There is no home and
The humanity
By Alexander Baron
Imperial War Museum War Classics, £8.99
There is a fascinating moment in his memoirs, Chapter of Accidentswhen Alexander Baron (1917-99) describes how he changed his name when he published his first novel, From the city, from the plough. He was born Joseph Alexander Bernstein in 1917 to two East End Jews. His father was a fur cutter who was born in a shtetl in Poland and came to the East End in 1908. Baron’s mother was born in Spitalfields to Jewish immigrants from Lithuania. His publisher Jonathan Cape had asked him to change his name to Baron. They obviously thought it sounded less Jewish.
The novel was a huge success. It was published in 1948 and sold over half a million copies. Writer and literary critic VS Pritchett said it was “the only war book that gave me a sense of reality”. Years later, historian Sir Antony Beevor called it “undoubtedly one of the greatest British novels of the Second World War”.
It was the first part of a trilogy of war books, followed by There is no home (1950) and The humanity (1953), a book of short stories based on Baron’s own wartime experiences. He later wrote, “I am regarded as a kind of spokesman for the voiceless British soldiers of the Second World War.”
After a new edition of Out of town in 2019, There is no home And The humanity have now been reissued with new introductions by Stephen Walter. The former is based on Baron’s time serving in Sicily with the 8th Army. It begins in August 1943, when Catania has been captured by the Allies after a brutal battle against German and Italian forces. But it is a war novel with a twist. There are no battles or combat scenes. Instead, it focuses on the relationships between the British soldiers and the local women with whom they become increasingly involved. There is no home is as much about the effects of the war on women, both those in Sicily and those the soldiers left behind in Britain, as it is about the effects on the soldiers themselves. Sicily becomes a kind of code for what men do when they are far from home, so far from home that it no longer exists.
Baron had a rare gift for character creation, bringing to life a diverse group of soldiers. There’s the brutal gangster Broom, the jovial Jobling brothers, and Craddock, the only one who bothers to learn Italian.
One aspect is conspicuously absent from the novel. There are no references to Jews, anti-Semitism or the Holocaust. Does this reflect a general silence widespread in post-war British culture, or is it a more personal choice on the part of Baron, who wants to establish himself as a mainstream English author?
There is another question. Are Evelyn Waugh and Olivia Manning better known as war writers because they focus on officers, while Baron is always interested in the infantry?
The stories in The humanity follows a group of British soldiers from training in England to Sicily, Normandy, Belgium and the deep disillusionment after the war. It did not have the same impact as his masterpiece, From the city, from the ploughbut here all of Baron’s strengths are to be found. His ability to breathe life into a group of soldiers, his skill in dialogue and storytelling and, above all, his ruthless realism in describing a soldier’s life with all its faults, from dysentery to war neurosis. This is war without illusions or sentimentality, told by one of Britain’s best war writers. It was a brave book, written so soon after the war.
Once again, it is striking how little actual combat occurs in the two dozen stories. The focus is instead on the relationships within the platoon, but especially between the British soldiers and a series of fascinating outsiders – a hunchbacked woman, a young Italian (“Cicciolino”), an Indian soldier, and various exotic women. There is also the relationship between the narrator, Alex, and the other soldiers. Alex is cultured, well-educated, an outsider among the working-class soldiers, “a tough, turbulent bunch,” mainly working-class Londoners, heavy drinkers and womanizers, quite unlike the gentle, well-read narrator, who bears a striking resemblance to the author.
It is good to remember what an outstanding writer Baron was, the man The Guardian once described as “the greatest British novelist of the last war and one of the best, most underrated of the post-war period”. These are powerful and moving books, immensely worth reading, and we should be grateful to the Imperial War Museum for reissuing the trilogy.
