[lit-ideas] Re: In the Name of Efficiency . . .
- From: David Ritchie <ritchierd@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 9 May 2006 20:18:19 -0700
On May 9, 2006, at 7:42 PM, Lawrence Helm wrote:
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<x-tad-bigger>Your knowledge of the British military seems remarkable. How did you come by it?</x-tad-bigger>
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I think you're asking if I was ever in the military. The answer's no. One grandfather did four years in a Highland regiment in the First World War. The other thought the war a capitalist folly. My father, armed with a rifle and no bullets, defended Edinburgh University's Chemistry building against German bombers. He really wanted to join the Naval Air Arm and fly a Swordfish. Like Eddie Izzard, I was told by the careers officer at university that I was ideally suited to a military career. This was at one of Britain's most left-wing universities, at a time when the British army was finally out of Cyprus and Aden, but still in Northern Ireland.
Much as I wanted to fly, my answer was, "Not likely."
While taking a degree in literature, I spent a year in France writing an oral history of what went wrong with the Resistance in the Vercors in World War Two. Then I moved to California and wrote my Ph.D. thesis about how going mad in wartime became a disease, a subject that required fluency in military and medical history, as well as the history of the Music Hall and all kinds of cultural stuff. I wrote a book about swords, one that is still sitting somewhere in Penguin HQ and probably will now not see the light of day.
I'd claim to keep up with military history--I'm just finishing a course on Modernism and the First World War-- but your mention of John Mosier's controversial book reminded me that I still haven't read it. So I went to HWAR and was quickly reminded why I don't think of myself as a military historian.
David Ritchie,
Portland, Oregon
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