Battlefields Revisited

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 798, 5 November 1954, Page 4

Battlefields Revisited

told in Reach for the Sky, is now so well known that some of the information about it on page 6 may seem superfluous, But it is a story which does not stale in the telling. People who have read Paul Brickhill’s narrative will have an added interest in the radio serial. Tales of action are the best-sellers of these days, though action by itself does not explain the popularity of Reach for the Sky. The book is built around the character of a remarkable man. Others have triumphed over injury and suffering; but Bader went on to do notable exploits. To become almost a legend, in spite of physical handicaps, and at a time when courage and endurance were so widely shared, was surely one of the great personal achievements of the war. Bader stands higher than most, but he has companions. It is doubtful if at any other time in the world’s history there have been so many adventurous careers. The recent war was one of movement. Instead of the long lines of trenches of 1914-18, the slow attrition and the inconclusive battles, there were campaigns in which highly mobile forces wrestled for advantage over wide areas. Men who took part in these events have described them in many books. The procession of heroes includes soldiers, sailors, airmen, commandos, paratroopers, spies, escapers, partisans and _ underground workers. And still the books are coming out, taking us back in imagination to every phase of the long and exhausting struggle. It cannot be surprising if nowadays the novel seems to be: falling out of favour. Later, perhaps, it will win back its readers; but in the meantime it appears to be losing ground to authentic stories of adventure. The best novels, admittedly, are concerned with human relations; and , {HE story of Douglas Bader,

these can seldom reach the sales of books in which problems of behaviour are simplified, or reduced to fundamental facts of death and survival, while all their movement is outside the mind, in settings of violence. No comparable change in reading occurred after the First World War. For several years war books of any sort were unpopular: the people were numbed by their sufferings, and sickened by the bloodshed. When at last, almost ten years later, the war books began to appear, the best-sellers were novels. It seemed as if something more than descriptive writing were needed to help people rid themselves of the nightmare. Fiction kept close to the facts, but showed them through the eyes of men who felt themselves caught up in the monstrous processes of war. There was also poetry, some of it of high quality, whereas few poems of any value have come out-of the recent conflict. These differences of response are not easily explained. Both wars brought immense suffering. From 1939 to 1945 there was no long agony of the trenches; but there was the systematic destruction of cities, the invasions and the tyrannies. Perhaps it will be in novels that these events will return most vividly to life; and they will not be welcomed until people are ready for that necessary cleansing through the imagination. Meanwhile much can still be rediscovered. Experiences which once supplied headlines and terse reports are being filled out by men who saw what was happening: the story of the war, outside official documents, is slowly being completed. There will be time for a deeper exploration. And enough has already been written, even with the emphasis on action to show what men can do when they put aside all safety and selfinterest, and reach for the sky.