For valour
Forgotten Voices of the Victoria Cross
Roderick Bailey EBURY PRESS, 382PP, £16.99 ■ Tablet Bookshop price £15.30
“M 01420 592974
y subject is War and the pity of War …” wrote Wilfred Owen, killed days
short of the Armistice in 1918. The subject of this book, opportunely published just before Remembrance Day, is “the heroism of War”. The simple, resonant and understated words “For Valour” are all that adorn the plain bronze medal known as the Victoria Cross, yet in the hierarchy of military honours “the VC” is the senior one for bravery on the battlefield, in the face of the enemy. The first 100 VCs were awarded in 1856, at the end of the Crimean War. Since then it has only been awarded 1,258 times: not surprisingly perhaps, there were 600 in the First World War alone; 182 in the Second World War; and others in smaller wars from the Indian Mutiny in 1858 to Afghanistan today. Only 299 have been awarded posthumously. The accounts given include the original citations and eyewitness reports. They are dramatic, poignant and often harrowing. They celebrate the extraordinary deeds of ordinary people who make often split-second decisions to put others before themselves. Many of these accounts were transcribed from sound recordings of elderly veterans, held in the archives of the Imperial War Museum and linked to an exhibition which opens there this month. Three years of stalemate in trenches
stretching from the Channel to the Swiss Border created vast casualties from Ypres to the Somme. Sidney Godley, of the 4th Battalion, Royal Fusiliers, was the first private soldier to receive the VC in the First World War. There is no first-person testimony by Godley himself, but a description of his character and actions was provided by his friend William Holbrook: with a bullet in his skull, he defended a bridge with a machine gun for two hours, though he had only “a bit of cover. Nothing much. No trenches or anything like that”.
OUR REVIEWERS Catherine Nixey is a freelance writer.
Robert Nye’s most recent collection of poems is The Rain and the Glass.
Florence O’Donoghueis a member of the Irish and English Bars and a specialist in Irish history.
Richard Ormrodis a freelance journalist.
Amanda Hopkinson is Professor of Literature at the University of East Anglia.
David Goodall is a former High Commissioner to India.
24 | THE TABLET | 13 November 2010
Sergeant James Ward VC, who in 1941 climbed out on the wing of the plane he was flying in to put out a fire in the engine
Eventually he was captured. He learned of the award in a POW camp.
Lt Colonel Roland Bradford won both the MC and the VC before being killed at 25, in 1917. One of his subordinates remembered: “Very often he’d say, ‘There’s an order. Lose it.’ He did it an awful lot: anything futile from a higher command, he’d just ignore it and he was strong enough, with the VC and the MC, to get away with it.” Many of the valiant are also very modest and self-effacing: Private Robert Dunsire said, after rescuing two comrades in no-man’s-land under fire, “Anybody would have done the same.” Second Lieutenant Gabriel Coury, when later asked by his
FICTION OF THE WEEK
Beware heavy imps
Sing, Sorrow, Sorrow: dark and
chilling tales Gwen Davies (ed.) SEREN, 288PP, £9.99 ■ Tablet Bookshop price £9
A 01420 592974
ll 22 tales in this anthology are by Welsh authors. Not that you would necessarily know this from the roster of fresh names: Roshi Fernando, Anne Lauppe-Dunbar or Zillah Bethell sound exotically non-Celtic. However, the cream of contemporary Welsh writing is also there: Niall Griffiths, Lloyd Jones, Tristan Hughes. Known, almost entirely, for searing realism, these stories launch into another dimension, that of humans divided by blood and death, terror and madness, and of the unconscious forces animating fairy tales. The content feels half-known or
powerfully dreamt, as it should. Dreams inhabit these tales as naturally in Greig’s nightly visitation by the unreal light of the looming “White Mountain” or the oneiric
daughters how he got his VC, answered, “For being a bloody fool!” Some, like Lieutenant General Philip
Neame, served as career soldiers, rising through the ranks. Neame left a lengthy account of his actions: he improvised exploding jam tins with nails and bits of gun-cotton, in lieu of scarce grenades, to hold a captured German trench. Some had multiple medals, such as Major James McCudden, of the Royal Flying Corps, who had two DSOs, two MCs and a Military Medal in addition to the VC, and became the most highly decorated pilot of the First World War. In the Second World War, Flight Lieutenant J.B. Nicolson was the only pilot in Fighter Command to be awarded a VC. Despite suffering burns when his Hurricane was attacked and caught fire, he immediately attacked another German fighter before finally bailing out. Recovering from his burns, he later won the Distinguished Flying Cross. He was killed at the Bay of Bengal in 1945. Although many people “imagine VCs to be Rambos”, this book makes it clear that they are not: all ages, all ranks, in all services, they showed bravery on land, at sea and in the air. They were British, Irish, Indian, New Zealanders; sons of coal miners, vicars and millionaires; some died at 22, others at 100. Despite these differences, what unites them is their astonishing courage, in the face of often seemingly impossible odds. Richard Ormrod
impulsions of Cynan Jones’ “Epilept”. The dark engenders unnatural impulses towards brutish intercourse and brutal murder, as barriers crumble between man and beast, reality and dreams. It is families, not enemies, who foment fear and danger. Cracks fracture natural and domestic landscapes, as visibly as on the “House of Usher”: nothing can ever again be safe as houses. As the fables of Aesop migrated to La
Fontaine; as Grimm and Perrault shared and circulated sources; so revisions of ancient tales surface here. Beneath full moons and the call of night owls, fearless and dangerous women are abroad, possibly armed with scythes and knives. Readers are reminded of the revenge of the disempowered: “The Handless Maiden”, once a Norwegian tale of a mutilated child, becomes that of a fatal young woman whose emotions were severed in infancy. “The House Demon” takes one of Old Peter’s Russian Tales and turns it into another revenge, on intrusive Christianity, the Minister meeting his end as the imp “settled on his chest, cold and heavy as treasure”. Most powerfully of all, Three Cuts reprises Cinderella and takes it as far as possible from pantomime and into a world of horror and cruelty in which, once again, the mother is complicit with the lover and where the amputation of a toe is
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