A Soldier's Tale

This elegant novel is a love story, a war story, a historical fiction, and something more. It is the culmination of M.K. Joseph's exploration of war in poetry and prose, and the most acute and powerful expression of his central themes. The war seems to have awakened his literary creativity, moving him to draft poems in an army-issue exercise book he carried with him in France, the Netherlands and Germany; and then it supplied material for most of his subsequent output. Often the poems, like
A Soldier's Tale
, depict occupied Europe in quieter moments, the Allied forces stalled and awaiting action or mopping up after it, surrounded by its debris. When I set out to study Joseph's poems, I soon found myself tracing a web of connections between the poetry and fiction, at the centre of which sat the great, grim fact of this conflict.

Joseph (1914–1981) wrote two novels specifically about World War II—
I'll Soldier No More
(1958), a straightforward autobiographical chronicle of military life, and
A Soldier's Tale
(1976)—but the war leaves a residue in all of his work, long after his return to New Zealand, to what he called ‘a time of mildness and hope'. His poems of the 1950s and 1960s are often haunted by Hiroshima, and shadowed by the Cold War. These hostilities influence an apocalyptic strain in many of the poems, which emerges again more emphatically in his science fiction novels.

As a highly regarded academic at the University of Auckland, a widely anthologized poet and then a novelist, Joseph contributed substantially to an emerging post-colonial literature, while remaining resolutely opposed to consciously nationalistic writing. Only
A Pound of Saffron
(1962) is set in New Zealand and includes no depiction of war. In the deeply philosophical science fiction novels
The Hole in the Zero
(1967) and
The Time of Achamoth
(1977), he returns again and again to historical and imagined wars, and to the individual human being under acute pressure. The moral sphere is above all Joseph's territory. For the most part he is more concerned with the ethics of individual conduct than with warfare itself—with the way war sharpens dilemmas, intensifies pressures, and magnifies consequences, rather than with its physical or political violence.

As company clerk, Joseph knew very well the banal, bureaucratic side of military service, and the bungling incompetence. Boredom and numbing routine figure large in
I'll Soldier No More
. Against this backdrop, the characters are tested by personal tensions, emotional and spiritual crises, sex and the black market—much less often by physical danger or hostile action. In
The Hole in the Zero
, he creates a dystopian cosmos caught up in a Thousand-Year War. Amid a desert full of apocalyptic monsters, he places a little island of absurd order—army stores run like clockwork by obstructive bureaucrats, mounting a futile defence against political and moral chaos.

Joseph was at Oxford when war broke out. He joined the British Army, and, like his narrator in
A Soldier's Tale
, served as a bombardier artillery clerk with an Air Observation unit. These units ‘spotted' targets from the air for subsequent artillery bombardment: ‘…not far enough back to be disgraceful', says the bombardier-narrator, ‘and not far enough forward to be lethal'. In the poem ‘Drunken Gunners', we get a graphic take on this role. The spotter-planes have done their work, and their intelligence is being plotted on a map, to direct the heavy artillery at distant, invisible targets. The captain ‘sees/ His rule connect two dots a league apart' as though he were a mere spectator, not really responsible for the trajectory of the shells that ‘throws destruction at hypotheses'.

A Soldier's Tale
flips the perspective and radically diminishes the scale of ‘Drunken Gunners'; hypotheses are displaced by blighted communities, numbers by human beings, leisurely moral reflection by desperate dilemmas. Artillery rumbles intermittently in
A Soldier's Tale
, reminding us of the huge surrounding violence. The war throws up big questions, but the characters supply the finer shades, conversing or quarrelling about them, deciding between the meagre options, revising judgements and permissions, negotiating an improvised relationship. Their debates are given an edge by their limited understanding of each other's language; Joseph brings a fine ear, honed during his childhood years in France and Belgium, to the bilingual subtleties of their communication.

As always, he displays a humane understanding of the inequities of power, and the way they skew questions of right and wrong, and constrain the options. His personal allegiances are suspended—readers would never guess, for example, his committed Catholicism from the depiction of the church and priest in this story. He does not hand down judgment, but he compels us to confront the issues, partly by having the characters prod at them, partly by eliciting our sympathy for them, and partly by the way the story is delivered.

The bombardier tells us exactly how he constructs the tale, distinguishing the soldier's colloquial first-person narrative, dredged up from memory; the bombardier's guesswork, carefully labelled, which kicks in when the soldier clams up; and the bombardier's commentary, always served up in parentheses. It all seems very transparent, and the narrator scrupulously draws attention to the doubtful reliability of third-hand details needing ‘a double decode'—‘trying to see through her eyes what I knew only at second-hand through his'. But of course this is the whole book in a nutshell, a story filtered through the original teller, then the bombardier, and finally the invisible author (a few episodes are recognizable from the poems or
I'll Soldier No More
).

Even though he refuses finally to judge the tale, the bombardier's comments constantly expose his assumptions, about class and motive, for example, alerting us to the conditioned judgement at work in every line and every silence. Thus the layered narrative implicates the reader deeply, challenging us to judge then to question every judgment, while insisting that emotional and moral detachment is finally an impossibility. This rich moral and technical complexity gives
A Soldier's Tale
a dimension lacking in more routine fictional accounts of war. It allows the story to transcend not only the times it depicts but also the times in which it was written, so that it deserves to be brought back into print to touch and challenge another generation of readers.

I
n nineteen-forty-four I was a bombardier artillery clerk with four years' service, and serving in an Air Observation unit. I don't suppose you'll want to hear the technical details: the main thing was that we spotted for the divisional artillery—twenty-five-pounders, mostly—but also did some forward liaison with infantry, mortars, heavy MGs and so forth. Altogether it wasn't a bad way to do a war, not far enough back to be disgraceful and not far enough forward to be lethal.

We worked with the same mob from Normandy right up to Nijmegen, a crowd of Geordies, very clever gunners and very tough foot-sloggers, but as nice a lot of people as you'd meet in a day's stroll. Then we lost them, because they'd been so cut up and patched with young replacements that they had to be taken out for a good rest.

Now there was one lot, and one particular character, that I ran into several times. Every so often
I'd go up in the jeep with our captain on a forward liaison, which I didn't enjoy very much because, sober or drunk, he drove like a maniac. Well, there was this corporal, and he had the highest regard for gunners because (as you may imagine) a good battery that can put down supporting fire exactly as and when required—close, but just not too close—is regarded as a very good friend by all poor foot-sloggers. And since we spotted for the guns that made us like long-lost brothers and honoured guests. Also he was a Wessex man, from the other end of the country and not quite at home among the Geordies, so he liked a bit of company to talk to sometimes.

In other ways he was a very hard man. He was big and rather clumsy-looking, with big heavy bones and long flat muscles, and he had a big, expressionless, broken-nosed face. Yet he moved with surprising ease and silence, as well as having a gift for stillness. In civvy street he had been a gamekeeper and perhaps a bit of a poacher too, an orphan brought up strictly by his old granny. In the army this made him a natural for the job of sniper or for patrol leader in the shifting no-man's-land between the armies. He was very good at this, taking out small parties nominally led by some young officer, and bringing in small groups of Jerry prisoners for interrogation as required. But he also
liked going out for exercise, alone and without orders, working his way as quietly as a big cat along the deep ditches and thick hedgerows of the Normandy
bocage
country, to eliminate some unlucky enemy soldier with one of the well-worn knives of which he would always carry two, one at his belt and one in his legging, or with a wire noose. Or so others told me, for he wasn't given to boasting much. His name was Saul Scourby, and he would have been very bad indeed to have as an enemy, but for us he couldn't do too much. As I waited for my captain to come back from his session at the officer's mess (where he was also well taken care of) there would always be a place for me by the cook-house fire and a mug of tea with rum in it and a big plate of stew or bully or whatever happened to be going.

The last time I saw him was across the river from Nijmegen, in the stormy autumn of 1944 after the failure at Arnhem, when the whole Allied drive bogged down for the winter. It was a cold, damp, low-lying place behind the polders, with the violent, brown Rhine pouring past on the other side, quite capable of rising and flooding in the dark wintertime. By the time that actually happened we were both far away, I snowed-in in the Ardennes, he Lord knows where.

The HQ Company had their cook-house in one of those big Dutch barns, well blacked-out with tarpaulins. My captain was having a long session with friends in the mess—I think he knew then that we'd be moving soon—and so we sat on as the night gathered outside with its searchlights. The main cookers were off, and the cooks and the fatigue men were playing a grumbling game of pontoon round the only lantern. There was a Primus going to keep the tea hot for the guard, so Saul Scourby and I sat beside it. When he got to telling me about this French girl he'd known in Normandy it was just for something to talk about, for no particular reason, just to pass the time. But it took possession of my mind in a strange way, and I've thought about it so often that now, nearly thirty years later, it's hard to separate what he told me from what I imagined out of it, what I divined, what I added of my own.

I've tried to tell it as he told it, though I know how difficult this is—you can't try to reproduce an English lower-class accent without seeming to patronize it. Look at Kipling, for example, though he gets away with it because he loved people and because time (as Auden says) pardons those who write well. One thing I've done is to patch in various pieces here and there, like the woman's bits of stories recalling
the France of the Third Republic, which I'd known and he hadn't; but in the main I've tried to write the book he might have written, if he could. Only he couldn't, not because he was stupid or illiterate—for example, he knew his Bible better than most of us, which his granny used to read to him when he was a kid—but because he was a modest man, too modest to be a writer.

So, although it's not strictly realistic, you must try to imagine him telling this story, squatting on a ration-box, staring with his cold eyes over the rim of his mug into the thin, blue flame, seeing in it the pictures he was describing to me.

Did I tell you, Bom (he said), did I tell you about this bit of stuff I had in Normandy? Did I? Shall I fill your mug up? Right. Well, she was a lady, and a tart with it. A regular Jezebel, like Jezebel the wife of Ahab.

It was when we was near this village south of Bayeux. Pulled back in support, we was, and having a bit of a rest. A lot of the local people had gone and what was there stuck pretty close to their cellars, because we wasn't too far from the line. Quiet, it was, except for a battery of mediums not far off, that shook the place up sometimes.

So there was the village one way and the other
was a sort of monastery place, and in between we was dug in on some old Jerry positions, pretty cushy, really. There was fields around and a side road and some farmhouses.