A Spell with the Black Dog and a Couple of Quick Reviews

First blog post after a bit of a hiatus, on this occasion the result of a relatively minor depressive episode. Those who know me well know that I have been prone to depression for pretty much my whole life and that I have at times found myself in some very uncomfortable places as a result. This time the trigger was a period of intense stress both at home, where I care for a wife with young-onset Alzheimers and a son with autism, and at work.

I don’t want to come across as remotely self-pitying, I know many people with heavier burdens than mine to bear, including both my wife and son. It is merely an observation that might help readers to understand where I am coming from sometimes.

An upside of decades of depressive illness, combined with a tendency for self-analysis, is that you develop a close familiarity with your own emotional and cognitive processes, and an intense sensitivity to looming crises and what is likely to trigger or to soften them. I tend to recognise almost to the minute the point at which I am starting to unravel, and my excellent GP is always happy to work with me to identify a solution. Which leads to another upside of decades of depressive illness: that moment when you feel the cloud begin to lift. You go through hell to get there, but it’s one of the sweetest feelings you’re ever likely to get. It’s like making up with a partner after an ugly row, or the sudden coming of spring after a hard winter – it takes you by surprise to realise that life can be good.

While plodding through the murk I found that, while I wasn’t quite feeling sociable enough for much gaming activity, I did recently get to read a couple of decent books so thought I would share some details here.

For the first, Chris Carey’s Thermopylae, I have to immediately add a disclaimer and say that the author is my elder brother so I am biased. That said, being a Professor of Classics most of his output to date has been academic works that, even if they were about subjects of more interest to me, I would have struggled to read, or at least to understand more than one word in ten. This book, which he was invited by the Oxford University Press to write as one of their Great Battles series, is his first foray into more popular history and he has told me that it is the book he has enjoyed writing the most. Because ancient warfare has always had slightly less interest for me than modern, it took me far longer than it should have done for me to read the free copy that I was given, with other books pressing for my attention.

Why did they always fight naked? That is never going to end well.

It’s a very good read though. What I liked most about it is that it was not in the least what I was expecting, which was a straightforward narrative of the battle. In fact the details of the fighting take up only a few pages out of more than 200. Most of it is more investigative or analytical writing about such topics as the reliability or otherwise of our sources, where the battle took place, the motives and aims of the antagonists, what the battle represented to contemporaries, and its lasting significance to ancients and to moderns. As a classical scholar of many decades and an expert in Herodotus Chris was certainly the man for the task, and the scholarship on display is seriously impressive. He also had a blast when researching the book, following the path of the Great King’s army from Western Turkey across the Hellespont and down through Greece to the fateful pass, there mapping and following all the possible routes along which the treacherous Ephialtes might have lead the Persian host to fall upon the Greek rear. The enjoyment he had in researching and writing the book, along with his sheer enthusiasm for the subject, comes through in the style, which is engaging and witty.

I find I am curious now to look at other books in the series to see if they take a similar approach to their subject. I see that so far the OUP have published volumes on Agincourt, Lutzen, Culloden, Waterloo, Rorke’s Drift/Isandhlwana and El Alamein.

The second book I read was an older one that I first read back when it was first published in the 1980’s and is more social history than military: The Old Lie : The Great War and the Public School Ethos by Peter Parker (yes, when I first saw it I thought of Spider Man too). The theme of the book is how the public school culture that grew up in Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century – athletic, anti-intellectual, deeply male-oriented, with its emphases on honour, fair play, intense emotional attachment to school and ones peers there – was instrumental in creating a generation with the exact mindset that was required to fulfil its tragic destiny as cannon fodder in the trenches of the Great War. The more so since the public schools were so evangelical and their ethos spread by school stories and magazines, as well as the missions that the schools set up in inner city areas to bring their culture to the benighted masses there.

No, not that Peter Parker

Parker follows the history of the schools from the barbaric bear-pits of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century when boys were subject to physical and sexual abuse at the hands of all-powerful prefects and there were school riots that necessitated calling out the militia (Floreat Seditio was scrawled on the walls of Eton during one ruck at the time of the French Revolution); through the first steps of reform initiated by the revered Dr Arnold of Tom Brown’s Schooldays fame, and then the more profound reforms of the Clarendon Commission of 1861-6, to the schools’ heyday of the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries.

When war broke out in 1914 and the British Army needed a sudden and dramatic increase in numbers, the only ready source of officers was the OTCs of the public schools. The response was overwhelming, as evidenced by the appalling casualty lists that all the schools had to show on the memorials that were built post-war. The poignancy of all these young officers, imbued with that ethos of honour and service and swearing, bizarrely as it seems to us now, to die for their schools as readily as for King and country, marching off to perish miserably in the mud and horror of the western front, makes the book quite a sobering read. The theme of loss of innocence is a strong one, but there is an underlying anger to the book, at a culture that was ready to so mindlessly condone and encourage such a sacrifice. That the image of young men dribbling a football across a blasted muddy wasteland before being mown down could be seen as something rather sporting, to celebrate (‘True to the land that bore them, the Surreys played the game’) as opposed to something quite grotesque is a reminder of quite how foreign the past can be.

Again, a good read (although possibly not the best choice for an already low mood!), especially if, like me, an interest in things military co-exists with a nostalgic fascination for old public school stories (another disclaimer: I love the Greyfriars/Billy Bunter stories and have a huge and unwieldy collection of Magnet reprints that I can sadly hardly read anymore because the print is so small!).

Perhaps not the most coherent blog post but it's been a funny old month or so, hopefully what counts as normal service will be resumed soon! Hope all are well.