War-weary

War-weary

I was reading Max Hastings’ overall history of the Second World War (“All hell let loose”, 2011). I was impressed by a remark about the rate of desertion on the Italian Front, by 1944; he has 30,000 soldiers ‘absent without leave’. I figure that the 8th Army was about 200,000 people and, given that many of them were artillery, line of communication troops, staff, catering, etc., this is a high proportion of all the combat troops. Hastings emphasises that it was the units facing imminent death, or also delayed death, who produced most of the deserters. They were the ones who had watched large numbers of their comrades die or get carried off on a stretcher. His wording is “The rear areas teemed with military fugitives, men ‘on the trot’… Thirty thousand British deserters were estimated by some informed senior officers to be at liberty in Italy in 1944-5 […] and around half that number of Americans.” He also records “capital punishment was deemed politically unacceptable.”

This sheds a light on the New Romantic line of poetry. After all, the key to that movement was opposition to the war – starting from opposition to the State. And then to propaganda, to mobilisation, to directing culture towards “the morale of the Home Front”, etc. So, they were the party of not being militarist. I am used to thinking that they didn’t matter, because not enough people opposed the war, but it now looks as if they were on the wrong side because so many people didn’t want to fight, and the problem is that their party was far too large. I can't easily place myself on the side of the anarchist-pacifists.

Hastings stresses the legal difference between desertion and being “absent without leave”. He notes that "official war histories set the desertion figures much lower". This sounds like protecting a state secret. I think the point is that the senior officers were aware that it was the fighting men who had this problem. Desertion is a crime, subject to military law, which might imply execution. But these were actually the men who had won all the battles, from El Alamein on. So, you could have a large pool of people who weren’t reporting to their unit, weren't on parade, but weren't written up as illegally avoiding combat. I think it means this.

I have never seen anyone write about the desertion issue. I think we can talk about a lot of people being war-weary, certainly after D-Day, but probably after the end of the North African campaign. People saw victory on the way, but they had also had enough. This is when you see escapist films being made (the Gainsborough melodramas). You didn't really have a free press, and I can imagine that a journalist in Italy who used the phrase “war weary” would lose accreditation instantly, and just be sent home. I am wondering if the newspaper, back in London, would have printed the story. News was part of the war effort. So possibly there were plenty of journalists aware of this desertion issue, but they didn’t write up the story.
The questions around New Romanticism aren’t wholly about rhythm, imagery, etc., since really the issue was whether you believed 100% in the war effort and the State, or if you wanted to have a personal life and a personal space. But that exposition of “personal myth” as the sacred space of culture aroused mass hostility from people who also believed in the war effort, and who saw troops evading combat in Italy as the greatest threat to the country.
A page posted by Leeds University's Film Studies department says "After 1943 though, a violent swing against realism carried British cinema away from the war to the exoticism of the Gainsborough costume films, the spiv cycle and the whimsical nostalgia of Ealing comedy." The paper is by Robert Murphy, whose book on 40s British cinema I have read a couple of times. It identifies a return to the war theme in 1950, with "The Wooden Horse" and "Odette". I suppose we could define that date as the end of war-weariness. It is also when the New Romantic thing is agreed to have come to an end (or at least become marginal). This dissatisfaction in the last two years of the war is important also because it opened a space for people resisting being part of the Cold War Effort in the 1950s and 1960s.

My guess is that people, after 1945, wanted films to tell the stories which had been kept out of the newspapers during the war. A release of totalitarian strictures. None of the films did this, because the commercial weight was with depicting heroism, social unity under pressure, group coherence, etc. The films all identify the State with virtue and unity – with the voice of Society, in fact. They continued the melodies of wartime propaganda, even though they were made by private businesses, not by any arm of the State. Evidently, a lot of people didn’t share that memory. The films weren't very good, and faded away after 1960, although I don’t think disappointment was the only factor in this.
OK, some of those war films are worth watching. I certainly liked "Ice Cold in Alex" and "The Small Back Room." And "The Silent Enemy".

Hastings’ footnoting is unclear, but a source he does cite is a Brigadier R.A. Penney in ‘The Penney papers’, available in an archive. He does not cite a printed source, and I do not recall seeing any film or novel which tells this story of soldiers “absent from duty” in Italy in 1944-5, although it looks like one of the most interesting stories of the war. I wonder how they got home, how they were eventually mustered out, etc. I think the story with deserters around 1946 is that they were all amnestied and care was taken to avoid anyone being able to count them.