Raising Hackles

Black  Watch

National Review Online, November 14, 2008

Of all the remarkable aspects of Tony Blair’s personality, one of the strangest is the absence of any noticeable feeling (other than a prim, preachy technocratic disdain) for Britain’s past. From countless questionable constitutional “reforms” to his continuous attempts to integrate the U.K. ever deeper within the European Union, he demonstrated an indifference to the history of the nation he led that is so profound that it raises disturbing questions as to why he wanted the job in the first place. But if British history meant little to Mr. Blair, the British military meant even less. Blair may have deployed the U.K.’s armed forces far and wide, but he starved them of the resources they needed and the respect they deserved.

To realize this is to grasp why, in October 2004, the decision to divert Scotland’s legendary Black Watch away from the British army’s area of operations around Basra and into Iraq’s American zone (specifically, in and around the notorious “Triangle of Death”) was greeted in Britain with an anger that stretched far beyond the usual critics of the Iraq war. To many Brits, the mission made scant military sense, but was easy to explain politically as an electorally helpful gesture of support to a Bush administration intent on showing that the Coalition of the Willing was indeed just that. To add insult to the likelihood of injury it had recently emerged that, as part of the Labour government’s ongoing “rationalization” of the British army, the Black Watch, the oldest Highland regiment (it was founded in 1725), was likely to be reincorporated as a battalion within a larger Scottish formation. Like its soldiers, this formidable regiment was, it appeared, disposable.

This forms the background to Gregory Burke’s extraordinary, innovative, and elegiac Black Watch. Dating from 2006, this fine, fierce, but flawed play is now running at Brooklyn’s St. Ann’s Warehouse (it closes December 21; veterans of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars are admitted free of charge) in a strikingly staged, beautifully acted production by the National Theatre of Scotland. Some of the more extravagant plaudits this play has attracted may spring from its critique (“the biggest western foreign policy disaster ever”) of an unpopular war, but only some. Black Watch is a work of a quality that transcends ideology.

Jumping back and forth between a grim Scottish pub and an even grimmer Iraq (Camp Dogwood and its environs, 20 miles west of Mahmudiyah) — and interspersed with song, music-hall moments, reminders of Edinburgh’s military tattoo, and sequences that tip over into evocatively choreographed dance — Black Watch has little that is new or interesting to say either about war in general (bad) or the Iraq war in particular (very bad). Where it fascinates is as a portrait of the clash between the men (and I mean men, the only glimpses of women in Black Watch are as centerfold and DVD porn) of a venerable warrior tradition wrestling with a difficult war, political betrayal, and — hardest of all — themselves.

The opening monologue by Cammy (compellingly played by Paul Rattray), one of the unit’s soldiers, reveals the originality of the play’s vision, the vigor of its script, and the banality of its politics:

A’right. Welcome to this story of the Black Watch.

At first, I didnay want tay day this.

I didnay want tay have tay explain myself tay people ay.

See, I think people’s minds are usually made up about you if you were in the army.

They are though, ay?

They poor f***ing boys. They cannay day anything else. They cannay get a job. They get exploited by the army.

Well I want you to f***ing know. I wanted to be in the army. I could have done other stuff. I’m not a f***ing knuckle-dragger.

And people’s minds are made up about the war that’s on the now ay?

They are. It’s no right. It’s illegal. We’re just big bullies.

Well, we’ll need to get f***ing used tay it. Bullying’s the f***ing job. That’s what you have a f***ing army for.

“Bullying”? In all its pride, prickly defensiveness, and profanity (if un-FCC speech is a problem for you, don’t go to see Black Watch: The largely liberal audience may have come prepared for wartime horror, but a noticeable number flinched every time — and it was often — that the “c word” ricocheted across the narrow stage) Cammy’s language sounds authentic, but, as for its content, well, the idea that a soldier steeped in the lore and mystique of a regiment with hundreds of years of experience of counter-insurgency and “police” work would regard his work as “bullying” beggars belief.

But to Mr. Burke it’s that lore and that mystique, the fabled “Golden Thread” of regimental history that has linked successive generations of the Black Watch, which beggars belief. In a dazzlingly structured, darkly funny (like much of this play) and sardonically narrated sequence, Cammy hints that the thread is really a garrote:

[W]e fought the French and Indians. In America and India. And the French again in Egypt and Portugal and Spain. And at Waterloo in our squares. And somewhere along the way, George the Third decided we deserved tay wear a red vulture feather in our hats.

The Red Hackle.

We got it for the recapture of two cannons in a little village in Flanders in 1795. Which didnay seem like a big deal at the time. But George the Third must ay thought so.

The British Army likes little touches like that. It calls them force multipliers. Gets the cannon fodder hammering down the recruitment doors.

Even if we allow for the traditional gallows humor of the serviceman, that’s too glib, too slick, and too easy. The regiment’s heritage, and the pride its soldiers take in it, may be drummed into new recruits, but it is organic, not manufactured, as real as three centuries. What counts is not the feather, but what that feather symbolizes — something that goes far, far beyond a king’s whim and a couple of cannon.

But, as Mr. Burke (who based his drama on a series of interviews with former members of the Black Watch, semi-fictionalized versions of which frame and punctuate his intricately organized play) clearly understands, history forms just one of the threads, golden or otherwise, that bind the regiment together:

Macca: It was the regimental system ay. It was perfect.

Granty: You got tay go way the people you kent.

Rossco: And you get to fight.

Nabsy: That’s what we’re trained for.

Cammy: That’s what we joined the army tay day.

Rossco: Fight.

Cammy: No for our government.

Macca: No for Britain.

Nabsy: No even for Scotland.

Cammy: I fought for my regiment.

Rossco: I fought for my company.

Granty: I fought for my platoon.

Nabsy: I fought for my section.

Stewarty: I fought for my mates.

Cammy: F***ing s****e fight tay end way though.

Writing in the introduction to a published edition of the play, Burke explains this phenomenon in terms that might startle readers more familiar with America’s distinctly different recruiting tradition:

Even today, in our supposedly fractured, atomized society, the regiment exists on a different plane. In Iraq there were lads serving alongside their fathers. There were groups of friends from even the smallest communities. Four from the former fishing village of St. Monans. Seven from the former mining village of High Valleyfield. Dozens from Dundee and Dunfermline, Kirkaldy and Perth. Friends and family. Uncles, brothers, cousins, fathers, sons, schoolmates. . . . [T]he army does not recruit well in London or any other big city. Metropolitanism and multiculturalism are not the things that are welded into a cohesive fighting force. Fighting units tend to be more at home with homogeneity. Not that there aren’t other nationalities in the Black Watch. There are Fijians and Zimbabweans, even a few Glaswegians. However, the central core of the regiment has always been the heartland of Perthshire, Fife, Dundee and Angus. . . . The Black Watch is a tribe.

Yet despite Burke’s cynicism about the use to which the Black Watch’s history is put, and despite the ways in which this play, and Burke’s bleak portrayal of how the troops viewed their stint in Iraq, is colored by his obvious opposition to the war (and possibly also by the fact that he only appears to have talked to men who chose not to re-enlist) he is too honest to conceal his respect for the way that this tribe works together, sticks together, and fights together right “tay end.” It’s no surprise to learn that Burke, a college dropout brought up in Fife, has relatives who had fought in the regiment.

At the same time, for all Burke’s sympathy for the troops, it is impossible not to detect a touch of condescension in the way he depicts them. Like Rudyard Kipling before him, he is for the soldiers, but not of them. The lovingly reproduced, sharply observed, and spectacularly obscene Scots vernacular of Burke’s dialogue is a comprehensive-schooled sequel to the carefully dropped aitches and delicately coarse language of Kipling’s Barrack Room Ballads. The social gap between Burke and the men of the Black Watch (a theme that the playwright cleverly turns against himself in some acutely uncomfortably exchanges in that acutely uncomfortable pub) is dauntingly wide, if nothing like the vast class chasm that divided Kipling from the army rank and file that he, in his turn, hymned so well.

The suspicion that Burke may view his subjects de haut en bas — as puppets to be positioned to make a point — is only reinforced by the banality, the aggression, and the repetitiveness of so much of their conversation. This depiction occasionally comes close to turning them into caricatures of masculinity, belligerence, and ignorance — cut-outs where depth is replaced by testosterone-fueled display. It’s probably significant that with the exception of one hypnotic, heart-breaking scene — part dance, part mime — in which the men receive letters from home, only one of the soldiers, the upper class officer (Peter Forbes, in a finely judged performance), is shown to have a family life.

Or perhaps the playwright was just reaching his way to a truth about the brave, tough troops who defend the rest of us, a truth that is not (as Kipling recognized) always quite as straightforward as our myths tell us it ought to be:

We aren’t no thin red ’eroes, nor we aren’t no blackguards too,

But single men in barricks, most remarkable like you;

An’ if sometimes our conduck isn’t all your fancy paints,

Why, single men in barricks don’t grow into plaster saints:

Wise man, Kipling. Wise man Burke.