Books On The Go: The Fighting Padre

I made the mistake of browsing the excellent Pen and Sword website recently and in due course three books arrived in the post (trans-Atlantic mail has improved remarkably since the start of Covid) including this collection of letters from a British infantry chaplain of the Great War, Pat Leonard.

 

Leonard was a young Anglican clergyman whose youth and vigorous physique (he was an accomplished boxer, hence his nickname “The Fighting Padre”) allowed him to thrive in the trenches when older clergymen quickly broke down under the physical demands of frontline service.    He was attached to a British Army infantry brigade, and later in the war transferred to the Royal Flying Corps, supporting a number of different squadrons and aerodromes and earning a respectable amount of flying time in the observer’s seat.

Chaplain memoirs and letters are a fairly niche subject.   For the clerical reader, it’s always interesting to see how frontline padres tried to support the men under their care, often travelling long distances between units to bury the dead, offer the sacraments, counsel and encourage.  For the general reader, they offer a fascinating look at daily life in a war zone, in and behind the front lines, and glimpses of the culture of the men they served.  Chaplains were almost all civilians before the war and thus lacked much military knowledge, but they were observant, intelligent and articulate, and so they offer a great “fish out of water” look at the war around them.

I wanted to read this especially because Leonard was friends with a chaplain hero of mine, Philip (Tubby) Clayton, who ran “TocH” or Talbot House, a soldier’s rest centre in Poperinghe, a town within the Ypres Salient.  Tubby’s picture is on the left of this blog’s header - his own memoir, “Tales of Talbot House”, is a brilliant book in is own right.  

I’ve just started and haven’t met Tubby or any aircraft, but have found Leonard an engaging and friendly guide to life in the trenches.

Cheers and blessings,

MP+

 

Book Review: Nicholas Watson's Fortress: The Great War Siege of Przemysl

 

The Fortress: The Great Siege of Przemysl, by Alexander Watson, New York: Basic Books, 2020.  

This is not as long a book review as my last one, more of an appreciation, really, but I can’t remember the last time a book of military history made such an impact on me as Watson’s book on this obscure battle of the Great War in the East.

For those of us in the Anglo-Saxon world, unless we are particularly well-read, our knowledge of the Great War on land is most likely centred on the campaigns in France and Belgium,  with side trips to the Dardanelles and perhaps the fighting in the Alps between Italy and Austria.   The Tannenberg campaign is probably the latest singular exception to this rule, but the frontier battles that raged in Galicia and the Carpathians in 1914-15, and which devoured hundreds of thousands of lives, were a mystery to me until several folks online said that this was a must-read for students of the Great War.

Alexander Watson is a relatively young professor at the University of London, who has already published one book on this subject, Ring of Steel: Germany and Austria-Hungary at War, 1914-18.   Fortress by contrast focuses on the Austro-Hungarian defence of Przemysl, a town on the edge of the Carpathians in what is now Poland, which was surrounded by a ring of mostly obsolete fortresses.   There was no vital reason to defend it, but after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian offensive in Galicia in 1914, the decision was made for reasons of prestige to hold it with a scratch force of reserve troops from the town and from the far reaches of the Empire.   The city held out until the spring of 1915, when starvation forced its surrender to Russia.

I won’t try to duplicate the many glowing reviews out there, such as this one in the Guardian.   I found the book absolutely gripping, and could quickly see why it’s such an acclaimed and awarded title in military history circles.  I will also say that I found the book unbearably tragic.  Like all sieges, it has the same narrative arc of gallant defiance and comradeship giving way to dull despair as food and hope runs out.   Watson is drawn to the city’s unlikely defenders, mostly older reservists with obsolete weapons, but he is also clear-eyed as to the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s long record of massacres of the local population of Ruthenes (speakers of various Ukrainian dialects) as suspected Russian sympathizers (there are some dark photos out there).  On the other hand, the Russian regime’s treatment of the Jewish population could be just as grim, and as Watson notes, the First World War in Eastern Europe is a prelude to the ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Second World War.    Przemysl, a multi-ethnic city before the Great War, was greatly and sadly changed by the war, and its fate, like that of Sarajevo in the 1990s, reminds us of how fragile multi-ethnic societies can be when forces of hatred are unleashed.

The other thing I found particularly tragic about the book was the stupidity and callousness of the Austro-Hungarian army and its commander, Conrad von Hotzendorf.  It’s hard to imagine a more malignantly irresponsible figure in all of military history.  Whereas the Russian armies fielded against Przemysl appeared to be relatively competent, the  Austro-Hungarian command threw the lives of their troops away - there’s no other way to describe it.  This quote isn’t from the book but is from the must-read Twitter account of @PikeGrey1418 captures it well.  

  Watson’s book is full of this sort of account, and they still haunt me a month later.

Sitting on my games shelf is this mini-monster game from GMT Games, designed by Michael Resch.  

I confess I’ve had it for a few years, unpunched and still in the shrink-wrap, but after reading Watson I had to open it up and have a look.  Here’s the Galicia map, with just some of the counters.

 

And there’s Przemysl, with its ring of fortresses.

 I may not get to this anytime soon, as I currently have a large Franco-Prussian hex and counter game on the go, but I am very curious to give this a go, as I’ve played Resch’s sister-game on the Western Front, and learned a lot about the difficulty of commanding large armies in that game.  

Even if you never want to add this subject to your gaming repertoire, I can’t recommend Watson’s Fortress enough to you as a superb treatment of an obscure campaign.   Just be prepared to be a little haunted by it.

Blessings to your books,

MP+

 

Book Review: Jonathan Fennell's Fighting the People's War: The British and Commonwealth Armies and the Second World War

 

Jonathan Fennell, Fighting the People’s War: The British and Commonwealth Armies and the Second World War (Cambridge UP, 2019), 932 pages.

 

Fighting the People’s War (FPW) was not a reading project that I approached from a wargaming point of view, but simply out of a desire to try and stay current with cutting edge military history on WW2.   After reading this massive book, though, I see some of our wargaming preoccupations with morale, troop quality, and national characteristics with new eyes.

Jonathan Fennell is a youngish scholar, who lectures at the Defence Studies Dept. of Kings College, London.  His first publication was Combat and Morale in the North African Campaign; FPW is far more ambitious, with the goal of a single-volume history of the British and Commonwealth Armies of WW2.  Rather than focus on generals, weapons systems, or battles per se, Fennell wants us to understand “the personal concerns of troops, their broad social and political perspectives, and their willingness to fight” (9).   To understand these concerns, Fennell did extensive research on the censorship summaries produced in each formation by officers who censored the troops’ outgoing letters.  These summaries were frequently produced and passed up the chain of command to help senior leaders gauge the moral and effectiveness of their men.

Fennell also focuses on the social composition of the armies that were brought into being after the outset of war.   The British and Commonwealth armies were raised from populations that were “far less fervent and less deferent” than those who supposedly flocked to the colours in 1914.  The British government knew that conscription would be necessary from the outset:  of the three million men raised to join the Army of 700,000 under arms in September 1939, three-quarters were conscripts (63).  The Commonwealth armies were volunteer forces at the start of the war, but there was little “widespread enthusiasm” to join these armies, while minority populations (Canadian French, South African Afrikans) were particularly reluctant to volunteer and even less happy about conscription.   Deferments of professional and skilled workers meant that “semi-skilled and unskilled classes … were particularly represented” in the armies.  

Why did the British and Commonwealth armies perform so poorly from 1939-42, what Fennell calls the “great crisis of the Empire”?  A huge reason was lack of training.  In June 1941, for example, only ten percent of the British Army were fully trained regulars.  There was a shortage of equipment, uniforms, and training areas sufficient for a whole brigade to exercise (221).   The quality of officer training was often poor, and theatre-specific training was often left up to unit COs to implement if they felt like it, so, for example, many of the units defending Malaya were wholly unfamiliar with jungle training.  

Besides the training deficit, there was what Fennell calls an “ideological deficit”.  Governments expected their soldiers to fight the Nazis and preserve the Empire, which required an “innate commitment and fighting ability of its citizens and subects” (255).   The problem was that most troops had little commitment to the British Empire (especially Indian troops), were dissatisfied with their poor pay and treatment compared to the high wages earned by skilled workers in the war industries, and had memories of the poor treatment and unemployment of demobilized soldiers after the Great War.    Generals lamented that their troops were “readier to surrender” than their foes and realized that “many of the troops still want to know what we are fighting for” (255).    After the defeat of Eighth Army at Gazala in 1942, 88 per cent of all casualties were men reporting sick or who had surrendered.   British commanders like Auchinleck asked the government to reinstate the death penalty for cowardice and desertion; these requests were refused.

By 1944, the British and Commonwealth armies had improved training, focused extensively on soldier welfare, and had learned to conserve their dwindling manpower by doctrines such as Montgomery’s set-piece “Colossal Cracks” battles.    Commanders learned to only ask “of their troops what they were capable of and trained to do” (688).   However, hard limits were reached.  The New Zealand troops essentially mutinied over a botched 1943 furlough scheme, the South African populace had largely ceased to support their government’s war effort, and the Canadian government’s attempt to introduce conscription was a military and political failure. 

With victory in sight, what soldiers wanted most was an assurance that things would be better after the war – that better housing, better employment, better education would be a tangible reward for their sacrifice.  Army education schemes to help the soldiers understand what they were fighting for ironically radicalized the troops politically, which explains in part why Churchill, who cared more the survival of the Empire than he did for social engineering projects, lost the 1945 election.   Philip Zec’s famous 1945 cartoon sums up the hope of the soldiers that the peace would finally be an opportunity for the working classes.  One example of this radicalization that I didn’t know of in my own country’s history is that in 1945, Canadian progressive parties won 58% of the civilian vote and a whopping 71% of the votes of soldiers who had recently fought in NW Europe.

Fennell’s book has a demythologizing agenda, to be sure – he wants to debunk the idea that British and Commonwealth soldiers were “stolid … apolitical and uninterested in the broader meaning of the war” (697).   They were brave, they learned, and by the end of the war they were effective and well-trained armies that also “yearned for the camaraderie and equality of the battlefront to be present on their return to civvy street” (697).  

I’m glad I persisted in reading this massive book because it took me a little closer to the mindsets of the troops who did the bulk of the fighting and dying on the ground.   As a Canadian who used to be quite the Anglophile, I always thought that the pluck and elan of the British and Commonwealth troops always got them through a tight scrape – I am sure I’d internalized old propaganda films like The Way Ahead.    In fact, the history of those armies up to 1942 is often a series of lamentable disasters as poorly trained, unmotivated, and poorly led troops learned their business the hard way while the Empire collapsed around them.    For wargaming, even in a small-scale action, Fennell’s book should lead us to question our first assumptions about troop quality, morale and training.  We can ask these questions without questioning the bravery or heroism of these soldiers.

Reading Roundup: Wars Past and Future

Not a lot of gaming or painting getting done of late.  I have my head down trying to generate the first draft of my MA thesis in time to meet an April defence date and a return to the uniform and whatever military posting awaits me.  In between thinking and writing about religious pluralism in the Canadian Armed Forces, I do however pick up the odd book or read something non-thesis related just to give my mind a rest.  Here are some reports and recommendations from that front.
 I never blogged anything about the Brad Pitt film Fury when I saw it last fall.  I went with my brother The Mad Colonel, a retired infantry and staff officer, and he was somewhat non-committal about it.  For my part I thought it excelled at catching the feel of tank warfare in World War Two, and the interaction between the characters rang true to what I know of soldiers.  Mind you,  I had some issues with the final scene, where a happy, intact SS battalion was marching around Germany in the last days of the war, singing lustily but had somehow forgotten its antiarmor drills, but I digress.



Recently I stumbled across this interview with Steven Zaloga, an American defence analyst and historian, who thought that given “the limits of what you can do in Hollywood … I thought it was very authentic”.  That made me feel a little more kindly towards the film, and even want to give it a second look.

I was also interested in some of Zaloga’s criticisms of some of the accepted truisms on tank warfare in NW Europe, specifically that the Sherman was a deathtrap (Zaloga says the “Ronson” image is “nonsense”), or that the Allies paid five Shermans lost to take out one German tank (Zaloga attributes this to cliche to an over reliance on British authors and their experiences of Normandy, not true of US-German kill rates at all).  Anyway the article is quite interesting and worth a read.  I found this bit especially interesting, given how war gamers and modellers love the big German tanks and often over-represent them on the table.

“To give you a general sense, in April of 1945 the Germans have about 90 tanks on all of the Western Front.  All tanks, everything, Panthers, Panzer IV, Tigers.  They had a handful of Tigers.  They had about 400 other armoured vehicles, assault guns, Stug III and things like that.  So they had just short of 500 armoured vehicles on the entire Western Front, from the North Sea all the way down to Bavaria and Southern Germany.  At that point in time the United States had 11,000 tank and tank destroyers, to give you some sense of the disparity in forces."

Zaloga's forthcoming book Armored Champion is on my wish list - coming out from Stackpole this May.   Zaloga also recommends a book from his colleague Robert Forcyzk, Shwerpunkt: Tank Warfare on the Eastern Front, 1941-42.  Forcyzk knows German and Russian and uses sources largely unused by popular military historians.

The other day I posted on an oddity from the Cold War.

If future war is your thing, you might want to look at five short pieces imagining what the first shots of the next world conflict might look like.  A US think tank called The Atlantic Council and the War On the Rocks website recently sponsored a contest for creative writing submissions that imagined how such a conflict might spin up, and the five winners are posted here.  Hopefully it’s not a spoiler to let you know that drones and the internet figure prominently in these submissions, as does China and the kind of undeclared, deniable proxy wars currently being perfected by the Russians.   If you’re a resident of a Pacific country, these scenarios might be disturbing.  The conflicts imagined here pose an interesting challenge for wargames designers, in that a generation ago, all you had to do was imagine the Red Army and the Warsaw Pact rolling across the West German border and you’re away to the races.  These submissions suggest that the next war will be a lot more chaotic and fluid than that - see Sydney Freedberg’s Talinin is Burning for an example.

Speaking of World War Three, I used to be quite a fan of WW3-themed wargames back when they were plentiful in the 1980s. They were so plentiful that I recall an interview with Jim Dunnigan in which he said that they kept SPI afloat until ’89, when the Cold War ended and the bottom fell out of that market.  I always wanted SPI’s monster game The Next War, and if you have a copy you want to sell, let’s talk. I did recall a game I  haven’t played in ages, Anyway, I dug out my copy of this classic, and am hoping to play it at some point if I can get another thesis chapter done this week, and if I can get my Longstreet game finished.



The only problem I have is that there isn’t a kitten-proof surface in the house.

Finally, returning to books, our friend Edwin King, wearing his bookseller hat, has started carrying reprints from the History of Wargaming project.  I’ve treated myself to a reprint of the Peter Young classic, Charge! (Ross Mac says it’s an essential read, and who am I to argue with Ross?) as well as Paddy Griffith’s book on Napoleonic Wargaming.  Check out Edwin’s blog and send some business his way.
Blessings to your books,  MP+

Book Review: Chris Stoesen's CSS Appomattox

One of my wargaming heroes is Chris Stoesen - blogger, historian, researcher, scenario writer and all around good egg can now add novelist to his resume.  



CSS Appomatox is an altnerate history novel set in a world where the Confederacy won the American Civil War.  In Chris’ carefully thought out and quite plausible version of events, the Confederacy has made its own peace with its past.  Slavery is abolished and blacks even serve in the CSA military.  The South has established an uneasy cold war peace with the North, and forged alliances with some of the European powers including Spain, except for Germany, a Northern ally.  This book begins as Germany picks a fight with Spain over her Caribbean holdings, Cuba and Puerto Rico.   The Confederacy commits her newest technology, an armed airship, to stop the German expeditionary forces. I need to be careful that I say airship and not balloon.  It is definitely not a balloon.

The hero of the novel is Thomas Devareaux, a tough and technologically minded naval officer who is luckier in war than he is in love.  He has a series of adventures in the air and on the land, and is supported by a crew of sailors, marines, technical wizards and shadowy intelligence operatives.  I won’t spoil the plot for you.

CSS Appomatox reminded me a little of the alt-history novels of Harry Turtledove, except with a much tighter focus on a small cast of characters.   I won’t flatter Chris by competing him further to the likes of a writer like Turtledove.  There are some rough edges to his style, and you definitely know that you aren’t reading the work of a professional writer.   However, how many of us can say that we’re written a novel?  Probably a lot fewer than the number of us who have wanted to write one.

CSS Appomatox is self-published and available on Amazon as an e-book.  It’s as cheap as chips so treat yourself to a copy in your e-stocking.

Reading Chris’ book makes me want to order the Avalanche Press title Zeppelin from its Great War at Sea series and put some warships against giant balloons … not balloons, Zeppelins!  Zeppelins!  AHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!

They Don't Do History Like This Anymore

 

 

Imagine my delight to find this book in a local used book store, for a quite decent price.   I read it once as an undergrad and thought at the time that it was pretty stirring stuff.  Then I went to graduate school and learned how academic professionals think about historiography, and I am fairly sure that Elting’s book would not pass muster on the syllabus of a history course at a major university today.   Fortunately for us, Elting was either ignorant of or ignored academic history.  He was a soldier, writing about soldiers, and we are all blessed for it.

Colonel John R. Elting (1911 - 2000) grew up in the American West and first joined the US Army in 1933.  His first commission was in the Reserve Officer Training Corps at Stanford University in 1932, and he described serving in a unit of “horse-drawn field artillery, equipped with the famous Model 1897 “French 75”.  (Much later I would realize that this had had historical value; like Napoleon’s gunners, I had learned something about what horses could do and the problems of caring for them”.

Much of his writing is peppered with observations that come from his own experience.  In describing how Napoleon favoured riding in coaches while doing staff work on the march,  Elting notes that “A general could not study reports or maps astride a galloping horse.  (Even gentle, well-trained horses usually object to having a map suddenly unfolded right behind their ears and take unpredictable action to remove that nuisance)” (Swords 76).   One wonders if he learned that lesson about maps and horses the hard way as a young officer cadet (or as Elting would say, a “shavetail”) from his first days with horses and guns.    Sometimes the slang is absolutely delightful, as when Elting speaks of the French cavalrymen’s habit of using up horses: “Even when long service hd taught him how to handle his mount, he tended to remain the sort of rough rider who had, in the parlance of my Montana boyhood, “teeth in his ass” (Sowrds 317).  Other gems of mid-twentieth century slang are scattered through the book, as when Elting refers to an eccentric officer as an “eight ball”.

I couldn’t imagine a better introduction to Napoleon’s army than this book, however dated it might be.   Each arm of the service gets a careful and detailed study, in the wider context of the period, from the last years of the Royal Army to the Hundred Days.   There is no nuanced, objective portrait of Napoleon.   Clearly Elting revered the man, and I am sure wished he could have served under him in another lifetime.   He spares few opportunities to praise Napoleon’s appetite for work and for detail, his bravery, and his devotion to the profession of arms, as in this account of the retreat from Moscow and of how the Emperor raced back to Paris to raise a new army before news of the disaster became widely known:  “He left Smorgoniye on December 5 and reached Paris just before midnight of December 18, covering almost 1,300 miles of winter roads in thirteen days, wearing out six vehicles and half of his party.  That dash had been almost entirely improvised, its first stages through debatable country with only light escorts, which had orders not to allow him to be captured alive.  The morning of December 19 he was hard at work.” (Swords 79).  I remember a few years back on a staff ride of the Little Big Horn with another retired US Army colonel who clearly revered Custer, historiography be damned.  Soldiers like soldiers.

Elting was an armoured officer in Europe in World War Two (he co-authored the tactical manuals on the tank battalion and company that his tanker peers used in Europe), and his postwar service included West Point, Asia and finally, as a staff officer (G2) in the Washington Military District in the mid 1960s, where he describes having a front-line view of the Vietnam-era protests and may have pondered Napoleon’s dictum about crowds and whiffs of grapeshot.  As he himself wryly noted of these last days in uniform, "I had ample opportunity to study the underside of democracy in action and to ponder the ancient proverb that 'God looks after small children, idots, drunken sailors, and the United States of America’.”  He would have gotten along well with my own dad, who retired as an infantry major in 1968 and as a crew-cut middle-aged civvie went to university in the glory days of hippiedom.

Elting had a prolific career as an historian, writing about Napoleonic matters and the War of 1812.   His commentary in the two-volume Napoleonic Uniforms collection of Herbet Knotel’s colour plates is amazing.  Other historians wrote numerous tributes to Elting’s generosity in helping them research and write their books.   One historian recalled how he was mystified at how one side managed to get 700 horses across the St. Lawrence River during the 1813 Crysler’s Farm campaign.  He called Elting and they “worked out a very probable answer, based on such historical evidence as I had and Colonel John’s own memories of a river-crossing exercise undertaken in dust-bowl Kansas in the mid-1930s.  That kind of rare but extremely useful expertise is unfortunately lost to us."  

John Elting died at his desk in his study, and for me, at least, it’s hard to imagine a better way to go.  Just before his death, he wrote this note to a friend and fellow historian.  

"Dusk.... I'm in the Night Hawk Guard's square at La Belle Alliance [Waterloo], fumbling for one last cartridge. Too many heart failures over last few months, and nothing much left for the next one.... Been great knowing you."

Colonel John, I wish I’d known you.  Thank you for your books and for your example as a soldier and as an historian, sans pareil.

 

 

Book Review: A British Army Doctor's War as Retold by His Grandson

 

Just a quick plug of a book review I just put on my other blog (aka the God Blog) of a fantastic book about a British Army Medical Officer and his experiences (1914-1915).  Fans of the Great War, of the British Army, of the BEF, and of medical and social history will enjoy this book.

MP+

Book Review: Daily Life in Arthurian Britain

 

Deborah J. Shepherd, Daily Life in Arthurian Britain (Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood/ ABC-CLIO, 2013, ISBN 978-0-313-33295-1).

 Here’s another title from the new books section of my university library.  I picked it up because I was once quite interested in Arhuriana and also because a number of my gaming and blogging friends are interested in Dark Ages Britain, particularly thanks to Too Fat Lardies’ Dux rules.  Also, I was procrastinating on getting those term papers finished.

It would probably be more honest if the title was called “Daily Life in Post Roman Britain” or “Daily Life in Fifth and Sixth Century Britain”, but I suppose it’s always a better marketing move to put King Arthur in the title if you can.   The book focuses on the geography, people, and social and military organization of Britain in its long and gradual transition from Roman to Anglo-Saxon dominance.

The author is a well-published archaeologist specializing in Dark Ages Britain and Finland.  Dr. Shepherd’s knowledge is considerable, but the book is pitched at the introductory level, intended for beginners to the period and high school and college students.  Wargamers will be especially interested in Chapter 7, “Keeping Order”, which describes the gradual replacement of Roman military organization by a native British one.   This chapter taught me that by the fourth century the Romans would have recruited their auxiliary troops from the northern native British population, who would have consolidated in fortified places and remained there after Roman administration gradually fell away.   These former Roman garrisons would have had a symbiotic relationship with the local farmers and gradually morphed into hereditary ruling families leading their war bands.  “The situation could scarcely have been better tailored by the Romans beforehand for the reconstruction of native British society” (199).

Wargamers probably have many more detailed and technical books to draw on for the military detail they need, but I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to get a better feel for post-Roman British society and culture.

Speaking of the Dark Ages, Mdme. Padre and I are almost finished watching Season 1 of the History Channel series The Vikings.   I know little about Viking culture, but it seems to be well researched and has the feel of history rather than fantasy.   We are quite enjoying it.  However, after watching Northumbrian soldiers getting butchered like sheep, Mdme Padre asked “Was it only the Vikings who knew how to fight?”.   It was a good question.  The actors playing the Vikings all look like extras from the 300 movie, only blonder, whereas the non-Vikings all looked pale, pudgy, and faintly ridiculous in their armour, and seemed to look at their weapons with befuddlement before being hacked down.    I suspect, if Anglo-Saxon poems like “The Battle of Maldon” are any guide, that they were tougher opponents than that.  Still, terrific fun, but not enough to make me want to go and buy Dark Ages figures.   I have enough periods, and Dark Ages battles simply don’t look that interesting to me.  De gustibus non disputandum set and all that.

Blessings to your brushes and die rolls!

MP+

What I’m Reading: The Soldier’s General: Bert Hoffmeister at War.

Douglas Delaney, The Soldier’s General: Bert Hoffmeister at War. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2005.

Among the papers I inherited from my dad is his class yearbook, Snowy Owl, from the Canadian Army Staff College (1955 ). Towards the end is a profile on the class of 1942, whose candidates included Bert Hoffmeister, then a Major and company commander with the Seaforth Highlanders of Canada. Hoffmeister’s brief reminiscence of the course is worth quoting in full.

"The expression “Death Takes a Holiday” has seldom been used more appropriately than on the occasion when students of the Fourth CJWSC were called on to demonstrate their skill on combination motor bikes to the satisfaction of the G1. With hardly an introduction to these gas demons, hearts quailed over the prospect of piloting these machines through Kingston, stopping, then facing up to the return journey. Had the good citizens of Kingston received any inkling of the risk to which they were being exposed that day, the streets would have been as empty as those of Cassino during heavy shelling. This unforgettable experience miraculously ended well and was indeed a conditioner for later events under fire, where in my opinion the odds were much more favourable.”

Motorcycle adventures aside, the time Hoffmeister spent at Staff College is an important chapter the story Delaney tells about how an inexperienced militia officer became one of the most successful of a now mostly forgotten group, Canada’s World War Two generals, and the commander of a storied outfit, the Fifth Canadian Armoured Division (5CAD), “the Mighty Maroon Machine”. An infantry officer and a faculty member at Royal Military College, Delaney’s focus is that of the military professional, showing how Hoffmeister learned the tradecraft of command. Non-military readers may find this book to be dry and technical, but as Jack Granatstein notes in his introduction, there’s a dearth of scholarship on the men who commanded Canadian troops in the World Wars, and this book is fine account of an important Canadian soldier.

Bert Hoffmeister might easily be offered as an example of an enduring national stereoptype, the amateur colonial soldier who took to war and who succeeded where bumbling British professionals had failed. Hoffmeister's fellow British Columbian, Sir Arthur Currie, comes to mind in this regard. Nothing could be further from the story that Delaney tells. Bert Hoffmeister was an amateur soldier before the war. An up and coming lumber executive in Vancouver, BC, he was an officer with the Seaforth Highlanders, a militia infantry regiment. The militia were willing but poorly trained soldiers in the interward period. What training they did with the regular army, the Permanent Force, was deficient. Hoffmeister recalled that the regular officers he met where “sad”, “lethargic”, “overweight”. “drank too much” and were mostly “useless”, and as a result, he admitted, “I knew damn all about tactics” (p. 18).

Mobilized in 1939 at the declaration of war, Hoffmeister and the Seaforths went to England as part of the First Canadian Division. They were well-intentioned, but their training never went much beyond basic soldier skills. Through 1940 Hoffmeister worked hard as a conscientious company commander, but he was acutely aware that he lacked any real knowledge of how to make decisions on the battlefield. By January 1941 he was suffering symptoms of a nervous breakdown, including partial paralysis. As Hoffmeister remembered, his breakdown was “brought on by the anxiety of having responsibility for a hundred men, [being] responsible for their lives, taking them into battle, and not having the necessary training to ensure that I would do a satisfactory job” (p. 30). In an army that still today views mental crises as signs of weakness, the story of Hoffmeister’s breakdown and his subsequent recovery is an important one to remember. It reminds us that fear and stress can occur even in the best soldiers, and can be countered in many ways that leave the soldier and the unit more, not less, effective.

Hoffmeister recovered thanks to army psychiatrists who believed he could recover by talking through the issues that led to his strain. He also recovered thanks to the influence of the British General Bernard Montgomery, then senior commander in Southeastern England, who instituted more realistic training and who aggressively weeded out non-performers and sent them back to Canada. Hoffmeister would later describe himself as a “disciple” of Montgomery. By autumn 1942 Hoffmeister had passed his staff course in Kingston and was back in England as the Seaforth’s battalion commander. It was the first of step in his rapid wartime rise. Once he regained his confidence, Hoffmeister’s people skills served him well with his troops. One of his NCO’s remembered that “He was in there all the time, every exercise or scheme, he was in there leading. He’d come around and ask people how they were doing … He was very good with the troops” (p. 42).

The main thread of Delaney’s biography is how Hoffmeister combined character and courage with increasing military knowledge and craft. The latter could be learned, the former were his gifts. As a battalion and brigade commander, he was brave enough to lead from the front, gathering tactical information first hand and inspiring subordinates with his confidence and energy. One of his officers remembers during the battle for Ortona that Hoffmeister, then commander of 1st Canadian Infantry Brigade, visited him and said “’Great show, Syd, terrific show, you are doing great’. He patted me on the back when all I wanted to say was, ‘For Christ’s sake, Bert, can’t I have a rest [?].’ There was no way I could say that to him. He was so great that way … I was so impressed with the way he inspired and put so much spirit into people. You couldn’t say no to him” (p. 103).

When he moved to divisional command of 5CAD, Hoffmeister learned that he could not manage a larger battle from the front. He also learned that he could no longer visit his wounded troops in hospital, because the experience left him feeling like a “dishrag” and he became worried that his concern for his soldiers “could affect my judgment in planning an attack” (p. 152). Hoffmeister led his division ably in the last big battles of the Italian campaign, and then led 5CAD in the Liberation of the Netherlands. While he was in Italy he served under the British Eighth Army, and found their command style to be informal, relying extensively on verbal orders. Under fellow Canadians Harry Crerar and Guy Simmonds, the atmosphere was formal, everything was written, and there was less “mutual rapport” (p. 206). In short, the Canadians were more British than the British! Hoffmeister did well in Holland, and he finished the war at home as commander of the Canadian contingent preparing to invade the Japanese home isles. After the war he returned to Vancouver and the lumber industry and died in 1999 at a vigorous ninety-two.

Doug Delaney has done us a great service by reminding us of a fine Canadian soldier. Bert Hoffmeister was an amateur who became a professional. He learned from role models such as Montgomery, cared for his soldiers, tried to preserve their lives through careful planning and simple orders, and inspired them to give their best. During the battle of Agira in Sicily in 1943, one of his Seaforths, a corporal and a radio operator named Corporal Denis Meade, won the Military Medal for manning an exposed position to keep Hoffmeister in radio contact with his subunits. As Meade said later, he took the risk because “I didn’t want to let [Hoffmeister] down” (p. 70). As Delaney notes, the ability to inspire such loyalty in his troops was the key to his success, and made “Hoffy” stand out amongst other Canadian generals.

What I'm Reading: Achtung Schweinhund

What I'm Reading: Harry Pearson, Achtung Schweinhund! A Boy's Own Story of Imaginary Combat (London: Little, Brown, 2007).

If you grew up in a family with a grandfather, father, or uncle who served in World War Two or Korea, then you are probably well on your way to appreciating this book. The World War Two bit is important because the cultural and historical background is important. It means you, like Pearson, likely heard war stories, and, if you grew up in Europe like my friend Pete, you saw war debris and old garden air raid shelters in your neighbourhood. Even if you grew up in North America, like me, you likely watched Rat Patrol, Combat, Hogan's Heroes, etc on TV, you likely read comics like Sgt. Rock and Haunted Tank, and you likely remember the smell of plastic glue melting polystyrene as you struggled with Airfix models. That is, if you were a boy, as this book is unabashedly about the masculine world. I don't recall girls of my generation reading Sgt. Rock or playing Avalon Hill's Blitzkrieg, which probably explains why my friends' wives don't do much more than lovingly (if we're lucky) tolerate their husband's wargaming obsessions. I suppose I could say more about this aspect if I had a degree in gender studies, but I think the dichotomy is pretty obvious.

If you didn't grow up in the 1950s or 60s, then the world Pearson describes is likely foreign to you. My fifteen year old daughter's cultural map does not include any of the TV shows mentioned above - she told me recently that she had never even heard of Hogan's Heroes. My thirteen year old son knows a Schmeisser machine pistol from a bazooka, which makes me proud, but he's learned that invaluable information from playing games like Medal of Valour on computer gaming consoles. He's more likely to want to play with Space Marines and Space Orks then he is to want to play with WW2 "army men" and as Pearson (and I) did at that age, shout things like "take that, Hun" or "for you ze var is over, Englander". For my son and daughter's generation, history seems to be a generic place called "the past" where the historical eras depicted in Orlando Bloom films (antiquity, the Crusades, pirate times) are all jumbled up and happened more or less at the same time.

So all of that to say that the likely readers of Harry Pearson are likely to be people like me - male, middle aged or getting there, and obsessed with war because we grew up under its shadow, and unlike our parents' generation, who had their fill of it, we still want to play it. The word "play" is one of Pearson's themes, for he is understandably self-conscious about being a middle aged man with a wife and a family and a mortgage who spends valuable hours of his remaining years of life painting and playing with miniature soldiers or "little men" as my own wife calls them. Reviewers readily jump on this theme; Britain's Guardian called the book a tribute to "the fine art of time wasting".

Pearson tells a hilarious story of being cornered on a commuter train by a corpulent "extrovert geek" who recognizes a kindred spirit when he spots the copy of Wargames Illustrated magazine that Pearson is reading. "I should have said, 'This is for my son. He's just turned eleven so I'm hoping he'll soon drop this foolish toy soldier lark in favour of solvent abuse and masturbation'. But these thngs never come to you until after the event, do they?" (p. 234). As the fellow bellows at him from several seats away, Pearson describes how "Whatever was left of my self-esteem shrivelled to the size of a walnut and attempted to throw itself out of the window" (p. 234).

I've recognized the same challenge to my self-esteem on many occasions. At the last wargames convention I visited, the hotel was thronged with men, mostly from age 30-50+, many quite overweight, many calling their parent's basement home, and many apparently quite unfamiliar with the rudiments of personal hygeine judging from the pungent aroma hanging over the hall. To see so many chaps in appalling T Shirts (eg, "Hitler's European Tour, 1939 - 1945: Poland, Holland, Denmark, France, etc" - hilarious!), debating the merits of which rules system best captures morale tests for cavalry charges, and fondling ziplocked bags of lead figures, leads to the inescapable question, "am I one of these?" But look beyond the unwashed bodies to the fruits of their imagination and passion - tables with scenery that often would rival the best of a model railroad group, figures painted with loving attention to detail, and a shared interest in the past, and you see something quite extraordinary. You see boys (and the occasional girl) who were given a bag of crudely molded army men as children, and who immediately longed for the day when as adults they could do so much more - build armies with the money they would earn as adults, make life-sized buildings instead of using lego or wooden blocks, and meet in like-minded fraternities free of the bullying and fashion-ruled mindlessness that reigned in their school corridors. Here they are now, mostly jovial and good natured, often quite self-mocking, mostly loving if slightly eccentric parents and spouses, and here is a world that they have created, a world of tongue-in-cheek heroism, creativity, and wonder. As Pearson concludes, "Every man needs a place to go, Montaigne had said, and for better or worse, this was mine".

What I'm Reading: Anne Rice's Christ the Lord Out of Egypt

Anne Rice, Christ the Lord Out of Egypt (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005).

What do Harry Potter (especially in the first HP novel) and Jesus Christ have in common? Other than being the heros of bestselling books, both are (as imagined by J.K. Rowling and Anne Rice respectively) young boys who are growing into miraculous powers, who are destined to fight evil powers, who are trying to unravel the mysteries of their earliest years, and who are surrounded by adults and parent figures who won't tell them everything they want to know.

Northrop Frye once said that there are only so many stories in the world, and they are simply retold with variations. I don't know whether Rice or Rowling had any influence on one another, or whether they are both playing variations on a 2,000 year old tune. I do know that I enjoyed Rice's Christ the Lord (CtheL)far more than I had expected to.

The childhood of Jesus has fascinated Christians throughout the centuries. If you believe in the divinity of Jesus, then you have to wonder, "when did he know what he was and who he was"? The canonical or approved scripture of the church is largely silent on the question, except for St. Luke's account of the young Jesus calmly discussing law and theology with the priests of the temple during his parents' stay in Jerusalem (Luke 2:41-52). However, a number of the non-canonical gospels and accounts of Jesus' life from the earliest days of the church tell many stories about miracles and acts of power that Jesus did as a young boy. These stories include making clay birds fly, causing another boy to drop dead, and then bringing him back to life. One of the most charming of these stories, which was well loved in the Middle Ages, tells of how the young Jesus made an apple tree bend down so his mother Mary could pluck the sweetest fruit from its high branches.


Christ the Lord borrows from this tradition of apocryphal accounts of Jesus' early life. However, Anne Rice has made it clear that her understanding of the story is orthodox, that she believes that Jesus was the son of God. Her book can be understood as an extended meditation on Luke's comment that "The child grew and became strong, filled with wisdom; and the favour of God was upon him (Lk 2:40). As a gifted storyteller, she portrays Jesus growing into his identity, as he tries to comprehend the reluctance of the adults around him to explain the circumstances of his birth, including the flight into Egypt to escape King Herod's massacre of the young boys in Bethlehem. She shows an impressive understanding of life in the ancient world, including cultural clashes between Jews and gentiles, and her characters have an authentic humanity about them, as if she has freed them from their iconic places in our culture.

I picked up this book not knowing what to expect. I knew of Anne Rice from years ago through some of her vampire novels and some of her erotic writing, and so I was not expecting to be sympathetic to her handling of the story. What I didn't know was that during the years of work that she put into this book, reading a massive amount of material from Christian and secular scholars (her bibliography alone is worth the price of the book), Anne Rice became deeply convinced that Jesus was who he said he was, the Son of God. In a moving epilogue, Rice describes how the writing led her back to the Catholic faith of her childhood, but with a new and richer understanding of who Jesus was and who she was. As a person of faith myself, I found Rice's story as moving as her fictional account of the young Jesus. I find it miraculous in itself that Rice, with a fan following of millions, is bringing the Christian story to millions who might not otherwise have time for it.

I would recommend this book to Christians who want to gain a deeper insight into the world of Jesus, and want to enrich their devotional lives - they will find much to meditate on here. I hope non-Christians also read this book; they will find much to ponder here.

MP+

What I'm Reading: Cormac McCarthy's The Road

Cormac McCarthy's The Road (New York: Random House/Vintage, 2006).

Something in us dreams of our own destruction. Perhaps it is the spirit of our age, the pessimism that seeps into us with the news that resources are running out, that the world is dying and we are sickening, that the terrorists will get us. Esquire magazine's review said that it is "exactly what a book about our future should be like" I don't know if The Road is a product of this pessimism. Lesser books I've read, like Max Brook's World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie Wars, actively trade on our media-implanted fears that we are living in an end-time with no saving rapture to hope for. Certainly that's how the publishers view it. I was bemused to find in the bibliographical data that it is cross-referenced with books about 3) Regression (Civilisation) - Fiction and 4. Survival skills - Fiction. Wow - I had no idea that Regression (Civilisation) was a legitimate sub-genre in its own right - lots of cheery reading there, to be sure.

Perhaps this labeling would amuse McCarthy, who I sense is too smart a writer to acknowledge that he is naming the fears of our own day. Like Samuel Beckett, he wants to peel as way as many layers of our lives as possible to find the core things that keep us alive. Maybe McCarthy is more interested in a timeless existentialism than the threats lurking in today's headlines, but one thing is for sure, this book scared the pants off me regardless. Look up reviews for The Road and you'll find words like "harrowing" and "unspeakable" used freely, and aptly, I would say.

I love McCarthy, something I say on the strength of what I've read of him so far, All the Pretty Horses, the first volume of his novels set on the Texas-Mexico border. McCarthy's prose is both sparing and poetic, his landscapes harsh and unforgiving, his characters are tough, alienated, and are driven by moral codes that don't always serve them well in the world they move in.

The backstory of The Road is only hinted at. There was a nuclear war, and the boy was born the night after the bombs fell and as the cities burned. This boy is the key to the novel. He has miraculously survived years of nuclear winter, starvation, and the descent of America into savage tribes of cannibals. There is an innate goodness to the boy, his concern that he and his father are "the good guys", and his desire to help the few unfortunates they meet on the way. The father is convinced that the boy is "the only thing godspoke left in the world (if God didnt speak in the boy he never spoke at all)" and therefore his goal is to save the boy for an unknown future in a dead world. The boy's mother on the other hand lost all faith that life had any purpose, even that they were alive, and took her life.

There is a vortex at the heart of this book, a kind of black hole of nullity that rips away everythign - names of states and months, creeds and debates, memories, identities, hope. The boy's mother speaks of it in a remembered conversation before her suicide: "As for me my only hope is for eternal nothingness and I hope for it with all my heart". The man resists this vision, but it is as if he can only carry a few scraps of memory and humanity into a hopeless future: "Make a list. Recite a litany. Remember". Within this conflict of nothingness versus tattered hope is a second tension, the boy's innocent goodness, as evidenced by his desire to help the few other unfortunates they encounter, and the man's grim and survival-focused selfishness.

Amidst the horrors and challenges of this book is the sheer pleasure of McCarthy's command of language. Scrabble-players will feast on the richness of language; it is as if McCarthy is deliberately and routinely confronting us with unknown, half-understood words, perplexing the reader and reinforcing the sense of a world turned alien and meaningless. I offer a short list of examples:

"The cold illucid world"
"He descended into a gryke in the stone"
"They were discalced to a man like pilgrims of some common order for their shoes were long since stolen."

It's tempting to ask what sort of hope McCarthy offers in this bleak future. To be sure there is goodness. The boy has learned from his father that they are "the good guys", which makes them a distinct minority in this cannibal-haunted landscape. What future there is for goodness, hope, or the place of God is for the reader to decide. For myself, I'm haunted by the elegiac final paragraph, a look back to a pre-lapsarian time when the earth was rich and beautiful, "Of a thing which could not be put back. Or be made right again", and I can't help but think that this book's future stands perilously close to our present.

MP+

Victor Davis Hanson's A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Pelopennesian War (New York: Random House, 2005).

I first ran across Victor Davis Hanson while at a friend's place, channel-surfing his gazillion TV stations. A quiet-voiced but intense academic was reading from a book on a war that occurred almost 2500 years ago, and it sounded absolutely fascinating.

Perhaps the attraction of the Pelopennesian War is that it pitted two such dissimilar opponents against one another in a protracted and terrible war. In the popular imagination (or at least, in my imagination) the Spartans have the terrible appeal of fascism - a disciplined and single-minded barracks state - while the Athenians represent the best of what became, well, us - democracy, culture, philosophy - the whole package of Western values at its nascence. And there is the terrible, almost Sophoclean tragedy of these two cultures gutting each other, when it wasn't so long before, in the Persian War, that they stood side by side. Well, that's the appeal as I understand it. I had tried to read Thucydides' classic The Pelopennesian War some years ago, but lost heart in its labyrinth of minor intrigues and soon gave up. So Hanson is my first substantial guide to this conflict.

If you wanted a chronological account of the war, Hanson is probably not your best bet. His approach is to cover his subject through a number of themes explaining the "hows" of the war (as per the subtitle, "How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War".) Hence we move from "Fear" (why the Spartans decided to fight the Athenians) to Fire (the first Spartan attempts to destroy Athenian agriculture) to Plague (the consequences of disease that ravaged Athens after Pericles pulled the local population into the city to avoid the Spartan land army), through a variety of other subjects, including the transition from traditional hoplite (heavily armoured infantry following strict rules of formalized combat) warfare to a more modern-looking assymetrical style of warfare featuring terror and attrition, and the final phases of escalating naval warfare. These themes are arrayed chronologically, but perhaps not in enough detail to satisfy someone wanting a "this then that" coverage of the conflict.

I found much to like about Hanson as an historian. You gotta love a writer who can illustrate a discussion of how hard it was for Greek armies to uproot and destroy olive trees (the main crop of ancient Greece) with his own account of trying to cut down walnut and plum trees on his own farm in California. Hanson has walked the battlefields with a military historian's eye, so his insights into tactics and strategies are useful and welcome. Likewise as a classicist he can enlist contemporary sources to bring life to his narrative. A good example, and one of my favourite passages, is this description of the tireme, the warship of ancient Greece:

"A terror to enemies" and "a joy to her friends", Xenophon wrote of an oared ship in ramming mode, the chief method of attack. The swish of an oar, the rhothion, of a rapidly advancing tireme was famous. Both the sound and the look added to the drama, and presaged something terrible to come. Thucydides emphasized "the fear of the swishing" (phobos rhothiou) which only compounded the scary sight of a tireme bearing down. Tiremes, like later full-masted men-of-war, were beautiful and occasionally noisy vessels, and they captured contemporaries' imaginations in ways most other workmanlike warships, from Roman galleys to ironclads, did not. With a length six or seven times its width and massive ram, the sleek tireme in one sense was simply a floating spear." (pp. 239-240).

Fortunately this isn't just a military fan/historian geeking out on some cool piece of ancient kit (as we wargamers are prone to do). Besides interesting technical comments on the instability and relative unseaworthiness of these vessels, VDH is acutely aware of the human conditons on these ships: the rowers in the lowest bank of oars enduring "Sweat, thirst, blisters, exhaustion, urine, and feces - all this was in addition to the billows of the sea and the iron of the enemy" (238). His accounts of the collisions of hundreds of these vessels and the subsequent killing and drowning of thousands of men is sobering reading, but what really fascinates me is the motivation that led yet more thousands of Athenians to replace the lost crews and maintain the struggle in the final years of the war. In 406BC the Athenians rebuilt their fleet almost from scratch, one of the largest armadas in Greek history, manned by wealthy citizens and slaves who had been promised their freedom. As VDH puts it, "how Athens after the plague, Sicily, and continued attrition in the Ionian War could project such naval forces near the end of the third decade of the war staggers the imagination" (281). This fleet broke the Spartan-led Peloponnesian fleet at Arginusae, a fleet whose rowers were being paid by Persian gold whereas the Athenians were fighting for an ideology that put "old and young, slave and free, poor and wealthy on tiremes" (280).

In the end, the ideology of the war is for me the most fascinating and least explained aspect of this book. What would it have been like on an Athenian tireme where wealthy landholders and slaves were rowing and fighting together? What besides pride and self-preservation motivated the Athenians to keep fighting, and to try so hard to export their worldview to the rest of the ancient world? VDH touches on this issue in his chapter on sieges when he explains that a siege often forced factions in a city, democrats vs. oligarchs, to take sides and often fight their own battles within the walls, but as the focus of the book is on the how of the war, the why is not explained as well. I'm sure other books explain the whys better, and Hanson's biography is extensive if anyone wants to pursue this subject.

A democratic empire that tried to export its vision of the world, and which relied on its powerful navy, wealth, technology and culture. A conflict where asymmetrical warfare, guerilla tactics, terror and wildly swaying public opinion worked to negate military advantage. A mood of increasing brutality where civilians and captives were killed in the name of national security and revenge. These echoes may well sound familiar to we in the West in the early 21st century. Hanson doesn't push the comparison too far, and indeed in his personal blog he has some clear opinions on why the West needs to aggressively pursue its battle against Jihadism. But VDH is very clear that war, once pursued as an option, can seldom be contained or anticipated. His final paragraphs are memorable:

"The young men of Athens, on the eve of the initial Spartan invasion or during the debate about Sicily, are always eager for war, inasmuch as they have had no experience with it. In contrast, "the older men of the city", the more experienced, always are reluctant to invade, and thus often strive to give the enemy some way out during tough negotiations that otherwise might leave war as the only alternative. Thucydidean war can have utility and solve problems, and it often follows a grim logic of sorts; but once it starts, it may well last twenty-seven years over the entire Greek world rather than an anticipated thiry days in Attica and kill thousands at its end who were not born at its beginning." (313-314)

As I read these last paragraphs I thought of Seymour Hersh's recent pieces in the New Yorker on how the Bush administration is planning its next war against Iran; certainly the continuation of the Iraq War this long bears out the relevance of this echo from the past. Finally, as a soldier I am grateful for VDH's attention to the many dead soldiers and sailors of that war whose deeds are not recorded in Thucydides and who continue only as names in fragments of stone, who were "asked to settle through violence what words alone cannot. Remember them, for the Peloponnesian War was theirs alone" (314).

Mad Padre+

Summer Book Blogging Project


The Rev'd Canon Dr. Kendall Harmon's blog Titus ONE Nine ran a wonderful post recently describing a summer "Blog a Book" reading and blogging project. The project comes from Chuck Colson's BreakPoint - the description of the project is here and the list of recommended books by friends of BreakPoint is here. It just so happens that MadPadre found a copy of Anne Rice's Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt in the public library the other day and that will be my own blogging project for the summer. Once I get caught up with two other book reviews, I'll start reading and blogging and I hope for a comment or two as I go along.

What I'm Reading - Jane Hamilton's Disobedience

Some years back a relative mailed me a copy of this book, thinking that the content about American Civil War reenacting would be of interest to me. Actually I cringe a bit wondering how my family perceived me during that enthusiasm, and the reenacting content was incidental to my enjoyment of the book. Hamilton is a lovely, graceful writer, able to dig into the mundane details of everyday life and unearth some of our deepest longings, the emotions that we can barely articulate to ourselves.

The narrator, Henry, a teenager on the brink of going to college, by virtue that he is the only one in his family with computer savvy, discovers that his mother is having an affair. This knowledge obsesses him, threatening his sense of his family as a place of refuge and integrity. The title can thus be taken as referring to his mother's disobedience against Henry's rather stern code of who she should be for him and for her family, Henry's disbedience in violating his mother's secrets and walling himself off from her, or to the idea, from the first three lines of Milton's Paradise Lost ("Of Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit / Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste / Brought Death into the World) of the disobedience of human sin which forces us from our Edens. OK, that last thought may be a stretch - I blame those English degrees.

The most haunting character for me was the father, who (of course) at the end we learn knew more about his wife's affair than his son suspected, and who remains faithful to her and to his own idealism and optimism. He may be, as Henry calls him, "the patron saint of cuckolds" but as Henry closes his narration he admits that he stands in awe of a goodness that he can scarcely believe in.

I hope to come back to this author again.

Jane Hamilton's website:
http://www.randomhouse.com/features/janehamilton/