Mitch Miller: Plates: The Battle lines are drawn

PLATES The Battle lines are drawn

Mitchell Miller

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Famously, Tintin’s attitudes and behaviours were modelled on the values of the scout movement, a profoundly odd juvenile para-military organisation that shaped the worldview of so many middle class European youths. The Broons men all had military careers and seemed to unconditionally accept the militaristic traditions of the Scottish working classes. But if Tintin and the Broons brought unsuspecting readers into touch with subtly espoused ideologies then the Osprey series of military histories are in and of themselves, a social, political and aesthetic phenomenon. Their avowed purpose is to impart detailed information on regiments, ordnance, battle deployments, the blow-by-blow (shot by shot, stab by stab, hack by hack …) narratives of decisive engagements and campaigns. The field of study is narrow but impossibly deep, stretching from macro to micro; the use of a strap, baldrick or buckle to the devastation wrought by the machine gun or halberd, to troop deployments and formations. But the thoroughly researched text is not the main reason to pick up an Osprey.

The main, best and only good reason to pick one up is for the pictures, the pastrami at the centre. Richly coloured plates that pull together

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the references and sources described in the text into representative exemplars of military ranks, soldier types and warrior elites.

It is strangely appropriate that an imprint so concerned with the paraphernalia of imperialism began as the subsidiary of a tea company. Anyone breaking open a box of Brooke Bond for a 1960s tea party would find a collectible card among the bags depicting a military aircraft with absolute technical precision. The cards were painted by Dick Ward and were like many other such collectibles immensely popular (Dudley D. created a similar series, the ‘Warrior Trade Cards’ for The Rover – ‘#8 Australian Black Boy, #22 Himalayan Afridi, #5 Gordon Highlander … while Hergé produced a number of technical and expositional drawings throughout his career).

Ward suggested a series of illustrated books about aircraft and Brooke Bond agreed; leaping from leaf to leafbound they formed Osprey, publishing its first book in 1969. North American P-51D Mustang in USAAF-USAF Service would be the first of over 1,500 books, published at a rate of 10 a month, index to a persistently violent, perilous world. Each of these books

present a text of secondary importance to the centrefold illustrations. In the Men at Arms series the text acts as a preamble to the illustrations, explaining the history behind the different pieces of equipment. The illustrations are, in a sense, not illustrations at all, but the thing the text illustrates.

And of a hunger - some might say ongoing fetish - for the technicians of this persistence.

The joy is in the detail of the figures drawn in a hyper-realist style with the military kit, from hauberk to AK47 rendered in obsessive detail. Osprey employs some of the finest draughtsman around, among them Angus McBride (his Assyrian warriors being particularly fine) and Mike Chappelle, a specialist in modern grunts. So we might have a Black Watch kiltie-killer or a Zulu warrior – either of these will be in a pose best designed to show off dress and livery and something typical of these soldier societies. This is after all, science, these illustrations are information, a bar graph possessed of notable martial prowess, alert and ready to fight. Belts will be slung so, the spear will be regulation length, the body well proportioned – and said body/dummy/ model/paragon/cannon-clogger will be as fine a specimen as the kit. The musculature is perfect, the human figure carefully proportioned. These are in short, proper pictures, representational and accurate, neutral illustrations.

And then again, not quite so. As mentioned before, these are bar graphs in a state of perpetual military readiness but they are frequently ‘cross-tabbed’ against other such graphics in various tableaux. Gallowglasses and Kerns appear in a scene of extreme violence, pristine swords about to be sullied in the guts of a specimen Norman knight. Flawlessly executed, they are oddly cold, frozen scenes, devoid of emotion and matter of fact about what a certain style of blade was intended to do. Of course this gives some useful reminders to the readership but no question, no doubt, there is

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something thrilling about these images. When in action the level of detail is always sustained; the action shot provides an excellent opportunity to observe how a soldier’s kit would ride up over a raised arm, or bump against his thigh as he moved in for the kill. The numbering system that identifies each human exemplar in each plate is usually retained, so that we can tell that the 1 is attacking 4a because 1 is a Numidian light cavalryman and that 4a is a Thracian conscript in the Roman army. This is the point where the keen student of militaria should be taking notes and the more casual observer comes to realise that the objects are more important than the human being.

But such is technical drawing. Fashion designers are similarly uninterested in the wearer, only the worn – take a look at any display of current or recent designs in a museum and note how the mannequins are alabaster white and featureless, the face just a smooth oval on a long neck that cascades into some impossibly lithe figure. In these situations the standard, wall-eyed plastic mannequin would only detract from the stitches and patterns. Silhouette is another popular abstraction that allows the eye to hone in on a particular detail, for example, those old fashioned Ladies and Gents toilet signs where each gender is represented by a realistically proportioned Caucasian man in a suit and woman in a skirt.

The proportions are realistic but all the skincovered areas are in black, because we are meant to focus on gender through recognition of body shapes.

But in Osprey there is always a flesh-tone against the reds and khakis, a carefully painted, superrealistic face, usually in a state of complacency but, when called to action by the requirements of the publishers, contorted in rage, malice and fear. These are not ‘pure’ in their intention to reproduce and record. Leaving aside the debates over photography and how the camera can lie,

it behoves to remember that there is even less purity in drawing. On the one hand, chemical reaction, on the other a hand moved by a mind, thought, whim – moved, in short, by the maker’s agency. And such agency, as should be apparent to anyone with a basic commonsensical handle on the world, is a highly complex beast. The solipsism that the artist Stuart Murray has made his own is an important lecture on this point, and the whole notion of an artist’s reproductive powers. Murray’s solipsism is sleeve-worn – in others it is masked by an aggressive virtuosity.

During the writing of this piece I spotted an article in the Metro newspaper about a Spanish artist who uses blue bics to scale up and reproduce photographs of his friends. The images are (even glimpsed second-to-third hand in a bedraggled free-sheet) shocking feats of autistic concentration (though the artist is not, as far as I know, autistic or even suffering from Asperger’s), initially indistinguishable from photographs. But they are very limited in their interest, and reflect the expected concerns of the young male artist (beautiful young women). They are an impressive party trick, nothing more, as close as the hand and the implement come to outright empirical record (at a third remove mark you …) and seem to have nothing intelligent or astonishing to say beyond professing their maker’s craft – and even THEN, they are still far from ‘pure’.

The fighting men of the Osprey books are decidedly and militantly not photographic.

Photographed subjects can often be in poor light, or have poor posture, or may have even put their kit on improperly, always fragmented. Thus the preference for made images that remove this randomness altogether and depict what the military authorities of each military organisation represented intended. Expression and idea takes second place to analysis and scrutiny, the central promise of any Osprey book being that it has sifted and distilled available information on its subject to present some sort of platonic sample, whether it be a Black Watch Sergeant or a Seljuk archer. The artists know their job and do it very well. They render detail, they isolate individual accoutrements, gee-gaws, wotsits and gadgets and do not permit natural light or shade or colour to interfere in the central act of seeing the form (although the figures are nevertheless shaded and toned in a reassuring nod to bourgeois realism). I could call it cubist, but let’s not get overexcited. Colour is of course absolutely vital to the Osprey plate artist, from the blue of a French uniform to the swarthy complexions of foreign armies.

This exemplary function has been the

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responsibility of the illustrative plate since at least the heyday of the great 18th century factbooks (and more directly the brightly illustrated regimental histories and gazetteers of the 19th). Hokusai, true to his punishing work ethic, took on many military themed commissions – ‘Exercises in Pole Combat’ demonstrates the various forms of the combat style as part of a manual, as does his exacting drawing of a breech-loading pistol. His samurai images are famous and provide exceptional detail of sword hilts, armour plates and hairstyles but closest in spirit to Osprey is his illustration of a Chinese soldier with halberd. The man poses front on, his uniform and equipment explained by a web of explanatory notes.Very different however, is the expression on the face – curiously whimsical and knowing. Dorling Kindersley has become the undisputed leader of this field in western publishing and has spawned hundreds of beautiful imitators – cutaways and dioramas and exploded diagrams. But Osprey sits in a class by itself as the inheritor of the mantle of the old illustrated regimental histories; Osprey is special, and Osprey is decidedly more small-p political.

This politics is expressed partly through the texts but fundamentally through the line of the centrepiece illustrations.

In Dieppe 1942, the standard gear-‘n’-kit plates are substituted for meticulous three-dimensional maps and ‘dioramas’ depicting typical scenes from the disastrous Allied Raid – like a more classy edition of a Commando comic library. From behind we see three of Lovat’s commandos fire mortars over a barbed wire fence, two bracing and loading in the upper foreground, the officer pointing a helpful finger towards the target. Even in this oddly stiff action sequence the troops are impeccably dressed – details such as the tassels on the officer’s blue cummerbund and a cord attached to the handle of his pistol are especially striking. But the Osprey universe imposes no judgements on the causes being fought for. Thus, the scene – even down to basic composition – is mirrored later in the book, where another full colour two-page spread gives an over-theshoulder view of two soldiers of the Wehrmacht taking up the foreground. They are mowing down Allied troops with a machine gun, one firing, the other loading the ribbon of bullets. The reader can rest assured the bullets are being threaded in the correct manner, and that the breech of the gun is in exactly the right place, that the buttons are positioned just so, that the rivets on either helmet are correctly studded. But the crisp, clear, meticulous use of the line in these plates is not always sustained. In contrast to the careful rendering of the foreground some of the far

distant commandos are almost impressionistic, man-shaped smudges presumably obscured by the fog of war … Yet what we now, as reader must understand, that as ‘the enemy’ are not beyond eyesight, there has been an artistic choice to drop the hi-definition draughtsmanship, in order to obscure them (a similar trick was played by the comic strips, where the facial features of Germans or Japanese were occluded by the shadow of helmets and peak caps).

Technical or expositional drawing is not of course, anything to be ashamed of per se.

But Osprey books betray a great deal about their clientele. In How it Happened Here, Kevin Brownlow’s account of making the film It Happened Here, Brownlow recalls the odd demeanour of his co-director Andrew Mollo, an enthusiastic collector of Nazi war surplus from the London flea markets, and implies a suspicion that his friend’s obsessive scrutiny of these artefacts did not leave him unscathed. Is it possible to study a pinpoint accurate drawing of a Panzer, or a German paratrooper’s battledress and think nothing of the political and social order it represents? Or for that matter, Mike Chappelle’s slightly Orientalist recreations of the Viet Cong without making some sort of judgement on what it represents? And if you can look at these images dispassionately, should you be able to isolate them so absolutely? The Assyrian soldiers reproduced by Angus McBride are, granted, not so likely to raise such questions 2,000 years on. Then again, a Christian like Watkins might well remember the atrocities the Assyrian empire committed against the Hebrews in the Old Testament and finds the object of his hatred given a face and identity (there is an affinity between the full colour plates common to Bibles and the Osprey illustrations) – because that is of course the flipside of the dispassionate enthusiast and collector of facts interested in the paraphernalia for its own sake.

A trawl of literature read and enjoyed by military enthusiasts sheds some light on the sensibilities of the clientele. This, from Prime Portal ‘The Military Enthusiast & Modeler’s Reference Site’: A Call to Arms … Regardless of the flag they fought under, this section is a tribute to the soldiers who answered the call to duty.

Well, yes, of course. One of the standard tropes of war literature, from Commando to All Quiet on the Western Front, is the acknowledgement that most soldiers in most countries endure a

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universal experience. One might question that; did an Iraqi conscript in Gulf Wars I-II feel the same as a better armed and equipped American Army Ranger? Is it the same to be an invader and a resister? Probably not. Most who fight tend to experience an odd welcome back to civvy street, ranging from embarrassment to outright neglect, but is an obsessive interest in military bric-a-brac the best way to acknowledge it? But to pretend we can disregard flags and pay tribute to all soldiers verges on the monstrous; do we really want to play tribute to a Serb Chetnik, or an SS division commander, the Khmer Rouge, the guards who patrolled The Berlin Wall and the Intra-German Border 1961-89 or Franco’s Spanish Foreign Legion? The blurb for the latter confirms the actions of said unit are not to be considered a problem: Although overshadowed by its French counterpart, the Tercio de Extrangeros, ‘Regiment of Foreigners’ has a rich and eventful history beginning with its formation in 1920. Under the command of Lt Col Millán Astray and Comandante Francisco Franco, the Spanish Foreign Legion developed into a formidable force, led by Astray’s belief that ‘to die in combat is the greatest honour’.

The peculiar notion of being able to rise above all considerations of what motivates Men at Arms, Elites and other practitioners of violence somehow seems more disturbing than Hergé’s occasional lapses into caricature or Watkins’ service in the name of Christian propaganda.

Take for example a comment on the Osprey blog (dated 20 Feb 2008): Obviously we are a commercial organisation that would like to continue to produce these books. So we have to balance out the obvious ‘big-hitters’ with the niche topics that are going to do well alongside the gaps we have not filled yet.

Sadly we can’t do everything and there are impassioned debates over topics like the Selous Scouts as everyone has their favourite unit, campaign or tank.

(The Selous Scouts were by the way, a counterterrorist force in the Rhodesian military that became the backbone of the 5 Reconnaissance Commando unit of the South African Defence Forces – instrumental in suppressing opposition to Apartheid. We await Suicide Bombers of the Gaza Strip with keen anticipation.)

An antidote to this curiously sentimental

detachment comes from a strange, utterly unrelated quarter. Josef Lada’s illustrations for the Good Soldier Svejk were never shown to the author and reportedly, wildly off the mark of the original model for the title character. The thick, bold frame drawings have a validity of their own just as comic illustrations and representations of the everyman type and the simplified AustroHungarian uniforms are very accurate, from the shape of fold-over pockets and the piping on soldier’s hats. But it is Svejk’s imbecilic moon face and a tubby unmilitary body and his adversaries have a starched look that runs from shirt to face. The faces of the Osprey warriors are more anatomically accurate, and might even be given that lived in, war weary look – but there is no question which looks more human.

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