Alexander Baron (1917-1999), From the City, From the Plough, Imperial War Museum Classics, 2019; first published 1948 (library copy)
The soldier lives in a drama: he never has the time to perceive it. His life, even in battle, is a succession of chores.
The title From the City, From the Plough refers to the soldiers recruited to the newly-replenished (fictional) Fifth Battalion Wessex Infantry during WWII: it’s made up mostly of cockney wide-boys and rural south-western ‘bumpkins’ – farmboys bemused by the military life, and longing for the familiar routines of land work.
The novel follows the progress of the unit from tedious, repetitive training in the south of England through the D-Day landings and subsequent campaign fighting the German forces across France. It’s a sort of collage narrative structure, an impressionistic sequence of scenes in which soldiers grumble and hustle through manoeuvres, pointless route marches and frequent unexplained changes of location.
There are many memorable incidents or vignettes. A tough, swaggering and battle-hardened Irishman challenges his sergeant’s authority and gets humiliated. A young lad has his first sexual encounter and is whisked away by the army as he’s on the point of marrying his sweetheart. The CO grieves for his missing-in-action son, and this clouds his judgement and influences his behaviour towards his men.
The last third of the novel reminded me of Saving Private Ryan; it depicts the noise, dirt, confusion, exhaustion and numbing terror of battle as the unit storms the Normandy beaches and advances through northern France with painful slowness.
They suffer fearful losses trying to take a well-fortified hilltop ridge. Many of the colourful characters we’d met earlier in the narrative are killed in action. Those who survive can’t grieve – they couldn’t go on if they felt too much. Nevertheless there’s a heart-breaking moment when a young recruit, blinded during the beach landings and sent back to England for medical treatment, sends his comrades a gift of cigarettes; the fact that he was feeling sorry for them touches them deeply.
It’s a powerful, fierce account. The blurb praises it highly, likening it to WWI classics like All Quiet on the Western Front. It probably justifies that comparison, though it clearly reflects a more modern sensibility in the style and approach to a war novel. The cynical, weary response of the unit’s second in command when told by his brigadier that his exhausted, decimated battalion had to go back into action against the strategically advantaged ridge-top German troops – purely as a diversionary tactic – sums up the unromantic, emotionally numbed heroism mixed with stoicism of these ordinary men sacrificed to the relentless military machine. The stark realism of the novel doubtless stems from Baron’s own experience as a soldier who served in the Sicilian, Italian and Normandy campaigns during the war.