Vessel of Sadness

"I work on World War I so, predictably, I read a lot of accounts of soldiers fighting in World War I and rather less of soldiers who have experienced World War II. I didn’t know this book until about a year ago. I picked it up at Oxfam. I just happened to be in the Oxfam bookshop in Edinburgh and saw it there. I was amazed I didn’t know it already. It’s beautifully written. Here is a man of a comparatively humble background who comes to Oxford, and, I think I’m right in saying, has his university career disrupted by the war. He then returns to Oxford after the war. What I find striking about it is that the descriptions of combat itself are much more explicit than you would find in the English literature of World War I. If you think of the classic canon of Siegfried Sassoon, Edmund Blunden, even Robert Graves, who’s more explicit, they assume that you know what’s going on. The nature of combat is implicit rather than explicit. Blunden himself said that, if you hadn’t gone the same journey as he’d gone, you wouldn’t understand what he was talking about. He is perhaps more allusive even than Sassoon and certainly more allusive than Graves, who invented quite a lot of what he was writing. I’m sure Woodruff did a bit of invention too. But Woodruff is much more visceral in his descriptions of what’s happening. He is also evoking a form of combat which is still not very different from World War I, in that Anzio got bogged down. The fighting was located in close-quarter combat, close proximity to the enemy army, and with a lot of Italian civilians caught up in the middle of it. There is as much empathy for the Italians, who after all had only just changed sides in this war, and even quite a lot of empathy for the Germans. “There are those practitioners who are absolutely convinced of the importance of military history. There are others who are good soldiers but they never read” One of the things that strikes me, when I look at some of the writing that’s come out on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, is that there’s a real effort by the best of the writers—I’m thinking of Harry Parker’s Anatomy of a Soldier or Michael Pitre, an American who wrote a wonderful book about Iraq called Fives and Twenty-Fives —to show that war is something that happens to everybody involved in it. Both of those books have characters who are Iraqis or Afghanis. And in Harry Parker’s case, the Afghan happens to be the Afghan who will place the bomb that inflicts these most awful wounds on the hero of the book—who is, of course, Harry himself. So I think Woodruff’s book acts as a sort of bridge between World War I literature, which has had an enormous influence on how people have written about war, and what’s being written today—which still, in some ways, comes off the back of World War I literature. That was the point that Paul Fussell was making in The Great War and Modern Memory (1975). As Fussell himself made clear, his book was only nominally about World War I; it was also about his war, which was World War II . What has changed since World War I is that the writing on war by those who have experienced it is much more openly concerned with how soldiers reintegrate both during war and after it is over. How do they reintegrate after war? That was the theme of All Quiet on the Western Front too, in some ways: Erich Maria Remarque wanted to find the way back, to paraphrase the title of the book he wrote after All Quiet . The enemy is also there in World War I literature, but the civilians are much more absent, not obvious as they are in the Woodruff book. And it’s interesting that the Italian campaign also produces Raleigh Trevelyan’s book . There are good accounts of the Italian war written by British authors. I went down the Salerno coast from Naples this year. I visited the cemeteries en route to the classical site of Paestum , which I’d never been to. And, of course, Paestum is right in the middle of the Salerno battlefield. It’s not that Anzio is Salerno but I was already thinking of those Italian landings. And, I suppose, my father was in the Italian campaign, this was his war… Yes, that’s the next stage on, beyond Anzio. Anzio was designed, in part, to release the pressure on Monte Cassino. So this book is a mini-classic that is neglected. It gives a very good feel about what it was like to be on the Italian campaign, but it also gives a good feel about war. It is specific to Anzio, absolutely. There is a moment when they’re back in Capri and recovering before going off again. It has a sense of place. But, at the same time—and this is really the point about much war literature—it’s about what it reflects of war more generally. And this book does that."