Antony Beevor's Blog, page 6

Sunday 2 June

Into the archive at eleven. Seven day researching is a boon, but I still do not think that I am going to finish in time. It is crazy. I feel a little like the man in that parable short story by Tolstoy, ‘All the Land that a Man Needs’.

Wednesday 29 May

Everyone is incredibly kind and welcoming in the archive. Nothing is too much trouble. All the personal papers and diaries kept by generals and their aids during the Ardennes Offensive in December 1944 are fascinating. My goodness, the jealousies and the paranoia of some generals bear out what Alanbrooke said in his own diaries about high command in war bringing out the worst in some people.  But there is also a huge amount of material about the experience of ordinary soldiers in this terrible winter battle. Because there is so much material, I have set up my little digital camera to photograph page after page of the Foreign Military Studies, the accounts written by captured German officers and generals. It is far quicker than photocopying. It will be interesting to see how many thousands of pages I photograph by the time I am through.

Tuesday 28 May

Having arrived late on Monday night, I spent the night at an airport hotel near Dulles International outside Washington DC. As I could not sleep,  I left early and drove north to Carlisle, Pennsylvania – or Pencilvania as Artemis likes to call it. I blessed the decision to go for a hire car with a satnav, even though it was quite a bit more expensive. It took all the stress out of the journey. I checked in at the Carlisle House B and B, where they gave me a late breakfast before I set off for the US Army War College archives, USAMHI, which were no more than a ten minute drive away. Alan, le patron britannique, told me a curious consequence of the Second World War. The US government had such enormous stocks of ammonium nitrate explosive when the war ended – they had been planning for another year of conflict before the atomic bombs were dropped – that they did not know what to do with it all. Ammonium nitrate of course turned out to be the best fertiliser for growing corn and so was distributed to farmers, who produced far more corn than could ever be eaten or exported. The result was that corn by-products, especially corn syrup, were developed, and the US food industry had the perfect addictive element. Thus to a certain degree, the plague of obesity is due to that surplus of explosive in 1945. The United States as a whole seems to suffer from a plague of gigantism. In South Hanover, the main street outside the Carlisle House, I was bemused by the outsize men sitting in preposterously outsize pick-up trucks.

Sunday 30 September

A long silence, but then September has been a crazy month. I arrived in Sydney at the end of August and suffered less jetlag than I expected. It was lovely weather for early spring, and I went straight into MTA (maximum tanning angle) by the pool of my hotel in Sydney. Sunshine is

Monday 23 July

I  have just returned from the French military academy at Saint-Cyr in Brittany. Its commandant General Eric Bonnemaison started the Festival International du Livre Militaire three years ago, and as I was the winner of the Prix des Cadets last year, he invited me to preside at this the third one. The festival, with nearly a hundred authors, was extremely professional, but unlike any other similar event. Most of the customers wandering from table to table were in uniform, and what a range there was. The French find the different regimental uniforms of the British Army confusing, but I was bemused by the mixture of infantry, cavalry, engineers, gunners, Spahis, paratroopers, legionnaires, gendarmerie and sapeurs pompiers. There were even some German officers, including a couple of generals from the Bundeswehr. You can spot the French paras by the way they walk, which is more of an upright stalk. I remember from when I was attached to the French Army many years ago how they run in a rather camp way kicking their heels up almost to their bottom. [I had to break off at this moment because a baby alpaca, or cria, has just been born and I had to dispose of the afterbirth].

On the Saturday evening, the new minister of defence, Jean-Yves Le Drean, came round the Festival. The main reason for his visit was the great passing-out parade of the officer cadets, a night-time ceremony known as Le Triomphe. This consists of a huge parade on the Marchfeld in their nineteenth-century full dress uniform, with white gloves, dark blue tunics, red trousers and rounded kepis with feathered plumes. It was indeed spectacular, with the band of the Foreign Legion twirling their trumpets as they marched. Le Drean gave a moving and deeply patriotic speech to the cadets. Even General de Gaulle would have approved. I was amused to see a Napoleon, accompanied by four marshals, arrive on horseback to salute the minister. Despite his disastrous  obsession with military glory, Napoleon is still revered. It reminded me of the fact that a number of French journalists were provoked by the comment in my D-Day book that only de Gaulle could have written a history of the French army without mentioning the Battle of Waterloo.

Wednesday 11 July

My White Russian correspondent Alexander Shihwarg has sent me another fascinating vignette to do with the Japanese defeat at Khalkin Gol – or Nomonhan – as they called the battle. Apparently Konstantin Simonov recounted how when the final exchange of prisoners was made after the conflict – probably in September 1939 – the Japanese prisoners were laid in rows on stretchers. A Japanese officer harangued and abused these wounded prisoners for having been taken alive. Then, some of his soldiers went round and fitted a white hood over the head of each man. The Japanese officer explained the reason for this to Simonov. ‘It is to spare the soldiers the shame of being recognised as cowards who surrendered to the enemy.’

I was surprised to find that I had been accorded a page on a site called brainyquote.com. I felt slightly embarassed at the rather pedestrian sayings they had chosen. In an attempt to improve the quality, I sent them a rather better one from some time back: ‘Intellectual honesty is the first casualty of moral outrage.’  I had better come up with a few more to replace the boring ones.

 

Sunday 1 July

I returned to London to find a letter from a White Russian, approving strongly of the fact that I had begun the book with the Soviet victory of Khalkin Gol over the Japanese in August 1939. He had been a schoolboy at an English school in Tientsin at the time and was travelling on a Japanese run train. ‘We had stopped at the railway junction of Feng tai and suddenly rather hysterical Japanese conductors came racing through the compartments, and pulling down the blinds – warning us, mainly Europeans, not to try to steal a look.  As soon as they left, I lifted our blind and recoiled with horror. I was staring into the compartment of a hospital train – with racks of stretchers bearing badly wounded Japanese soldiers, blood seeping thought their bandages. With a schoolboy’s inherent curiosity, I had discovered a military secret – the defeat and heavy casualties suffered by the Japanese at the hands of the Russian forces in Mongolia.’

Friday 29 June

I am down at the Chalke Valley History Festival in deepest Wiltshire. It is the most extraordinary literary extravaganza that I have ever witnessed. You approach the site through tiny lanes and swing over a hill, and suddenly, in the valley below, you see the row of tents, as if for a mediaeval jousting match,  and lines and lines of cars parked in a vast field. There is not a single house to be seen all around. Only in England would people be prepared to venture out into such remote countryside to listen to historians lecturing and debating. There are added attractions, of course. The food is excellent, with everyone seated at trestle tables in a huge tent, and there are nurmerous demonstrations, with archers, musketeers and bren guns, showing the reality of warfare through the ages. There is even a debate between Michael Gove the seceretary of state for Education and the historian and Labour MP Tristram Hunt on ‘The Importance of History’, with no doubt a foray into the subject of O Levels which should be very lively.  Other participants include Jeremy Paxman, Max Hastings, Tom Holland, Edward Stourton, Juliet Barker, Michael Morpurgo, Ian Kershaw, Patrick Bishop, Simon Jenkins, Adam Nicolson, Ian Hislop, Victoria Hislop, Wichael Wood, Amanda Vickery, Orlando Figes, and many others. Huge fun. Sebastian Faulks, gazing around, at the fields, guy-ropes and canvas, described it as ’an intellectual point-to-point’.

Friday 22 June

I am leaving Chicago on a beautiful day and so I went for a walk before it was time to go to O’Hare airport. I wandered along the business district’s sunless canyons - ‘measureless to man’ – making my way through a crowd of unathletic teenagers slouching past in sports wear. I wandered past the Berghoff Restaurant where I ate last night with Bill my media escort after the lecture at the Pritzker Military Library. The Berghoff is an old German restaurant from the days when Illinois was almost German speaking. The family at the next door table held hands round the table as they said grace. But there was also a group of three barely mobile obese young women sitting slouched in their chairs waiting for food like baby birds who would never be able to leave the nest. America is of course a land of astonishing contrasts as well as uniformity. It also has a taste for polished steel - in restrooms, drinking fountains and heavy trucks. I suppose its dull gleam always looks new and is easy to clean, and it provides an antidote to all those junkyards of rusting metal and abandoned factories, which represent the downside of the American dream.

Even the Wall Street Journal had fun with the football match between Germany and Greece. It reported that the Greeks were threatening to use a drachma coin for the toss to wind up Angela Merkel. After the Poland-Russia match, soccer has become the substitute, (and one hopes the placebo), for war. Still, the days are passed when Otto von Habsburg, on being asked which side he would support in a forthcoming Austria-Hungary match, was able to reply: ‘And whom are we playing?’

 

Wednesday 20 June

I spent yesterday afternoon with my publishers in New York. Later, we went to Barnes & Noble on the upper west side where I gave a talk. Geoff, my editor, told me that many homeless people had been attracted by the comfort of B&N’s chairs for reading books. One who was thought to be asleep turned out to be dead. So to save their customers from nasty shocks in the future, B & N redesigned their chairs to make them particularly uncomfortable after a certain period of time. Geoff also told me about working with James Patterson as an author, who had a stable of young assistants and ghost-writers with whom he worked very closely. I recounted how Barbara Cartland apparently walked around her office dictating one novel to one secretary, then on to the next book with the next secretary, a little like a grandmaster playing simultaneous chess. One was tempted to wonder whether the plots became confused, rather like in Mario Vargas Llosa’s novel Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter.

Once started, I could not resist telling him about Isabel Allende. Many years ago when House of the Spirits came out in English, I was asked to review it for the Times Literary Supplement. She came to London, and I was asked to the dinner in her honour and sat next to her. She told me how as a trainee journalist in Santiago de Chile she had needed to earn extra money, so she took on the task of translating Barbara Cartland novels into Spanish. But appalled by the subservient women in these stories, she rewrote them entirely with the women as the dominant characters. I always longed to know in subsequent years whether somebody at the university of Santiago has written a treatise on Barbara Cartland as a proto-feminist novelist.