The best novels about warfare

John Harris: Covenant with Death (1961)
Anthony Powell: The Valley of Bones (1964),
Nicholas Monsarrat: The Cruel Sea (1951)
CS Forester: The Ship (1943)

If one should decide to select only from British novels about 20th-century warfare, then the impulse to cheat, or to compress or otherwise to circumvent the rules, would still be an honourable one. And this would be because, as most historians are now beginning to agree, there were not two world wars but a single global war, which probably began with the Russo-Japanese conflict of 1905 (trigger of the first and best Russian revolution) and may not have ended until the reunification of Germany in 1989, only to start up again in the Balkans and the Caucasus in our own day.

The first time that I ever read this thought in print was in John Harris's 1961 novel Covenant With Death, which showed with unbearable actuality what happened to a newly formed Sheffield regiment on the first day of the battle of the Somme. Looking back on the carnage, the narrator realises that the horrific combat that he randomly survived will only be a curtain-raiser to a much more ghastly subsequent war in which his own children will have to suffer, too.

Once this thought is lodged in your head it cannot be dislodged. As a result, when you read the Sword of Honour trilogy of Evelyn Waugh, or the third movement of Anthony Powell's (pictured) Dance To The Music of Time (and I now confess what I meant above by cheat, in smuggling each of these trios through customs as being single extended fictional treatments), you will straightaway notice that the veterans of the first world war are the instructors of the novices of the second world war. Another thing you will observe is that the distinction between being a civilian and a soldier becomes more and more blurred. The old cliche from Clausewitz, about war being a continuation of politics by other means, is less of a cliche when you read Waugh and Powell describing the vicious domestic politics of wartime, and the murder of some of their own favourite characters during the aerial bombardment of big cities. Details matter here: both masters dwell on the awful lack of decent food and drink, but perhaps only Powell could manage so subtly to underscore the astonishing importance of sleep deprivation as a part of the misery of war.

I may have been preconditioned to notice that last point, having read The Cruel Sea about 50 times before I was 15. Nicholas Monsarrat's bleak, imperishable account of the battle of the Atlantic contains horrible accounts of flaying burns, hellish splinters, sudden sinkings and other fates, yet for me the most indelible image is that of Captain Ericson staying on his feet on the bridge when his actual body should have put him into a merciful coma of repose. The same image, of stern wakefulness as heroism, recurs in CS Forester's The Ship, where once again the odds in tonnage and gunnery are adjusted in favour of the British side by sheer discipline, pluck and morale.

That this isn't the entire story one doesn't need to be told. But that it was a real part of the story ought not to be forgotten, and the best of our wartime fiction preserves a certain stubborn and understated verisimilitude that is sometimes superior to what is taught (and even worse untaught) in our schools. Fools often say that Waugh and Powell only wrote about the English upper crust: they should spend a few hours reading Powell on the coal-mining rank-and-file of his Welsh regiment and on his later military attache's job of representing the gallant small nations whose governments took refuge in London after 1940.

John Harris's novel can certainly be classified as anti-war. And the mild-mannered CS Forester was no jingo, either. But at one point in The Ship he describes a British officer who has a berserk Viking look to him, and in attempting to capture his temper goes beyond the familiar image of joy of battle to the frightening words "rapture of the strife". Even Kipling, who liked Nordic language, might have hesitated to say that. But then the British, when writing about warfare, usually choose to pretend that they embark on it only with the deepest reluctance. It is from this very repression that the most ecstatic descriptions of bloodshed are derived.

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist and critic for Vanity Fair