What Book to Read?

I recently saw the final episode of Tony Robinson’s World War I, which covers the last year of the war and the Allied victory, and it reminded me how accurate a picture John Buchan gives of the final German offensive in his 1919 book Mr Standfast. The title even echoes the argument of one of the historians on Robinson’s program: that the British fought best with their backs to the wall – ie, standing fast. I’m sure there are other books – Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front comes to mind – which give a much more realistic account of the experience of the war. Buchan’s book is one of his series of ‘shockers’ featuring Richard Hannay; he defines these as ‘the romance [– read adventure -] where the incidents defy the probabilities, and march just inside the borders of the possible’. They were designed to divert, not educate. They are books I read when I was young and I have a real soft spot for them – Empire loyalty and all. But my point is that Buchan had an accurate view of what happened, and used it cleverly in his story.

Buchan had good reason to know what was going on at the front. A lawyer by training, he worked as a war correspondent, as director of intelligence in the Ministry of Information with the rank of lieutenant colonel, and later as a director of Reuters news service. Greenmantle, the other of the Hannay books directly concerned with the war (reviewed here) also has some interesting observations about aspects of the conflict. These include the Young Turks movement and the Islamic revival in Turkey in the early years of the war. Hannay, working undercover in Germany, is actually involved with shipping arms to the Turks to fight the Allies at Gallipoli. And the Russian assault on the Turkish city of Erzurum is real – one of the few Tsarist victories of the war. Here, only the end of the story involves the factual trajectory of the war, when the Germans made their last desperate thrust to get around the Allied positions in northern France.

In this book, Hannay is again recalled from active duty and sent to work undercover, this time in a pacifist enclave at Biggleswick in rural England, the premise being that one of the German spies from The Thirty-Nine Steps is living and working there. Buchan is not hostile to the pacifists, though he clearly prefers those who serve; he makes a hero of a conscientious objector who becomes an unarmed messenger at the front. The code Hannay uses is based on The Pilgrim’s Progress; Mr Standfast is a character in that book. In this one, Peter Pienaar, who has joined the RAF, is his counterpart. The American Blenkiron is also in the story, and there is a new character, Mary Lamington, who Hannay falls in love with. Hannay is soon on the trail of the spy’s network, and chasing him through Switzerland and Italy. As with any quest, there are setbacks as well as victories. The reader always knows what will ultimately happen – it’s that sort of book – but Buchan is more than anything else a great story teller, and keeps the reader thoroughly intrigued along the way.

Mr Standfast is nevertheless my least favourite of the four Hannay stories, (not counting the much later Island of Sheep (1936), or the two other books in which he makes a minor appearance). Too much of it isn’t ‘just inside the borders of the possible’; it’s firmly outside. There’s too much coincidence. The villain gets to gloat over Hannay and of course tell him of his nefarious plans – a plot device I never like. Buchan is notoriously bad at female characters; Mary is far too good to be true. The section dealing with the war comes at the end, and isn’t fully integrated into the rest of the story; it fulfils a purpose more related to what happens in The Pilgrim’s Progress than what happens in the spy story. You have to suspend disbelief, but if you can do so, despite my reservations it’s a good read.

While I found the section on the war at the end to be a clever use of imaginary events that could have happened , Buchan perhaps didn’t take the war story far enough. What he emphasises is the importance of aircraft reconnaissance to the battle to stop the Germans breaking through at Amiens. He doesn’t present it as the turning point it was in the nature of the war, from the horrific slaughter of the static trench stalemate that had prevailed for so long, to a much more fluid and coordinated push by air and ground forces supported by the relatively new weapon, the tank (first used September 1916). I was pleased to see Tony Robinson giving credit to the Australian General, John Monash, for the so called ’Dark Day of the War’ for Germany, the battle which the incident Buchan describes is part of. A civil engineer, not a career soldier, Monash saw the potential of tanks and planes more readily than some of his professional army colleagues. If only this had happened earlier in the war … I might need to read Roland Perry’s biography of him – Monash: The Outsider Who Won A War (2007).

There’s a lot about John Buchan on the internet; you can read a brief outline of his life and work here. Aside from being Governor General of Canada, Buchan is probably best remembered for his shockers, though he would have preferred to be remembered as an historian. You could look out for his own History of the Great War (1922).