A Winter's Tale - 'Greenmantle' revisited

It was deliciously cold the other evening, so I sought out a favourite old book, wrapped myself up warmly and turned my imagination up to the full.

 

The book is a nonsense, really. I first read it at a Sussex preparatory school when I was nine, when large parts of it baffled me completely, yet I did not want to stop reading.  I must have read it again a dozen times, and now parts of it infuriate me, especially the wide-eyed patriotism and enthusiasm for one of the stupidest, most pointless wars ever fought.

 

But , if you are willing to suspend a lot of disbelief, and put yourself inside the mind of a man still wholly in the grip of a very simple untutored patriotism, the opening few chapters are still a masterpiece of the thriller-writer’s art. It is John Buchan’s ‘Greenmantle’, preposterous no doubt, but actually far less preposterous than its forerunners ( ‘the Power House’ and ‘The Thirty-Nine Steps’) or its successor (‘The Three Hostages’).

 

In my view, Alfred Hitchcock’s film of the ‘Thirty-Nine Steps’ is far superior to the book, and has probably kept the book alive when it would otherwise have vanished. Talking of which, has anyone heard of or read Buchan’s earlier novel ‘The Half-Hearted’ which is set amidst the ‘Great Game’ of intrigue between Russian and Britain before 1914? I only discovered that it existed the other day, for reasons I’ll explain in a future posting.

 

Anyway, why does ‘Greenmantle’ appeal to me so on a cold night in November? First because it is set in an actual winter, between November 1915 and February 1916. It is bracketed by real events.  The hero, Richard Hannay, begins the book while convalescing from wounds received at the Battle of Loos a few weeks before (the first in which we, the British, used poison gas as an offensive weapon) . He ends it caught up in the Russian capture of Erzerum in Turkey.  He’s sent off behind German lines by his old friend, the Intelligence Chief Sir Walter Bullivant, whose own son has died in pursuit of a great secret.

 

There are many things which I missed to begin with and now find fascinating. Most of all is the prescient, surprisingly sympathetic  discussion of Islam, and the fear that the Germans may use a new and fanatical preacher to raise a Muslim rebellion against Britain in the East. Sandy Arbuthnot, the Scottish aristocrat who is one of the main characters, is so captivated by the purity of the desert religion, and in awe of this preacher,  that he sometimes sounds like Lawrence of Arabia.  

 

My schoolboy self must also have missed the very strong suggestion that the enormous and terrifying Colonel Ulrich von Stumm – the principal German villain -  is homosexually inclined, a fact revealed by this bull-headed monster’s possession of a knick-knack infested, thickly carpeted boudoir,  softly lit and crammed with sculptures.  Hannay notes that he had heard of ‘such practices’ among the Germans, though how he had avoided hearing of such practices on our own side, too, I am not sure. In any acse, I don’t think we are supposed to like von Stumm more because of this.  The passage is entertainingly antique. Will it disappear from future editions, or will  some enterprising and inventive author copy George Macdonald Fraser’s ‘Flashman’ idea, and write a series of thrillers set in Edwardian and Great War Berlin  in which von Stumm is the hero? Not a bad idea.

 

But I am running ahead of myself. Hannay’s discovery of Stumm’s secret coincides with Stumm’s discovery of his, namely that Hannay is not, as he claims, an Afrikaans-speaking South African engineer dedicated to German victory , but a British agent sent into the heart of Germany.  Hannay’s story is mostly tosh, and so full of the impossible coincidences which litter Buchan’s Shilling Shockers (as he called them)  that one begins to wonder if Buchan wasn’t actually a Coincidence Theorist, possessed by the idea that the world is in fact governed by such events. Even so, the coincidences keep the narrative rattling along, and nine-year-olds don’t notice such things anyway.

 

But it is an excuse for a wonderful winter journey, much of it by train, deeper and deeper into the heart of the dark forest. His imagination of how it would have been to be such a spy, on a frozen foggy day in 1915 Berlin, walking past the enemy’s ministries and headquarters,  is extraordinarily evocative and stayed with me until I eventually saw the real Berlin for the first time (at about the same time of year) and his description of that captivating city seemed very accurate to me.

 

But the crown and wonder of the book, for me, a very brief passage when Hannay, on the run from von Stumm, falls ill with Malaria in a snowy forest, and blunders to the door of  a woodman’s cottage. The husband is away fighting on the Russian front. The wife and mother is left trying to feed her brood of small children. Hannay can barely stand, so she takes him in and promises to hide him if searchers come to the door, before he collapses into bed, he gives her the food he has been carrying with him, and money to buy more. The woman is pitifully grateful that the Christ child will after all be visiting her home.

 

It is a moving moment of tranquillity in the midst of fear. Buchan’s obvious feeling for the woman and her children , and his revulsion from war, are a curious contrast with his belligerent jingoism elsewhere in the same book.

 

‘That night I realized the crazy folly of war. When I saw the splintered shell of Ypres and heard hideous tales of German doings, I used to want to see the whole land of the Boche given up to fire and sword. I thought we could never end the war properly without giving the Huns some of their own medicine. But that woodcutter’s cottage cured me of such nightmares…What good would it do Christian folk to burn poor little huts like this and eave children’s bodies by the wayside? To be able to laugh and to be merciful are the only things that make man better than the beasts’.

 

I was annoyed and puzzled by this aged nine, when I believed strongly in slaughtering the enemy.  Now I think it is the best bit if the book. In fact, Hannay has many flashes of intelligence, and frequently remarks on the talents,  decency , honesty etc of Germans he meets on his perilous way. At one stage he even notes the similarity of Frieslanders to East Anglian Englishmen.  Buchan knew what sort of readers he was trying to please, but was always too clever to believe his own propaganda. That is why his Edward Leithen books, in which the hero is a person much more like him, are in some ways more enjoyable than the shockers – but less fun.  

 

If it weren't for the Christmas passage, I don't think I'd bother with 'Greenmantle' any more. The American Blenkiron is particularly tiresome. None of Buchan's thrillers was a patch on Erskine Childers's 'Riddle of the Sands' , the Edwardian spy mystery to beat all Edwardian spy mysteries. Poor Childers led an even more interesting life than Buchan, though it ended quite horribly.  I assume the two men must have met, and that Buchan would have greatly liked Childers.