Greenmantle: The Great War as Adventure

The Christmas Day release of the film 1917 comes a few weeks after I finished reading a book written during World War I, Greenmantle, by John Buchan. I found it in a giveaway stack after a local library sale. Something about it sounded familiar (Buchan also write The Thirty-Nine Steps, made into a movie by Alfred Hitchcock), so I gave it a go.

I liked the book both for its fast-paced writing and also the context. Buchan published it in 1916, the middle of the War to End All Wars, with an action-infused plot involving British efforts to uncover German machinations to stir up troubles in the Middle East. In true James Bond fashion, the hardy band of spy-adventurers encounters a beautiful but evil woman pulling a lot of the strings in the German plot.

In contrast to recent takes on the war, such as 1917 and Peter Jackson's They Shall Not Grow Old, Greenmantle offers a rather bloodless view of the war as it was happening. Official Britain wouldn't want anything overly explicit written about the slaughter on the Western Front, although heaping helpings of anti-German sentiment were, obviously, welcome.

Some passages especially struck me as a sign of the times, or for a prophetic quality given the next world war still to come.

The lead character of Greenmantle and other Buchan novels is Richard Hannay, a South African mining engineer and British soldier leading a team pursuing vague clues about the German plan. Hannay fought in 1915's Battle of Loos, where the British suffered 58,000 casualties, including 8,000 in just four hours. While wounded in the battle Hannay says little about the horrors of trench warfare. The very first page of the book sets the laconic tone toward combat:

For more than a year I had been a busy battalion officer, with no other thought that to hammer a lot of raw stuff into good soldiers. I had succeeded pretty well, and there was no prouder man on earth than Richard Hannay when he took his Lennox Highlanders over the parapets on that glorious and bloody 25th day of September. Loos was no picnic, and we had had some ugly bits of scrapping before that, but the worst bit of the campaign I had seen was a tea-party to the show I had been in with  Bullivant before the war started. [The Thirty-Nine Steps gives the back story on this episode.]

In one scene, where he's given shelter by a German farm woman with three children and a husband in the German army, he reflects,

Her man had gone to the wars on the Eastern front, and the last she had heard from him he was in a  Polish bog longing for his dry native woodlands. The struggle meant little to her. It was an act of God, a thunderbolt out of the sky, which had taken a husband from her, and might soon make her a widow and her children fatherless. She knew nothing of its causes and purposes, and thought of the Russians as a gigantic nation of savages, heathens who had never been converted, and who would eat German homes if the good Lord and the brave German soldiers did not stop them. I tried hard to find out if she had any notion of the affairs in the West, but she hadn't, beyond that fact that there was trouble with the French. She was a decent soul, with no bitterness against anybody, not even the Russians if they would spare her man.

That night I realized the crazy folly of war. When I saw the splintered shell of Ypres and heard the 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 the woodcutter's cottage cured me of such nightmares. I was for punishing the guilty but letting the innocent go free. It was our business to thank God and keep our hands clean from the ugly blunders to which Germany's madness had driven her. What good would it do Christian folk to burn poor little huts like this and leave 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.

At one point Hannay says,

Germany's simplicity is that of a neurotic, not the primitive. It is megalomania and egotism and the pride of the man in the Bible that waxed fat and kicked. But the results are the same. She wants to destroy and simplify; but that isn't the simplicity of the ascetic, which is of the spirit, but the simplicity of the madman that grinds down all the contrivances of civilization to a featureless monotony. The prophet wants to save the souls of his people; Germany wants to rule the inanimate corpse of the world.

But wait, there's more about the German character! Hannay muses, "Then I realized something of the might of Germany. She produced good and bad, cads and gentlemen, but she could put a bit of the fanatic into them all." For good measure, Hannay mixes in several references to the Jews, angled to give ammunition to the conspiracy-minded:

This is the weakness of the German. He has no gift for laying himself alongside different types of men. He is such a hard-shell being that he cannot put out feelers to his kind. He may have plenty of brains, as Stumm had he has the poorest notion of psychology of any of God's creatures. In Germany only the Jew can get outside himself, and that is why, if you look into the matter, you will find that the Jew is at the back of most German enterprises.

(And if you liked that passage, Buchan writes other tart observations about Africans and Muslims that are outside the scope of this post.)

Later, he gives a manly view of mechanized slaughter:

I judged they must be bombarding the outer forts, and once there came a loud explosion and a red glare as if a magazine had suffered.

It was a sound I had not heard for five months, and it fairly crazed me. I remembered how I had first heard it on the ridge before Laventie. Then I had been half afraid, half solemnized, but every nerve had been quickened. Then it had been the new thing in my life that held me breathless with anticipation; now it was the old thing, the thing I had shared with so many good fellows, my proper work, and the only task for a man. At the sound of the guns I felt that I was moving in natural air once more. I felt that I was coming home. 

Buchan has more in this vein, talking up the bracing, clarifying nature of war as cleansing the effete posture of peaceful times; he was in tune with the pre-1914 mentality but absurdly delusional in the gore-infused light of what happened during World War I, and then the war it spawned 21 years after the Armistice. Whether Buchan moderated his views in other books after Greenmantle, especially after 1918, is something I'd like to learn more about.