Annual Booklist 2020 : Richard Hopton
Richard Hopton is a historian and author whose non-fiction works include a history of duelling and a study of the Battle of Maida. His first novel, The Straits of Treachery, won the 2019-2020 SAHR Prize for Militray Fiction.
I have long been fascinated by the First World War for many reasons not least the fact that four members of my father’s family were killed in the fighting, but the sheer extent of its literature makes any selection difficult. There are many memoirs of the war, some well-known, others obscure. One of my favourites is A Passionate Prodigality (1933) by Guy Chapman. Chapman was an unusual combatant in that he was already a member of the Bar when war broke out in 1914 and in later life held a chair in modern history. His account of his war service with the Royal Fusiliers is an unvarnished tale of the tedium, terror and occasional humour of the life of a junior officer in the trenches. Edmund Blunden wrote that Chapman recalled better than anyone ‘the ironies, the panoramas, the inventions and the mirages of those years.’
A memoir of a very different stripe is Francis Yeats-Brown’s Bengal Lancer (1930). Its affectionate, almost lyrical account of life as a cavalry subaltern in the Indian Army before 1914 recalls a long-vanished world. Yeats-Brown fought in the opening stages of the First World War before joining the Royal Flying Corps in 1915. He was posted to Mesopotamia where he was captured by the Turks, spending two years as a POW before escaping. This is a war story but one told with the charming, almost insouciant understatement which is supposedly so characteristic of that selfless, dutiful generation.
Mark Thompson’s The White War (2008) is a landmark account of the campaigns on the Italian front between 1915-18. It had largely been ignored by British historians of the War, despite the fact that British forces were engaged in the theatre in support of their Italian allies. Thompson’s book recounts in unsparing detail the relentlessly brutal campaigning in the harsh mountainous terrain of north-eastern Italy.
Of all the novels of the First World War, my favourite - and one of the best - which I’ve read at least half a dozen times since I was a boy, is C.S. Forester’s The General (1936). It is a brilliant portrait of an officer driven to destruction by his sense of duty and patriotism, a man who believed implicitly that what he was doing was what his country demanded of him in its hour of mortal danger. It is an important, albeit fictional, contribution to the never-ending debate about British generalship in the Great War, written at a time when many of the leading actors were still alive.
My final selection is not properly speaking military history at all, although one could plead that the subject of John Bew’s masterly biography of Lord Castlereagh served as an officer of militia as a young man and later as Secretary of War. Castlereagh (2011) is the defining biography of one of the most important British statesmen of the first two decades of the nineteenth century, a rounded and profoundly satisfying work of history. From a military historical perspective, it has much to say about the high direction of the Peninsular War and of the relations between Castlereagh, the political master, and Wellington, his principal general.
As for the book which I should like to see written, I have long been interested in the British (and Allied) intervention in Russia in 1918 and 1919. There are accounts of the operations based on Archangel and Murmansk in western Russia but operations in the east, driving west from Vladivostock, remain - so far as I am aware - obscure.