, who forges a relationship with young mother Graziella Drucci, whose soldier husband is missing in Africa, the novel focuses on these attempts, on both sides, to forge a new domesticity and some sort of rapprochement.
Baron’s war trilogy (of which this is the second) were bestsellers, yet his work has faded while the works of contemporaries such as Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene and Olivia Manning remain to the fore.
Perhaps this is because his primary concerns were with the ordinary soldier and civilians rather than with the officer class of such as Guy Crouchback and his clubbable chums. Baron had been in the thick of the fighting as a member of Montgomery’s 8th Army and in the D-Day landings and started writing as therapy after the war. Being Jewish and a former communist whose parents had been party intellectuals certainly accounts for his inability to gain promotion above the rank of Corporal.
The book homes in on the desperation of the individual circumstances of soldiers missing their families and the plight of their starving hosts whose menfolk are missing or dead. A kind of symbiotic domesticity is created. Some soldiers become surrogate fathers to the fatherless families, others assume the role of the missing men as lovers, while officers such as Captain Rumbold treat the local women in a purely exploitative manner.
A very different war novel that personalises the great myth of ‘The few’ is That Summer by our own Andrew Greig, a novel of extraordinary power, a breathless, unputdownable read.
We should applaud the sacrifice of servicemen and women without succumbing to misty-eyed myths and untruths perpetrated by those who did not want the war experience to change anything after it was over.