On honour, duty, loyalty and patriotism

I’ve been thinking about these topics as a result of the previous book I read, about Major-General Sosabowski’s loyalty to his country, and where it got him. I’ve never felt in the least bit patriotic, shocking as this may sound, and I’m aware that some of this lack of feeling may come from being neither fish nor fowl, half-English and half-Polish. But somewhere I’ve always agreed with Johnson’s adage that patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.

Looking rather more seriously at the issue, I have always found it almost impossible to understand why men marched to their deaths in the Great War in the way they did. I have stood at various places on the former western front, where the British climbed out into no-man’s-land on the first day of the battle of the Somme and looked into the distance at the crest of the hill some hundreds of yards away where the Germans were entrenched, and thought, my God how could anyone bring themselves to do that? And, when teaching the A level English Literature paper on Literature and the First World War, students and I would agree that we could not behave like that now, we would not be prepared to die like that…

Writers and poets of the time were clearly doing what they felt to be their duty, including rebels like Sassoon who threw his medals into the Mersey and brought much opprobrium on himself by writing in protest against the way the war was being conducted. He felt loyalty and a duty of care to the men under his command, as did Wilfred Owen, who also protested against incompetent leadership in his poems, and who ultimately gave his life.

I’ve also wondered about what creates and fosters a sense of loyalty to one’s country. Shakespeare creates a marvellous picture of ‘this sceptred isle’ in the famous speech in Richard II, and I agree that England is a beautiful country that is very fortunately situated… but to die for? And because we are an island, unconquered for nearly a thousand years, we do not perhaps understand what happens in the thoughts of others. French casualties in the Great War were horrendous, and a huge proportion of the deaths came in the first months of the war as the French strove desperately to drive the marauding German invaders from their country. I can see that men like Sosabowski felt great loyalty to their nation which, having only regained independence in 1918 after over a century of non-existence, was snuffed out a mere twenty years later by the combined treachery of Nazis and Soviets, and why thousands of men like my father volunteered for the 1^st Polish Independent Parachute Brigade that Sosabowski set up in order to train men for the liberation of Warsaw (which never happened). And having read his book, I am now clearer about the enormous sense of betrayal all those men felt as a result of Churchill’s machinations after Arnhem and in the closing months of the war.

Similarly, it’s quite clear the sense of pride in their country, in the motherland, in defending their socialist homeland, that the millions of Soviet men and women who died in the Great Patriotic War felt, even in spite of the horrors of Stalinism which they had also lived through. Reading novels like Vassily Grossman’s epic Life and Fate, or the last part of Anatoly Rybakov’s Arbat trilogy, Dust and Ashes, is incredibly moving, and, for me, a learning experience about the meaning of loyalty and patriotism. And Svetlana Alexievich’s book of Soviet women at war was even more powerful, because true…

Sadly, I have to say that very little about the current nation of England (or Great Britain, or the United Kingdom) makes me feel proud, other than our National Health Service, which the current government is doing its best to wreck. And throughout the Cold War I was aware that any conflict with the Warsaw Pact would mean that ‘my’ country would be attacking the country where half my family lived, while ‘their’ country would be trying to kill us… I wasn’t looking forward to the consequences of being a conscientious objector, but mentally prepared myself. And then I discovered that I would have been a ‘security risk’ because of my family on the ‘other side’ and thus probably not liable to service anyway.

Somewhere on the other side of the scales, before I get too serious, I have to put Jaroslav Hasek’s The Good Soldier Svejk, the story of a congenital idiot who volunteers to do his patriotic duty at the start of the Great War, for the Austro-Hungarian Empire… one of only two humorous books I know of about war (Catch-22 is the other) and remind myself that, like the Irishman asked for directions, if I were you, I wouldn’t start from here. In other words, like Johnson, we ought to be stepping back from the issues of patriotism, loyalty and duty to ask ourselves why we got into the mess in the first place, and aren’t there rather better ways of dealing with our problems?

Beware those who offer you easy answers (especially if their names begin with ‘T’)!

Stanisław Sosabowski: Freely I served

I’m not one for reading memoirs of military men, but I made an exception for this one. Major-General Stanisław Sosabowski was the founder and commanding officer of the 1^st Polish Independent Parachute Brigade, in which my father served, in the medical company, and took part in the Battle of Arnhem in September 1944. I’ve been doing some family history research, which is quite difficult given his life story, and it was time to fill in a couple of pieces of the jigsaw.

Sosabowski tells his own story: from humble beginnings in Austro-Hungarian Galicia to a military career during the Great War and also in the Polish Second Republic. He took part in the September 1939 campaign against the Nazi invaders and helped in the defence of Warsaw. Almost immediately after the Polish defeat, he became involved in the resistance, which eventually became the Home Army; he was soon sent on a mission to Rumania, and laconically records that, after that departure from Poland, he never saw his homeland again.

It’s things like that which bring home to me the sadness and bitterness of refugees, which we cannot understand from our positions of comfort and security. My father never saw his parents again after he was called up in August 1939, but he was fortunate and adventurous enough eventually to make the journey to the Belorussian SSR and revisit when he was born and grew up.

Sosabowski, because of his involvement with the underground, came via France to the UK; Polish forces at that time were based in Scotland and he had the idea of founding a parachute brigade which would eventually be able to take a lead part in the liberation of Warsaw. One of life’s great bitternesses was that when the call eventually came for help on August 1^st 1944, the British would not allow the Poles to go…

Sosabowski succeeded in building up and training a highly professional organisation, which was not under Allied command but responsible to the Polish Government-in-exile in London; the British Army coveted the brigade and spent much time and effort manoeuvring to get it under its control. Eventually the Polish Government allowed the brigade to be used in the wider European theatre of war, and it saw action in the disastrous and ill-planned Arnhem action. There are detailed accounts of a horrendous battle over several days, and Sosabowski analyses the reasons for the debacle from his point of view: what he says seems to make clear sense to this non-expert reader…

He acknowledges himself that throughout his army career he was rather an awkward customer and always spoke his mind; this did not go down well with the British, especially when he was right! And because the time was one of greater scheming and politicking among the Allied powers, Sosabowski’s dismissal from his command was engineered by the British government and armed forces. One gets the impression of a very shabby episode, with various people scurrying to cover their own backs, in the context of a wider sell-out of the Polish nation, for whom Britain had originally gone to war in the first place. The book was a decent read and I felt rather better informed about times my father chose not to speak of.