Autumn 2010

The

The quarterly magazine

of conservative thought

Exile & Return Mattiya Kambona

Moral Combat M R D Foot

Ladies Without Lamps Jane Kelly

Palace of Lies Theodore Dalrymple

A Veiled Threat Christie Davies

Sea Blindness John Parfitt

Autumn 2010

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Contents 3

Editorial

Articles 4 Exile and Return Mattiya Kambona 6 Ladies without Lamps Jane Kelly 7 Palace of Lies Theodore Dalrymple 9 A Veiled Threat Christie Davies 11 Cooking up a Storm Brian Ridley 13 Will the Germans set us Free?

Mark Griffith 15 Sea Blindness John Parfitt

18 Twelve Good Men and True?

Nigel Jarrett 20 A Curriculum of Errors Frank Ellis 22 Real Rebels on the Right Nigel Jones 24 American Funny Money Russell Lewis 26 650 Hands in the Till Richard Packer 29 Writing for Frankie Howerd Marc Blake

Columns

Arts & Books

28 BBC Watch 30 Conservative Classic — 40 When William Came, Saki 33 Roy Kerridge 34 Eternal Life Peter Mullen 35 Reputations — 29 The Queen Mother

27 Letters

38 M R D Foot on Michael Burleigh 39 Nigel Jones on Hugh Trevor-Roper 40 Patricia Lança on Generational Conflict 42 Will Robinson on Lord Denning 43 Michael St John Parker on de Tocqueville 45 Jan Maciag on Lost Cities 46 Frank Ellis on Waziristan 47 Alistair Miller on Positive Thinking 48 Anthony Daniels on Democratic Despotism 50 John Constable on an Angling Family 52 Film: Please Give Jane Kelly 53 Art: Andrew Wilton on Portraits 55 Music: Gerald Place on Shakespeare’s Songs

57 In Short

Managing Editor: Merrie Cave Consulting Editors: Roger Scruton Lord Charles Cecil, Myles Harris, Mark Baillie, Christie Davies, Literary Editor: Ian Crowther 33 Canonbury Park South, London N1 2JW Tel: 020 7226 7791 Fax: 020 7354 0383 E-mail: info@salisburyreview.co.uk Web site: http://www.salisburyreview.co.uk

D

avid Cameron is a descendant of King William IV and the actress Dorothea Jordan. Like Cameron the king had a certain informality of style.

Hearing that the First Reform Bill of 1831 ridding Britain of its rotten boroughs was to be voted down in the House of Commons he insisted on being driven immediately to The Lords ‘in a hackney carriage if necessary’. There, by entering the chamber wearing his crown, he caused the automatic prorogation of Parliament. The Act was passed in the next Parliament.

William lived at a time when the American War of Independence had underlined the power of the free citizen, and while Britain fumbled her way toward democracy, most of Europe was retreating from it, but William understood its importance.

Today’s rotten boroughs are further afield than Old Sarum, the uninhabited hill in Wiltshire which sent two MPs to Parliament. The new Sarums are in Brussels, Washington, Beijing and the digital entrails of companies like Goldman Sachs, which, despite breast beating by politicians, has escaped virtually scott free from impoverishing a generation. People we have never elected increasingly rule our lives, tax us, buy up our industries, tell us who we may admit to live here, and, even worse, have acquired the right to seize our citizens and carry them off them for trial in their own countries.

Just as William IV was faced with the question ‘Who governs Britain?’ so Cameron must decide if we are to be an independent state. Is he up to the job? There is little evidence of it.

After a visit to Washington he flew to Istanbul to reaffirm US policy in the region: Turkish entry into the EU. This was despite his promise to the British electorate that he would not agree to major changes to the EU without a UK referendum. If the entry of 90 million people from a non European country to the EU is not a major change to the EU what is? Tories might shrug this off as a mere gesture. France and Germany, they chuckle knowingly, will never agree to Turkish entry, but wait ten years when, with catastrophically falling birth rates and desperate for workers, Italy, Germany, plus a Muslim dominated Holland, outvote the French on Turkish The Salisbury Review — Autumn, 2010

entry. Neither has there been any hint of reforming the scandalous EU arrest warrant, or a similar agreement with the US, which allow both powers to seize our citizens for trial purely on the flourish of a pen.

Nor has that elephant in the room, immigration, been addressed. The UN Convention on Human Rights has resulted in Britain having a revolving door immigration policy, with lawyers taking fat fees to ensure each arrival stays as long as possible and goes before courts whose decisions frequently border on the hallucinatory. To opt out of the Convention would be the political equivalent of the US Declaration of Independence. By definition the coalition has no mandate for this, and mass migration will continue. This is perhaps why The Guardian in ‘Cameron, Man of Grace’ described him as far better than either Brown or Blair to promote the type of ‘consensus’ politics in which the left so fervently believes.

What else one of the rotten boroughs, the EU, has in mind for us is described in this issue by Theodore Dalrymple in ‘The Palace of Lies’. He writes: ‘the Secretary-General of the European Union, Juan Manuel Barroso, was once asked by a journalist what the European project actually was. The former leftist said that it was the creation of an empire. Subsequently every effort was made to expunge this remark from the historical record.’ Mark Griffith in a more hopeful mood tells how intelligent Germans have woken up to the threat posed by the modern, electronically tentacled state in ‘Will Germany set us Free?’ but John Parfitt in ‘Sea Blindness’ sorrows over the laying up of our great mercantile fleet and how vulnerable it will make us to countries like China. There are more personal ways to lose your freedom. Jane Kelly in ‘Ladies Without Lamps’ describes the loss of dignity that attends being nursed in an NHS hospital, while Christie Davies in ‘A Veiled Threat’ peeps behind the burka. Finally in ‘Coming Home’, Mattiya Kambona describes his midnight arrest and ten years in a Tanzanian prison without trial and his subsequent return to his homeland after 30 years of exile.

Only those who have lost their freedom can know its sweet taste. We in Britain are tossing it away.

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Exile and Return Mattiya Kambona Editorial note: The Salisbury Review has had a long connection with the Kambona family and three brothers have now written for it. Oscar Kambona was a prominent Government Minister in the sixties but resigned in 1967 in protest at the introduction of the one party state and the brutal collectivization of the countryside. He left Tanzania for a 25 year exile in Britain and terrible reprisals were taken against his family and friends. (v SR vol 3 No 4, Vol 9 No 4, Vol 12 No 2, Vol 23 No 2, Vol 26 No 4)

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hen President Julius Nyerere’s dictatorship of Tanzania finally came to an end in 1998, my close relatives gradually became more at ease when they spoke to me on the telephone. I had been living in exile in Britain for more than thirty years, and during that time conversations with people ‘back home’ had necessarily been very guarded. Then one day I was somewhat surprised when someone asked me, ‘When are you coming home?’

During the dictatorship I had spent more than ten years in prison (without ever having been accused of any crime) so I could not understand why my people seemed so keen for me to return to a place which could be so dangerous. Had my relatives become Government agents? Cautiously I contacted some friends who assured me that it would be safe for me to return. ‘Come back’, said one, ‘the dark days are gone.

So I decided to visit my country to ‘test the waters’.

In 1968 my brother Otini and I had had to consider escaping from Tanzania, as we had realised that our situations were precarious. Our elder brother Oscar, who had been Vice-President, had already had to flee with his wife and family because he had had a disagreement with Nyerere over establishing Tanzania as a one party state and collectivising the peasants soviet style. (see The Time I met Mao, SR Summer 1990) Oscar was bitterly opposed to any such move.

One day he had a warning from a friend who was a high ranking official in the police that he would be arrested very soon for opposing the President’s wishes.

Nevertheless Otini and I had hoped for the best and put our trust in the International community who we hoped would protect us, or at least would speak out for us, if we were arrested, and make the world aware of our situation as they did in Nelson Mandela’s case.

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The British government which had so painstakingly drawn up our constitution, which provided for a multiparty state, should be concerned. Otini was working as a journalist and I was employed in the Ministry of Industry and Power. I am a Cambridge graduate so we thought perhaps we were safe.

However late at night when I was working at home, I become aware of a tremendous commotion in the street outside. There seemed to be police cars everywhere.

Then came the dreaded knock on the door. The police searched my home for several hours, then told me to accompany them to Ukanga prison. I thought that, perhaps, was some mistake as I was not being accused of any crime, but it was to be more than ten years before I saw the outside world again. On that dreadful night, I realized that my brother Otini had also been arrested, although I was not able to talk to him; indeed during the following years when Tanzania was developing into a completely inefficient state where nothing worked, my brother and I, while being shunted around various prisons from time to time, were very efficiently kept apart for the whole of our incarceration.

Otini was married to a girl from Martinique and had two small children, my wife was from the Gambia and I had a three-month-old daughter. Both families were immediately expelled and our properties were expropriated. It was to be ten years before we saw anything of them again.

In 1978, we were just as suddenly and inexplicably released — probably through the intervention of Prime Minister Muldoon of New Zealand, who by a fortunate chance had heard of our plight and had made it known to Nyerere that aid from New Zealand would cease unless we were released. This happened almost immediately.

We were still not safe, however, as it was common practice that when people were released from prison the President would order their re-arrest. We knew that we would never be given official permission to leave the country; we would have to escape. One day we went north to Moshi, a town near the border with Kenya. We were not sure where we would go from there, but by another lucky chance, I met a man whom I had known in Moshi prison. He agreed to take us to a path in the forest from where we could cross to Kenya. Under no circumstances, however, could he be seen with us, because as soon as the authorities realised that we were

The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010

no longer in Tanzania, he would be arrested and put into prison again, as it would be assumed that he had helped us escape. We could only make our way after dark and he would have to return before dawn. And so we managed to reach Kenya.

Here we had friends. President Kenyatta, who knew Oscar, was no admirer of Julius Nyerere. We were able to travel with the help of these friends to London and safety, or so we thought. We applied to the Callaghan government for asylum, which was refused. Then one morning I received a letter from the Home Office signed personally by Dr David Owen, who was Home Secretary, to go to Heathrow Airport, for deportation back to Tanzania. I was in a complete panic: some day I should like to confront Dr Owen and ask him why he was so keen to send us back to certain death.

Fortunately, thanks to the delay pending an appeal there was a change of government at the 1979 election and Margaret Thatcher’s government granted me asylum.

I was safe and free at last.

And now thirty years later after working for the Sickle Cell organization and later with Alliance Security and having retired, I decided to return to Tanzania to ‘test the waters’. On the plane from Heathrow to Nairobi I was very happy — I was back in Africa but afterwards my heart began to sink. Had I made a terrible mistake? Had my desire to see my country blinded me to the dangers that I could be facing? As the plane approached Dar-es-Salaam I began to feel that I could be experiencing my last moments of freedom. Would there be government agents waiting at the airport?

After all, I had not had permission to leave the country.

Perhaps I was stupid to have returned. As the plane flew over the city I saw Ukanga prison where I had spent so many months and I felt on the point of collapse.

‘Dear God, help me’, I prayed almost aloud. I tried to take comfort from a favourite saying of my brother Otini — ‘God is greater than human beings’ but all I could think about was those government agents who would undoubtedly be waiting to take me to Ukanga probably after taking me first to an interrogation room within the airport building.

As I put my foot on Tanzanian soil for the first time in thirty years I was extremely nervous and shaking almost uncontrollably. I felt that I was jumping from a comfortable warm bath into a boiling cauldron. As we entered the airport building I felt that my years of freedom were coming to an end.

I looked around me, but did not recognise any of the officials. I chose to give my documents to a young man who looked about thirty years old — he could have been born when I left the country. In spite of his youth I was expecting that he would call someone to search my belongings after which I would be told to The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010

accompany someone to the Land Rover, which I felt just had to be waiting outside to take me to Ukanga. I was so preoccupied with these thoughts that I scarcely heard the Immigration official tell me to go on my way.

I thought that I had misheard. Was he really waving me away?

‘You mean I can go? I heard myself asking ‘Yes of course’, came the rather startled reply, ‘What else do you want?’

I could keep my freedom. I surveyed the area again.

I could not see a single member of Nyerere’s agents around. It was amazing. My legs became light and the heavy lump sitting in my chest began to disappear.

When I left the building I thought for a moment that I must be back in London. I was surrounded by smiling faces! (In the Tanzania that I had left, all those years ago, one scarcely saw anyone smiling: there was little to smile about in those days) As we drove away I kept looking behind. Nobody was following us. Was this really my country? Yet I still could not help feeling that this was some kind of calm before a storm.

Next morning I gingerly looked outside into the street. Apparently there was no informer watching the house. I began to feel that the disappearance of the all-pervasive fear, which I remembered so vividly, had infused my country with sweet fresh air. But as the saying goes ‘old habits die hard’. I was not yet totally convinced and I was still worrying at every unfamiliar face.

I went into the city centre and bought every available newspaper expecting to see the names of people who had been dismissed from their jobs, which groups had been rounded up and thrown (without trial) into prison, which Trade Union officials were being harassed, which government critic or politician had been arrested or had mysteriously disappeared and had his property confiscated, but as I searched I found nothing. I looked at the faces of the people around me, and gradually realised that of Dar-es-Salaam’s four million people, only one — me — was worried about Presidential tyranny. I bought a cold drink and sat in the garden opposite the Cathedral and imagined that I could see the smiling faces of Angels. Eventually a mood of thanksgiving came over me and I thanked God for the wonderful changes that He had brought about in the wonderful country of Tanzania.

When Julius Nyerere was in power, anyone who criticised him or his government could look forward to perhaps a week of liberty. In the new Tanzania people are free to say what they like and can live and die a natural death. It was wonderful to be home!

Mattiya Kambona worked for the Sickle Cell Association and Alliance Security.

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Conservative Classic — 40 When William Came Timothy Kidd

T

he Edwardian writer Saki, or Hector Hugh Munro, is best known for his short stories and sketches — witty or macabre pieces, with a sharp-eyed, sardonic view of the contemporary British and European world. He was also the author of several plays, a history of the Russian empire and two novels, the second of which was published in 1913 with the ominous title of When William Came.

There had been a number of ‘invasion scare’ novels and plays in the previous decade, warning of the German threat. Liberals and progressives scoffed at the whole notion that war was coming and that Britain would do well to prepare for it. In his Preface to Misalliance, Bernard Shaw jeered: The grown-up Englishman is to the end of his days a badly brought-up child: afraid that the Germans will come and enslave him ... unless his nurse, his parents, his schoolmaster or his army and his navy will do something to frighten these bad things away.

The publication of this effusion was early in 1914.

It is not hard to see who had a better grasp of what was about to happen.

Subtitled A Story of London under the Hohenzollerns, Saki’s novel is in a sense a history that never occurred.

Yet it is not just a superbly written, if somewhat dated, Edwardian classic. The book contains much of valuable relevance for us nowadays; and it may in particular engage those who are concerned with what has happened, or is happening, to our shared national identity a century later.

The story begins in an elegant Mayfair drawingroom in high summer. Cicely Yeovil is entertaining a young male admirer to luncheon. They are awaiting the return of her husband, who has been away for months in Siberia, cut off by distance and then by illness from the events of the outside world. It becomes clear that he will be returning to a very different homeland: He’ll come back feeling sore and savage with everything that he sees around him, and he won’t realise just at once that we’ve been through all that ourselves, and have reached the stage of sullen acquiescence in what can’t be helped.

Murrey Yeovil is the half-hero of the book, described

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as ‘a grey-faced young man, with restless eyes and a rather wistful mouth.’ He represents Saki’s own perspective on what has happened. Arriving at Victoria Station he takes a taxi, with a German cabbie, who drives past Buckingham Palace on the route home. The alien uniforms at the gate, and the eagle standard flying at the flagstaff, indicate what has occurred. Kaiser William has come and conquered, and the British Isles are now a province of the German empire.

How this came about is described later that evening by a doctor friend. A weak Liberal government, beset by internal quarrels, had neglected or undermined Britain’s defences. Germany engineered a minor frontier dispute in East Africa, which then escalated into open war: It burst on us with calculated suddenness, and we were just not enough, everywhere the pressure came.

Our ships were good against their ships, but were not able to cope with their ships plus their superiority in aircraft. The enemy were a nation apprenticed in arms, we were not even the idle apprentice: we had not deemed apprenticeship worth our while.

The collapse was so complete that I fancy even the enemy were hardly prepared for the consequences of their victory. No one had quite realised what one disastrous campaign would mean for an island nation with a closely packed population.

Britain having lost command of the sea, the Germans are able to dictate terms. Any further attempt at resistance or insurrection would simply lead to blockade, starvation and surrender. As a shrewd German politician remarks: ‘Every wave that breaks on her shore rattles the keys of her prison.’

Not all has been lost. The Empire has stayed loyal; the King and court have moved to Delhi, and many families have sold up and moved overseas, their places being filled by German immigrants. As the story progresses, Murrey wanders disconsolate through a changed London, observing the bright military uniforms of the conquerors, the continental cafes and Bavarian bands, the proliferation of bi-lingual signs and petty regulations, with numerous petty officials — some of them British — eager to enforce them.

The question the book expounds is: under such

The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010

circumstances, what can be done? Cicely Yeovil and paralysing blow, their subsequent methods are those her sophisticated friends have settled for acquiescence; of absorption, dissimulation, even an unequal form of her husband Murrey, angry and frustrated, searches for partnership. Indeed, the author shows a respect for the some form of resistance. As he says: ‘It is one thing to enemy’s willpower and self-belief, qualities that are slipping away from his central character, and those face the music, it is another thing to dance to it.’

A musical evening at the theatre, in the presence of of his kind.

Murrey returns to London, where a chance meeting at His Majesty himself, indicates how far submission to the new regime has gone, at least among the artistic and his club leads to the purchase of a horse and the lease metropolitan crowd. The programme of songs includes of a house in the West Country for the autumn huntingsuch popular numbers as ‘They Quaff the Gay Bubbly season. The scene then shifts to the countryside where in Eccleston Square’, and concludes with the daughter Saki spent much of his childhood, and where (for all of a once-powerful aristocratic family performing her his later urban polish) he acquired an abiding love of ‘Suggestion Dances’, illustrative of such topics as country pursuits: The Life of a Fern. As one of the audience remarks The dry warm scent of the stable, the nip of the afterwards: ‘At any rate we know now that a fern takes morning air, the moist earthy fragrance of the autumn life very seriously.’ woods and wet fallows, the whimper of hounds Disgusted with the spectacle, Murrey leaves London and hot restless pushing of the pack through ditch and hedgerow and undergrowth, the birds that flew for the provinces, where much of the traditional British up and clucked and chattered as you passed, the way of life is still carried on. He goes to visit an old hearty greeting and pleasant gossip in farmhouse acquaintance, the Dowager Lady Greymarten, now kitchens and market-day parlours — all these wellwidowed. The character is based on Lady St Helier, a remembered. political hostess whom the author knew and admired, but the setting of the ancient But the quiet comfort of A century on, we may regard Saki’s last home where the old lady country life turns out to be novel as a fictional prophecy which has not resides is unmistakeably a an enervating force, sapping come about in quite the way anticipated, portrait of Hatfield House, what is left of Murrey’s as is often the case with prophecies and the family traditions will. An encounter with a evoked are those of the courteous young German Cecils: officer, who shares his love of field sports, both entertains and repels him. His settling down to a Torywood was not a stately, reposeful-looking house; life of rustic littleness is marred by self-accusation, it lay amid the sleepy landscape like a crouched ‘ignoring the struggle-cry that went up, low and bitter watchdog with pricked ears and wakeful eyes ... To and wistful, from a dethroned dispossessed race, in and fro the squires and lords of Torywood had gone in their respective generations, men with the passion for whose struggle he lent no hand.’ statecraft and political combat strong in their veins.

Although his central character accepts defeat, the And now one tired old woman walked there, with story does not end there. The final chapter depicts names on her lips that she never uttered. a festival day arranged in Hyde Park, on which the Broken in health if not in spirit, the old lady Boy Scouts of Britain are due to parade in front of the disconcertingly advises Murrey to become a Kaiser and a host of dignitaries. The event is intended commercial traveller. She urges him to travel up and to set the seal on submission to the new regime. As the down the country, in contact with all types and classes crowd — including a shame-faced Murrey — stand of people, to remind them of the great things of the waiting and the minutes tick past, it becomes clear past, and instil a determination to win them back. In that the parade will not take place. ‘The Emperor and the course of time, she warns him, the Government princes, Generals and guards, sat stiffly in their saddles, would find out what he was doing, and he would be and waited. And waited ... The younger generation had ‘sent out of the country’, but others would be left to barred the door.’

The world itself did not have long to wait. Within carry on the work.

The latter suggestion reveals perhaps that the author a year the guns of August spoke, and Britain and her underestimates what a German military occupation Empire was at war with Germany. Although he was would mean in practice, since such a counter-agent now aged 43, as H H Munro he immediately joined would have been summarily shot. But Saki takes the army, saying that having written When William pains not to make his account melodramatic or Came he ought at least to go halfway to meet him. sensational. All the German characters in the book are He served a private soldier and then as corporal in the sympathetically portrayed. Having delivered the first Royal Fusiliers, posted to the Western Front. A fellowThe Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010

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soldier recalled his courage and coolness in action, and his cheerful kindness to others when they were out of the line. The end came on a dark winter morning in November 1916, during one of the last battles of the Somme campaign. Munro was resting with his section in a shell-hole, waiting for the order to attack.

One of the soldiers struck a match to light a cigarette, and in the brief flare of the match-flame, a German sniper took his chance.

A century on, we may regard Saki’s last novel as a fictional prophecy which has not come about in quite the way anticipated, as is often the case with prophecies. It was Germany who lost the war, and all her overseas possessions; the British Empire growing even greater as a result. A second war with Germany and her allies also ended in victory for Britain, but at the cost of her own Empire and her national wealth. Subsequent membership of the European Union has rendered the British Parliament and law subject to Brussels and Strasbourg rather than to Berlin, but the outcome is much the same. The denationalised culture that Saki saw and described in London in his

own day has extended, with American influence now predominant. Although the countryside has remained much as he knew it, mass immigration has turned parts of our cities into foreign territory. The prospect of the younger generation barring any door seems remote, since state education is now given over to ‘equality, diversity, and climate change’. The armed forces have been run down and deprived of men and matériel, although still required to engage in endless wars. A bloated public sector is mainly devoted to serving itself rather than the public. Oncerespected institutions such as the Church of England or the BBC are now dedicated to apologetics or appeasement. The United Kingdom itself may be moving from devolution to dissolution.

And all of this has occurred, not as a result of defeat in war, or through foreign invasion, but simply through negligence, self-distrust, or through our own volition. If Saki had lived to see these things come about, he might have wondered whether his sacrifice, and that of his entire generation, had been worthwhile. But then, as his central character realises in a despairing moment of recognition: ‘One cannot explain things to the dead.’

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ARTS AND BOOKS abetted by the German army, whose apologists now like to pretend that it kept its hands clean. On the other side, the NKVD behaved no better: many prisons they abandoned to their advancing enemies contained scores of corpses, beaten to death after torture.

He does not attempt chronological cover; for instance, his reader is cast back, after a trenchant chapter on the justified use of atomic bombs in August 1945, onto an account of what became of Mussolini in September 1943. But every chapter is a closely argued account of one sort of horror or another. He has a particularly vivid account of life in France in the summer of 1944, far behind the fighting fronts — missed rendezvous, abrupt changes of allegiance, muddle and sudden death. Historians of strategy are often weak on tactics; he is strong on tactics as well as strategy, and devotes a score pf pages to explaining what a fighting soldier’s life was like in action.

Much of his work deals with what happened to the Jews of Europe who were mown down by the scythes of the Sicherheitsdienst and of its many supporters, German, Hungarian and Roumanian: ‘a history in which there was no happy ending’. He shows that many of these monstrosities were carried through by men who had become convinced, so twisted were nazi doctrines, that what they were doing was the right thing to do. Others simply showed that a beastly streak lurks in most of us, and — given an excuse — will get indulged. He knows enough law to keep abreast of the lawyers, enough philosophy to keep abreast of the philosophers; he understands human behaviour, even when it runs berserk. As for politicians, ‘the will to ignore the inconvenient can ride over any amount of evidence’.

He is always alert to the probability that a generally received doctrine may be mistaken; noticing the continuing tendency to assume that the USSR cannot have been as bad as Hitler’s Reich, and indicating that Hannah Arendt though nowadays usually taken as infallible could make grave errors of judgement.

This is not a comfortable book to read, but war is not a comfortable business, and atrocities remain atrocious. It deserves to be widely read, and will deepen understanding.

A Beastly Streak M R D Foot Moral Combat: a History of World War II, Michael Burleigh, Harper Press, 2010, £30.

Thucydides, head and shoulders above all other historians, believed when he wrote his history of the Peloponnesian war that it would help his fellow Greeks to be aware of the errors of their forebears. Not many modern historians dare as much; but Michael Burleigh has ventured on an account of the last world war from a moralist’s rather than a military commentator’s viewpoint.

He believes in Blake’s aphorism, now some two centuries old, that Nought can deform the Human Race Like to the Armour’s iron brace.

He begins with an austere review of how the predator powers behaved in the nineteen-thirties: the Italians using blister gases against a barefoot Abyssinian army, the Japanese murdering over a hundred thousand Chinese of both sexes at Nanking, raping most of the women before they butchered them. His contempt for the ineffectual righteousness of Chamberlain and Halifax is clear. He then shows how the internal regimes of the German and Russian dictatorships sapped the capacity for normal fellow-feeling of their citizens, by overturning accepted ideas of behaviour and encouraging children to betray their parents.

His record of the Polish campaign emphasises the savagery of the mopping-up that followed on the Germans’ and Russians’ military walk-over.

Everybody who had the least traces of education — dons, schoolteachers, engineers, doctors, as well as officers and priests — was herded away into camps, where most of them were shot; the Germans huddled those Jews who were not shot on sight into ghettoes, pending a ‘final solution’. The police did most of the work; the army watched, lending an occasional helping hand. When it came to the invasion of Russia, Burleigh makes it abundantly clear that the bestial behaviour of the SS Einsatzgruppen was aided and The Salisbury Review — Autumn 2010

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