Summary: meh!

I once attended an academic conference in which one researcher after another spent their allotted time telling the audience in exhaustive detail how they went about undertaking their research, and how interesting that was for them whether the audience shared their interest or not. Few of them mentioned anything they had actually found out.

It is a common enough story amongst inexperienced researchers: developing robust methodology can be such a challenge that it is the thing that comes to preoccupy them rather than the actual purpose of the research itself. We’ve all been there.

Phillipe Sands is not an inexperienced researcher. The Ratline is his follow up to the very fine East West Street, his hybrid family memoir/ joint biography of the originators of the legal concepts of crimes against humanity and genocide. However reading The Ratline, I did find myself, again and again, transported back to that conference, thinking to myself: But what is your actual point here?

Like East-West Street The Ratline is concerned with the atrocities of the Second World War. It has grown out of conversations that Sands had with Horst von Wachter, son of Otto, a man indicted for mass murder in 1945 but who was never captured.

Horst insisted that his father was a good man, who, in spite of his involvment with the Nazis was never implicated in murder. Further Horst reckons that his father, who died in Rome, was murdered.

All of Horst’ fanciful assertions about his father are exhaustively explored by Sands. Unsurprisingly there is no “THERE” there. What we knew at the beginning is what we know at the end: His father was directly involved in atrocity and he was not murdered.

Some reviewers have found compelling Sands’ account of his painstaking investigations to discover nothing. I didn’t. Much of it I found banal in the extreme, particularly the extensive passages quoted from the diaries of Otto’s wife, wittering on about various domestic and society concerns while her husband is out conducting affairs with other women and ensuring that the machinery of mass murder is running smoothly. I presume that Sands’ purpose in including such material is to illustrate the banality of evil. But that does not stop the material in question from being desperately boring too.

Following the war, and after 3 years on the run in the Alps, Von Wachter senior came into contact with some pro-Nazi elements in the Catholic Church. He hoped these would help him escape on to someplace such as Argentina or Namibia via the titular Ratline.

It is a historical fact that elements of the Catholic Church assisted Nazi criminals to escape justice by facilitating their flight to South America and elsewhere. Other Vatican officials, most notably Hugh O’Flaherty from Kerry, also ran one of the biggest Allied escape networks of the Second World War, but Sands does not mention this.

In any event the impression given by the book of the Ratline is less an organised right-wing conspiracy and more a few corrupt and venial individuals seeking to profit from the desperate efforts of repulsive individuals to evade justice.

Von Wachter did not progress beyond Rome along this Ratline because he could not stump up the cash to pay. Instead he whiled away his time swimming in the Tiber where he contracted the infection that killed him.

Overall then The Ratline offers some methodological insight into how Sands conducts his research, but little new on any aspect of the war, crimes against humanity or genocide that was not much more fruitfully explored in East-West Street. It is a story of the banality of evil, banally told.

Summary: a haunting account of a fragment of the Spanish Civil War

A Moment of War is Laurie Lee’s memoir of his experiences of the Spanish Civil War.

His account is determinedly anti-heroic. Much of it deals with the bureaucracy of the Communist dominated forces that he is assigned to once it is accepted finally, after periods of incarceration, that he is not a spy and they did not have to shoot him after all. Ironically, he tells how he was subsequently assigned to what in the North of Ireland would have been called a “nutting squad” – a unit responsible for identifying and liquidating perceived threats, from deserters and saboteurs to little old men with lingering allegiance to the Catholic Church.

Apparently in sympathy with the anti-religious temperament of the Republican forces Lee relishes the sexual promiscuity he believes that this has bred. He describes an episodic affair with a young Spanish girl, Eulalia, who seems to represent to him a new spirit of sexual liberation in revolutionary Spain. Eulalia despite being at least five years younger than Lee calls him “very young” – perhaps what she has already lived though, like millions of women and girls before her and since, has aged her. So maybe what seemed like romantic abandon to someone as naive as Lee may have been a survival strategy for Eulalia. Lee’s English lover, presumably Lorna Wishart, a married woman with whom he was having an affair during this period, is also a recurrent, though mostly unseen, presence in the book, representing memories of humanity and normalcy away from the bleakness of war.

Towards the end of the book Lee states, almost in passing that he killed someone, blotting out the life of another young man in a confused skirmish during a hopeless battle that could have no bearing on victory or defeat in the war. Some have suggested that this is a fabricated incident, and that Lee was never actually a part of the International Brigades – assertions that Lee’s widow vehemently disputed. 

Both George Orwell and Tim O’Brien crafted elements of their experiences of war to sharpen literary effect. In The Things They Carried O’Brien is explicit about this, questioning whether a story describing how he killed a young man is a more honest accounting of his role in Vietnam than a description of his experiences in which he never personally pulls the pin on a fatal grenade.

Whatever the literal truth of Lee’s involvement in the International Brigades, A Moment of War is an atmospheric and haunting book, exquisitely written and deserved of its reputation as a modern classic.

Summary: War – good for nothing and may still be the thing that kills you

In The Shortest History of War, Gwynne Dyer, quotes, of course, Clauswitz’s maxim that war is the continuation of politics by other means. He does, however, conspicuously ignore that war has often been a continuation of racism by other means.

This considerable lacuna is most apparent when Dyer traces back only as far as the American Civil War the modern conception of “total war”- the making of war on the civilian populations of belligerent nations. It is true that Grant and Sherman practiced a version of this on the Confederacy. But total war has a more ancient pedigree. The sack of Troy, for example, is a story of how it was routinely practiced in ancient times.

Both Caesar and Genghis Khan also practiced versions of total war. And, while this may have gone out of fashion for a bit amongst the white nations of Europe in the 17^th and 18^th Centuries, it was always the way in which “Great Powers” made war on those they regarded as inferior or subject peoples: Cromwell halved the population of Ireland in his campaign in the mid-17^th century. Bonaparte’s campaign in Egypt and Palestine was ferocious in its violence towards civilians. The US campaign against Native Americans was genocidal as was the British campaign against Australian Aboriginals. The British conquest of India was another racist exemplar of total war.

But it is not Paddies and brown people that Dyer is interested in here. Rather he is interested in the “Great Power” version of politics and how this has been manifested in organised violence since ancient times. Within this narrower scope it is still a fascinating book, packed full of interesting detail and disturbing conclusions. Dyer argues that only three countries fulfil the criteria to be “Great Powers” in the 21^st Century: the US, India and China. Russia he argues lacks the population to contend. So it may be unsettling to learn how it will cope with its inevitable decline. Dyer doesn’t consider the possibility that the European Union may represent an alternative political model for a 21^st Century “Great Power”.

More disturbingly he notes that between them Indian and Pakistan have enough weapons to unleash a “nuclear winter” upon the Earth should they ever blunder into a nuclear exchange. In other words, in the space of a few days, while the rest of the world could be preoccupied with other things, events could unfold in South Asia that would spell the end of all human civilisation .

If anyone thinks such a thing is unlikely, they would do well to consider Margaret Macmillan’s The War that Ended Peace, her painstaking survey of European “Great Power” politics at the start of the 20^th Century. The complex array of alliances and egos that she describes shows how at critical moments inadequate and posturing leaders can lose control of situations that spiral out of control in the most appalling ways possible.

That some of the contemporary systems of planetary security are currently in the hands of Johnson, Modi, Khan and Putin should be of concern to all of us who like the thought of the next generation, and the one after that, living into peaceful old age with improving standards of human rights and a restored environment.

Towards that end perhaps someone could prevail upon Presidents Biden, van der Leyen and Xi to take steps not just to limit global warming, but also to promote détente leading to mutual nuclear disarmament between India and Pakistan.