…or something like that. The effects of reading Patrick O’Brian‘s Aubrey-Maturin novels (which I bought about five years ago and have now read for the second time) is that of slowly sinking into another world altogether, a world where communication may take months and even years, where a shipment may not even get out of harbor for want of wind, where bread has parasites (teaching one to learn to choose the lesser of two weevils) and meat has to be softened by towing it alongside the ship before it is even close to edible.

Despite the success of the Master and Commander movie, these books are unlikely ever to be made into more movies or a TV series – for one thing, it would be prohibitively expensive, for another, much of the excitement and readability of the books lie in their historical accuracy, their wealth of detail, their quiet humor, and most of all in the wonderful language. I love the the descriptions of political intrigues, the reflections on medical and other science of the times as experienced by Stephen Maturin, and the intricate and confusing legal details of Jack Aubrey‘s fighting commons inclosure and other (usually unsuccessful) adventures.

As the novels progress (and they are all good, by the way, no reduction in quality over time, in fact, they get better), you gradually learn to appreciate the main protagonists as people – initially cardboard figures, they gradually, through what they do and what they say, emerging as more complete personalities. Much more believable than Hornblower and Bush or Holmes and Watson, Aubrey and Maturin emerge as multifaceted and complex characters with personalities, flaws and qualities understood and appreciated not just by the reader, but by the vivid and rich set of characters met throughout the series.

I thoroughly enjoyed these books the first time I read them, and they improve upon the second acquaintance. Above all, the language is a delight. Like Frans Bengtsson’s incongruously titled The Long Ships (best enjoyed in its original Swedish version, Röde Orm) the novels are held in a language close to that of the times – close enough that I find my own English growing increasingly orotund with each page. Oh fie, O’Brian, for inciting me to top it the knob and engage in idle prating…

Highly recommended!

(Incidentally, should you decide to buy the series, make sure you buy the paperback versions from Norton, either individually or all at once, with the original paintings by Geoff Hunt. The boxed complete set from 2004 has, unfortunately, been scanned and then poorly copy-edited, introducing many irritating errors (or, rather, vexing imperfections.) And by all means, get the companion volume Sea of Words, which will explain bowlines and capstans and gratings and tompions and weather-gage and other essential terms.)

My War Gone By, I Miss It So by Anthony Loyd

My rating: 4 of 5 stars Anthony Loyd goes to the war in the former Yugoslavia as an observer – well, let’s be honest, a tourist – and then gradually succumbs to the fascination, tinged with shame, of observing something surreal, dangerous, and yet so central to Europe. The complex and cruel war between Serbs, Croats, Bosnians, Muslims and other overlapping and changing factions was a gruesome continuation of centuries of internecine fighting that was only temporarily halted by the Tito regime – close to a quarter million people dead, yet curiously disregarded by the European press.

Loyd gradually becomes a war correspondent, seemingly more for financial reasons – and to have a proper reason to be where he was – than because of an interest in a career. He turns out to be good at it, yet maintains his distance, and his heroin addiction. In the end you are left with painfully memorable descriptions of individual and mass tragedies – and you still don’t know much about the person doing the reporting.

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John Le Carré : Three Complete Novels by John le Carré

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I just spent the Christmas vacation under the covers with a flu, rereading this collection of three of the "Smiley" novels (in a Norwegian translation, which isn’t quite the same thing, though the translator is good).

The arena John le Carré creates here (or, rather, reports from, since he was a part of the real thing for a while) is the stealthy and paranoid world of Cold War espionage and counter-espionage, with the physically unimpressive spy-hunter George Smiley as the absent-minded and socially inept anti-hero.

The three books follow each other, not unlike the three main parts of "The Lord of the Rings" (come to think of it, it shouldn’t surprise me if le Carré structured it this way on purpose): The first book (Thinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy) concerns the hunt for a "mole" inside Circus, an thinly veiled version of MI6, defectors and all. The second has Smiley as a less central character, instead giving an operational agent named Jerry Westerby (the "Honourable Schoolboy" of the title) first billing, as he tries to locate and then secure an important Chinese defector through investigations during the final weeks of the Vietnam War. The third ("Smiley’s People") concerns Smiley’s attempt to penetrate the Soviet intelligence organization in a final battle with his nemesis, a the shady and very competent spymaster Karla.

I like these books for their accurate depiction of the fear underlying much of the cold war, the way "little people" become pawns in a game they (and, many times, not their bosses either) understand. Aside from the gloriously tragic figure of Jerry Westerby, the spy game is one of meticulous investigations, bureaucratic frustrations, occasional high hopes with correspondingly deep disappointments. How far can you go in order to win – can you sacrifice people, sometimes with their consent, for an uncertain victory in a cause you are no longer sure about? I think these three books are the best John le Carré wrote, with the possible exception of "The Little Drummer Girl". Reading them again brought back the haunting specter of the dictatorship next door, the nagging fear most people of my generation grew up with, the uncertain enemy with powerful weapons, fought by vicarious means with a realization that the individuals involved had very little to say in the big decisions.

The question remains – who, if anyone, had?

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Downstairs in a kind of cave is the kitchen, where an Army cook is baking square apple pies by the quarteracre. The floor is so deeply worn that he has to step over some of the high places. His coal stove is roaring, and he has arrived at that quiet hopelessness that cooks get on finally realizing that their work is never going to be finished, that there is no way of feeding a man once and for all.

John Steinbeck, Once there was a war p. 70

D-Day: The Battle for Normandy by Antony Beevor

My rating: 4 of 5 stars After having read a number of Steven Ambrose’s books on the battle for Normandy, Anthony Beevor’s version is a relief in that it has much cooler analysis, more maps (which every book on warfare should have more of) and manages to include the German, Canadian, Polish and French side of the equation to a much larger extent. (for instance, he points out that more French civilians died as a result of the war in Normandy, particularly the bombing and shelling, than died during the blitz in London).

Beevor is somewhere between Ambrose (who provides much more detail on the experience of the individual soldiers, particularly infantry) and Liddell Hart and Keegan, who take a more professional, tactical and strategic view. The balance is good. However, the book adds little new knowledge, as far as I can tell, aside from more detail on the rivalry between the various commanders, as well as a good account of the liberation of Paris, with all the political machinations and posturing that went on before it.

Beevor is sharply critical of Montgomery, seeing his egocentric posturing and lack of imagination as a diplomatic and political failure as well as tactically costly. He does point out, however, that Montgomery was facing a more heavily defended part of the front, except at the beachhead. Beevor is also critical of the use of bombers as infantry support, and points out numerous tactical and strategic errors which cost lives and time. In all, most generals seem to make more errors than good decisions – which, I suppose, is primarily an effect of having to take decisions all the time, with imperfect knowledge.

The book manages to give an impression of both the large and the small view of war, and points out how the slaughter in Normandy spared the rest of France a protracted war. For that reason, if you are going to read just one book on D-Day, this is probably it.

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Nelson: Love and Fame by Edgar Vincent

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
Detailed biography based on Nelson’s correspondence, gives a good picture of Nelson as a person, his relationships with superiors, subordinates, his common-law wife Emma Hamilton and her husband. This book is widely regarded as one of the best Nelson biographies, but I would have liked to see a bit more on strategy and tactics of the battles themselves – as it is, the sheer number of anguished letters home for love, money and fame can be a bit overwhelming, though it gives a good indication of all the myriad things a captain and admiral had to deal with.

Great biography, but a little discipline and tightening up here and there wouldn’t hurt.

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The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
This is an important book, of huge ambition and with a breathtaking canvas, though it occasionally, particularly towards the end, fails to quite live up to its ambitions. It has divided reviewers in every country it has been published (first written in French, relatively late translated into English.) I come down on the side of those who like it – or, rather, who admires the book while feeling rather nauseated by its contents.

Jonathan Littell has attempted to write the equivalent of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah – but from the perspective of the perpetrators. the books protagonist (it is written in the first perspective) is Dr. Maximilian Aue, a fictional SS-officer with an intellectual mind and an extremely complex and warped character, who is writing his autobiography with a dire warning to the reader: While he has done despicable things, who can say they wouldn’t do the same, if they had grown up like him and been put in the same circumstances?

Aue joins the SS for practical reasons and gradually descends into the cesspool that was Nazi Germany, rising in the ranks and with increasingly deviant mind. On his way, he works with the Einsatzkommandos in Poland and Caucasus, narrowly escapes Stalingrad, inspects Auschwitz with a view to improving its efficiency, participates in the murder of the Hungarian Jews, and finally takes part in the fall of Berlin, always with an intellectual detachment and a cool rationalizations. A thinking SS man with powers to explore and observe, he is without will or ability to do something other than excel at his job. He is saddened by the killings but more appalled by the lack of a scientific basis for deciding who is Jewish and who is not (The description of a conference in Caucasus discussing whether a certain group is Jewish or not is obscene in its similarity to any other scientific debate, coolly trying to determine whether 6,000 people should be exterminated or not, ending with the Wermacht blocking the extermination because they want to avoid the local population joining the partisans.) He deplores the treatment of the prisoners less for the suffering than for the reduction in productive capacity it causes: When he tries to obtain clothing and food for evacuating Auschwitz prisoners, it is not for humanitarian reasons, but because he has orders to use them as a workforce.

Almost as a subplot (and less believable) are the civilian experiences of the main person: Imprinted with an incestuous love for his sister, he is unable to engage with women and instead seeks out homosexual partners to act out his fantasies of his sister. As he sinks deeper and deeper, his veneer of civilization scrapes off and he loses himself in amnesic episodes, including one where he probably kills his mother and stepfather. After that, he is followed by two policemen who, like a constantly reappearing conscience (much like the chorus in a classic Greek play), calls him to justice. It all comes together in the end, with the fall of Berlin and the fall of Aue – though he survives, escapes to France, and settles down as a minor industrialist. Aue is a reprehensible, but fascinating character – he is a Nazi, but this is not rank stupidity of a Frank Suchomel (a Treblinka prison guard interviewed in Shoah) speaking, this is a cultured German with a wide intellectual foundation and some pretty screwed up, seemingly internally consistent, ideas about the world, capable of enjoying music but, significantly, not playing it.

The book has been criticized for being overly long, for being sensationalistic (explicit sex and rape scenes) and for being written in an old-fashioned language. I disagree completely: The length of the book and its myriad of people assure that you forget some of them – an important reminder of the enormity of the crime described. People die like flies around Dr. Aue, and after a while you, along with him, hardly notice it anymore, aside from some single individuals (such as a 13 year old Jewish piano prodigy executed after hurting his hand and therefore not being able to play) that penetrate the protective shield the perpetrators erect around themselves. I used to work at a hospital many years ago, and recognize this protective shield and the holes in it: To function and be able to take care of patients, I had to make myself immune to their suffering – but occasionally, some single patient would break through my defenses, usually because I somehow could identify with them. Jonathan Littell, who has worked with aid organizations alleviating hunger in war-torn areas, seems to write from that perspective – but Dr. Aue does not heal people, he kills them.

The book contains a number of diversionary discussions – on the languages of Caucasus, on the psychology of increasingly sadistic prison guards (they hit the prisoners not because they see them as subhuman, but because the prisoners persist in being human however much they are humiliated), on the Kantian imperative (in a discussion with Adolf Eichmann, no less), on the differences and many similarities between Communism and Nazism. The book is also a study in bureaucracy and how to do projects that look good to your superiors even though the subject is execrable and the results, in the end, the same: The discussions on how many calories each prisoner should have, how much would disappear through theft, and to what extent one should reduce rations to weak prisoners in order to make the die faster seem surreal if it wasn’t for how it would sound like any other bureaucratic hearing if the subject was changed. Dr. Aue gets better at shaping his reports and steering them through the bureaucracy, but he also loses sight of the real impact of what he is doing, if he has ever had it.

Jonathan Littell has derived his knowledge from books and from visits to the sites of many atrocities, and the book is historically accurate (with the stamp of approval from none less than Claude Lanzmann himself.) Aue meets many historical figures, and you can sometimes see (or think you see) influences from other books. The Communism-Nazism discussion reminds me of Pinker’s The Blank Slate, Dr. Aue’s reflections over word dead in many languages of how Robert Jordan reflects on death in Hemingway’s For whom the bells toll, the description of the dead hippo floating in a pool in Tiergarten with an artillery shell in its back is straight out of Antony Beevor’s The Fall of Berlin 1945. There is recurring symbolism with birds representing pure but vulnerable beauty: Ducks ("with beautiful green necks") are noted in reflective moments, Aue goes shooting with Albert Speer, cranes escape Berlin "not knowing how lucky they are." Overall, The Kindly Ones reminds me most of Günter Grass’ Die Blechdrommel – and Grass, almost predictably, had war experiences he carefully kept secret.

This is not a book to like, but to admire, because you gradually become fascinated with Dr. Aue despite his abominations. As he says in the beginning: How do you know you wouldn’t do the same, given the same upbringing and the same environment? Inhabitants of Jugoslavia, Darfur, Cambodia, Chechen, and Rwanda certainly would have no problem answering that question. Those of us living in more civilized societies should perhaps count ourselves deliriously happy we have never needed to confront it.

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Martin van Creveld: The Changing Face of War: Combat from the Marne to Iraq , Presidio 2008

Martin van Creveld gained fame for The Transformation of War, a book that should have been read by the USA before venturing into Iraq (see previous review). In this surprisingly succinct volume, he summarizes the changes in thinking about warfare "from Marne to Iraq", showing how war has changed from something conducted in a short and contained spurts by an army via the "total war" first voiced by Ludendorff to today’s prolonged insurgencies, where the perpetrators blend back into the general population and advanced weapons fired from afar only can make the situation worse.

(As a digression, he characterizes the German invasion of Norway as rather risky and badly planned – it worked largely because the Norwegians were unbelievably unprepared.)

van Creveld divides war into two main phases: Before and after the atom bomb. After the atom bomb, total war was no longer possible, since it would mean mutual destruction. Instead, war has (for the most part) become guerilla war, where a militarily equipped power is battling a much weaker enemy, and, because the enemy is weak, become weak themselves.

There is almost no instances military powers successfully fighting insurgents – though since the history of fighting insurgencies are largely written by the losers, who argue that they could have won if not hindered by politicians, the press or lack of resources.

To fight an insurgency, the power in question must be legal, i.e., treat the insurgency like a criminal activity rather than a war (much as the British did in Northern Ireland, where they, incidentally, had a local police force and spoke the language.) Either that (which takes a lot of patience) or they must use cruelly applied force, with openness and without apology (as Hafez Assad did in Syria.) Trying to fight the war from a distance leads to a quagmire, but going in to fight the insurgents with their own means leads to losses and loses the war on the home front.

The book is admirably succinct when it describes the evolution in thinking about warfare up to about 1950 (showing, among other things, the increasing use of the scientific method in weapons and, to a lesser extent, tactics evolution.) It gets a bit repetitive on the question of how to fight insurgency. But the verdict on the US’ fight in Iraq leaves no doubts about what the author thinks about the technical "revolution in warfare" and what it does:

Once the main units of the Iraqi army had been defeated and dispersed, most of the sensors, data links, and computers that did so much to aid in the American victory proved all but useless. In part, this was because they had been designed to pick up the "signatures" of machines, not people. But it was also because these sensors did not function very well in the densely inhabited, extremely complex environments where the insurgents operated. Myriad methods could be used to neutralize or mislead whatever sensors did work. Worst of all, sensors are unable to penetrate people’s minds. As a result, almost four years after the war had started, the American troops still had no idea who was fighting them: Ba’athists or common criminals, foreign terrorists or devout believers. [...]

Soaking up almost $450 billion a year, the mightiest war machine the world has ever seen was vainly trying to combat twenty to thirty thousand insurgents. Its ultramodern sensors, sophisticated communications links, and acres of computers could not prevent its opponents from operating where they wanted, when they wanted, and as they wanted; [...] To recall the well-known, Vietnam-era song: When will they ever learn? (Ch. 6.5)

van Creveld offers few conclusions, aside from patience, people on the ground and good intelligence, all of which are hard to acquire and maintain. Otherwise, the insurgents will eventually win, if only because the military powers’ only way of winning is not participating.

David Lodge: Author, Author

I have seen this book described as "tepid", apparently because it does not contain scandals or a hard-hitting plot or whatever, but it is a study in indecisiveness – an author wanting to find money and fame as a playwright, but lacking the will both to shape his work to fit the format and a willingness to commit his best work to it. Many a scientist seeking money as a consultant will recognize the feeling, at least I do….

And it works – the "not quite documentary, not quite biograhy, not quite novel" format gives a great impression of the era moving from Dickens to Wilde, with Henry James wanting the latter’s fame using the tools of the former. Another fascination is the time scale of things, and the easy living – while worried about money and deadlines, James had money for servants, a secretary, and leisurely trips to Paris and Venice for weeks and months to write and contemplate. His meticulousness with language was such that a large expense was telegraph fees for last-minute corrections. One suspects he would have been a great blogger, with infrequent but meticulously crafted, long entries.

Recommended, as is anything by David Lodge.

B. H. Liddell Hart: History of the Second World War.

One of my enduring frustrations with books about WWII is poor mapping and relatively little focus on operational strategy. One reason for this, I have now found, is that Liddell Hart wrote the definitive book on the war in 1971, and every book since then either will have to concentrate on more details (such as Anthony Beevor’s books on Berlin and Stalingrad) or take a more “themed” approach (such as John Keegan’s WWII).

The book is cold-blooded and argumentative – with a focus on maneuver (nicely mapped) and evolving tactics. Liddell Hart spends more time on tank battles (in particular Rommel‘s campaigns in North Africa) than strictly necessary, and frequently introduces footnotes about his own role, pointing out how he had written critically about various weaknesses in British and US defenses long before anyone else. Then again, he has the right to do so – many of the newer tactics such as the Blitzkrieg and the “indirect approach” were developed or inspired by Liddell Hart’s pre-war writings. This is war from the viewpoint of a professional soldier, with the benefit of hindsight and not a little admiration for the other side’s competence and fortitude.

Liddell Hart is opinionated – he contends that the war could have been prevented if Britain and France had displayed more fortitude towards Hitler in the beginning, and that it could have been shortened if, among other things, Eisenhower had allowed Patton to surge towards Berlin. He also contends that the Allied policy of demanding an unconditional surrender prolonged the war both towards Germany and Japan, and that the dropping of the atom bomb was unnecessary, since Japan, having had all supply lines cut, was facing starvation and was actively looking for peace at the time they were dropped. I certainly am no historian, but his viewpoints seem very sensible, even with 35 years’ worth of hindsight.

Liddell Hart’s book is the one book every other historian refers to, and it is easy to see why. Indispensable reading. Go get it (I got mine on sale at Borders, so there.)

Keegan, J. (2003). Intelligence in War: Knowledge of the Enemy from Napoleon to Al-Qaeda. London, UK, Pimlico.

Case stories of intelligence (from the Battle of Abukir, Shenandoah Valley, German-English sea battles in WWI, Crete, Midway, the U-boat war, and the hunt for the V-1 and V-2) and its strategic importance in warfare.

Main point (p.23):
"It is the intrinsic difficulty of communication, even, indeed above all, for the agent with ‘access’,  which limits his – or occasionally her – usefulness in real time. By contrast, the enemy’s own encrypted communications, if they can quickly be broken, will, of their nature, provide intelligence of high quality in real time.
The history of ‘how, what, where, when’ in military intelligence is therefore largely one of signal intelligence. Not exclusively, human intelligence has played its part and so, latterly, has photographic and surveillance intelligence. In principle, however, it is the unsuspected overhearings of the enemy’s own signals which have revealed his intentions and capabilities to his opponent and so allowed counter-measures to be taken in time."

On keeping the Napoleonic expedition to Egypt a secret: "Gossip helped to refine the picture. Some of the academics who were to accompany the expedition began to boast, a notorious failing of clever men leading unimportant lives."

From the conclusion (p398):
"[...] it strikes this author that the organization of intelligence-gathering and subversion within the same body is undesirable. Subversion is a weak way of fighting, differing from conventional warfare by the total unpredictability of its results; moreover, in a democracy, it is always liable to disavowal by legitimate authority and denunciation by authority’s political opponents. Intelligence-garhering, by contrast, can yield conflict-winning outcomes and , if securely and soberly conducted, is an activity only those of ill-will can condemn.
      Yet, in the last resort, intelligence warfare is a weak form of attack on the enemy, also. Knowledge, the conventional wisdom has, is power; but knowledge cannot destroy or deflect or damage or even defy an offensive initiative by an enemy unless the possession of knowledge is also allied to objective force."