"BARLASCH OF THE GUARD"

New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 354, 5 April 1946, Page 12

"BARLASCH OF THE GUARD"

HE NBS is now receiving from the BBC some of its recorded serials, and the first of these to make its appearance in our programmes will be Barlasch of the Guard, adapted by Norman Edwards from the book by H. Seton Merriman. This will begin at 3YL on Sunday, April 14, at 7.56 p.m., and will be heard weekly at that time. The narrator, who will link the dramatic sections of the story, is Henry Ainley, the famous English actor. Frederick Lloyd plays the part of Barlasch. The production is by Val Gielgud and Martyn C. Webster. When the BBC first broadcast Barlasch of the- Guard in January of last year, Val Gielgud (who is BBC Director of Features and Drama) introduced it to readers to the Radio Times in a short article, which we now print here: I have been credibly informed that when Tolstoy’s War and Peace was serialised over the air it was almost impossible to obtain a copy of the book from any Public Library. It is hard to believe that there was no connection between the sudden recent boom in Anthony Trollope and Mr. Oldfield Box’s adaptations for broadcasting of two of the famous Barchester novels. The popularity of Dickens in the same connection is an accepted fact. It should be interesting to see what sort of demand arises for Seton Merriman’s novel now that his Barlasch of the Guard is to be broadcast. In the Buchan Class Seton Merriman, of course, is not to be compared with the Victorian giants. He belongs to the Edwardian-a considerably less classical era. His canvases were not vast, his casts of characters are small, but as a sheer teller of stories he ranks high. I do not think it unfair to place him in a category with John Buchan, Anthony Hope, and Stanley

Weyman-even perhaps with Robert Louis Stevenson. His style may not be particularly distinguished, but it is clear, forthright and eminently readable, and his characters are never puppets. He realises, as do too few modern writers

of so-called "thrillers," that it is very difficult to get excited about people who are merely silhouettes in black and white. I must have read Barlasch of the Guard myself for the first time in 1915 when I was still at school. It probably ranks with The Vultures as the best known of Merriman’s books. It is a story of 1812 and of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, but it makes no attempt to challenge comparison with Tolstoy’s masterpiece. Napoleon’s figure is hardly present, though his travelling carriage, rolling into the streets of Danzig marks the turning point and impulse of all that follows. It tells the tale of the great invasion, not in terms of powers, princi-

palities, and national forces, but largely through the eyes of an old soldier of the Guard. It owes a good deal, probably, to the famous Memoirs of Sergeant Bourgogne, which is one of the classical sources of information relating to the human side of 1812. It is in the charm and fidelity of the character drawing of this old soldier-Papa Barlasch, as he calls him-self-that the great merit of the book resides. It is on Barlasch that the adapter has, very properly, concentrated most thoroughly. I doubt whether fiction can show a better example outside the pages of Kipling of the old type of professional soldier with his grumbles and his good nature, his contempt of the recruits he nursemaids, his ability to take care of himself, his looting proclivities, his combination of toughness and sentimentality. Barlasch, of course, stands out, but this story is no mere peg from which to hang one fine portrait. There is the whole of the intricate, the exciting plot, which involves the Danzig family on which Barlasch is billeted. Sebastian, dancing master and French refugee, deeply involved with the German secret societies who plotted in those days against the Napoleonic tyranny. His two daughters, Désirée-

ingenuous without being insipid, cheerfully plucky without heroics — and Mathilde, who believed the world well lost, not for love but for ambition. There is the Polish Colonel de Casimir; and there are the two cousins, one serving in the French Army, the other in the British Navy; and there is the genuine atmosphere of that picturesque Baltic town which saw so much, and suffered so much, of history in 1812. Merriman was not one of those authors who writes of Samarkand from an armchair in Bloomsbury, or of Alaska in a hotel in Torquay. He travelled widely, and when he wrote of a place he would go there and live there so that he could write of it, if not as a native at least as someone more thama visitor with a guide book. The adapter of Barlasch is Norman Edwards, who has written two historical plays for broadcasting of some distinc-tion-Quarrel Island and The Queen of Baltimore-and who, among other qualifications for a knowledge of the period, has one of the finest collections of books in existence dealing with Napoleon’s last days at St, Helena. Frederick Lloyd will play Barlasch and Henry Ainley will tell the story. I expect this production to give me great pleasure. I hope you may share it.