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.

As Rome Starts to Smoulder

National Review Online, December 9, 2003

Human nature never disappoints in its capacity to dismay. The fact that, six decades after Auschwitz, there is, once again, anxiety about rising anti-Semitism in Europe is proof enough of that. Vandalized synagogues, desecrated graveyards, torched schools, tales of beatings, bullying, and thuggery in the streets bring a touch of the pogrom to 21st-century headlines. And then there are all those words, speeches, articles, and opinion pieces in the better papers. They are subtler than 60 years ago, with a more discreet viciousness, carefully calibrated and coded, no Stürmer stridency, no conspiratorial Protocols, just hints and insinuations — well sometimes a little more than that — of something altogether more primitive. In Holland, for example, there's Gretta Duisenberg, grim Wim's grimmer wife. Until recently, old Wim was in charge of the European Central Bank, busily presiding over economic stagnation and a destructive interest-rate policy. Compared with Gretta, however, he was a paragon of good judgment. Asked how many signatures she hoped to gain for a petition calling for economic sanctions on Israel, the charming Mrs. Duisenberg laughingly settled on this number: Six million.

A coincidence, she said later. Perhaps, but Europe has recently seen quite a few such coincidences, evidence, it is alleged, that the lessons of the Holocaust have yet to be learned in the continent that gave it birth. The thought that an old evil may be about to return is disturbing, but, for some, it's an image that is as convenient as it is frightening. To Europe's Left, the specter of the Third Reich has long been useful political theater, a bloody brown shirt to wave at its opponents and, these days, a handy device for suppressing any attempt at serious debate over mass immigration. Take Pim Fortuyn. He was a libertarian free spirit, but, for his comments on immigration and multiculturalism, he found himself denounced as a "xenophobe" and, mark of Cain, a "fascist." End of discussion and, as it turned out, end of Fortuyn too.

Meanwhile, to some Americans, particularly on the right, the notion of a Europe flirting with the worst of its past fits in nicely with their portrayal of a continent as depraved as it is decadent. Think back to the dramas of earlier this year. With the grotesque spectacle of the French foreign minister cynically articulating the case for "peace," what better way to puncture his country's pretensions of moral superiority than to focus on the apparent reappearance of anti-Semitism in the land of Dreyfus, Laval, and Le Pen? Anti-Semitism is bad enough in its own right, but it is also the sin forever associated with Vichy's moral squalor. To highlight its rebirth, particularly at a time when France was under fire for deserting old allies, was a useful way for Chirac's critics to conjure up memories of the period in French history with which it is usually associated, that epoch of white flags, a railway carriage at Compiègne, and, at times, all-too-enthusiastic collaboration.

And to complete that picture of treachery, betrayal, and capitulation, who should turn out to be France's closest ally in the struggle against U.S. "hegemony"?

The Germans.

Bringing this shameful era into the debate may have proved an effective, and not entirely unfair, tactic but it runs the risk of reducing the discussion to crude (if entertaining) stereotypes (full disclosure: I've done a bit of this myself). In reality, France's policy in the face of Baathist tyranny and Islamic extremism has been, like Vichy, a fascinating blend of spinelessness and realpolitik, repellent but more complicated than just another display of cowardice by a nation of cheese-eating surrender monkeys.

While it is, alas, true that Europe has seen some recurrence of "classic" (if that's the word) anti-Semitism, the idea that the continent is somehow moving towards a repetition of the nightmare of 60 years ago is an exaggeration even more absurd than France as chicken supreme. For proof, look no further than the furor over what is still a relatively small number of violent incidents. Despite this, however, there can be no doubt that something wicked is indeed afoot. To understand it, we should look closer at two topics often obscured by propaganda, prejudice, and political correctness. The first is European attitudes towards Israel, the second, extremism among Europe's Muslim population.

When a recent opinion poll found that nearly 60 percent of EU citizens believed that Israel was a threat to world peace, comfortably ahead of those doves in Pyongyang (53 percent), it seemed yet more proof that an old virus was already abroad in the land. Perhaps, but check the numbers and you'll see that the U.S. (also on 53 percent) was rated as just as dangerous as crazy little Kim. That's ludicrous too, of course, but it's evidence that this polling data reflects not gutter prejudice but something almost as insidious: Europeans' desire to accept any compromise so long as it could buy them a quiet life — at least for a while.

It's an attitude that used to show itself in the argument, once popular among large sections of the European Left, that there was a broad degree of moral equivalence between the Cold War's American (Holiday Inn, McDonalds) and Soviet (Gulag, mass graves) protagonists. It's an attitude that regards "peace" (that word again) as a good that trumps all others — so when Israel is labeled the worst threat to world peace, or the U.S. and North Korea are described as being as dangerous as each other, it shows only that Europeans, left powerless by years of relative decline, falling self-confidence, and shrunken military budgets, have realized that both Israel and America are more interested in self-defense than suicide. That these two countries may be fully entitled to take the positions they do is, naturally, quite irrelevant.

This is the context in which Ariel Sharon has taken to talking about "a great wave of anti-Semitism," but Americans — and Israelis — need to acknowledge that it is quite possible to be critical, indeed severely critical, of current Israeli policies without being in any way anti-Semitic. Indeed, even when they are manifestly unreasonable, contemporary European attitudes to Israel are generally best seen not as anti-Semitic, but rather as an extension of that self-loathing that seems increasingly to define Western cultural and political life. Go back to the 1960s and an impressed and remorseful Europe tended to see Israel as a plucky little country, filled with the survivors of the worst that Europe could do to them, cheerily working on their cheery kibbutzim to build a cheerily collectivist future that would in itself be a living rebuke to the reactionary attitudes that had made the Holocaust possible.

Prompted in no small part by Soviet propaganda efforts, that attitude began to change, particularly after the Six Day War and, even more so, in the wake of the 1973 conflict. Conveniently, some might say, in the light of OPEC threats to Europe's oil supply, Israel came to be seen as the oppressor, not the oppressed, a colonialist, "racist" (evil Zionists!) outpost of European savagery, rather than a refuge from it. As such, condemnation of Israeli policy was not so much an expression of European disdain for "the Jews" as yet another manifestation of Europe's hatred for itself. Combine that sentiment with today's televised images of the hard-line response of the Sharon government to the revived Intifada and it's easy to see that the anger now directed at Israel was almost inevitable.

But if it's a mistake to attribute all this hostility to anti-Semitism, it is also a mistake that to deny that European vituperation of Israel has now reached such a level that it may be tapping the wellsprings of a very ancient psychosis, as well as, it should also be admitted, the more "modern" anti-Semitism long associated with Europe's hard Left. Under these circumstances, it is unfortunate, to say the least, that so much of the imagery and the language used by Europe's harsher critics of the Jewish state recalls the anti-Semitism of an earlier era. Coincidence? Doubtless Mrs. Duisenberg would say so.

It is unlikely, however, that there can be any such merciful ambiguity (however stretched) about the curious behavior of the EU's "Monitoring Centre for Racism and Xenophobia," an organization that, appropriately enough given its rather Orwellian name, allegedly decided to shelve publication of a report commissioned from Berlin Technical University's highly respected Anti-Semitism Research Institute on the causes of the increased number of attacks on Jews in Europe. Why? The institute had come up with the wrong answer.

Naturally, that's not the center's explanation. Under intense pressure from its critics (which, with characteristic arrogance, the center is trying to spin as evidence of "how important and sensitive [its] work is"), it has now released the draft report on its website, while continuing to maintain that it is not "fit for publication." It is, they sniff, "neither reliable nor objective," This is a stance in line with its earlier claims that the report was of "insufficient quality," a view, unsurprisingly, the institute rejects. In essence, the Berlin researchers argue that the real objection to their report, which found, plausibly enough, that young Muslims (particularly immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa) were responsible for much of the rise in anti-Semitic incidents, was its lack of political correctness.

This rings true. The EU pursues a relentlessly multiculturalist agenda. Under these circumstances, the publication of data showing that young Muslims, rather than old Nazis, ought to be starring in Brussels's morality play was highly awkward. Inconvenient reality had, therefore, to be changed, or at least ignored, no big deal for a fraudulent (in all senses) "Union" that has long shown its contempt for the marketplace, the nation, history, tradition, and democracy.

So, it's no surprise that the EU's hacks ("independent experts...in the field of racism and xenophobia") repeatedly (according to the Daily Telegraph) attempted to persuade the Berlin Institute to tone down its conclusions. To its credit, the institute refused and we have seen what happened next. To the EU, combating anti-Semitism, it seems, is less important than preserving the dangerous illusions of multiculturalism, and, probably, recognizing the demographics of a Europe where there are more Muslims to appease than Jews to protect.

As a symbol of the dishonesty and confusion that surrounds this issue, that's hard to beat, but in the meantime, France's chief rabbi is concentrating on more practical matters. He's advising young Jews to wear baseball caps rather than skullcaps. Wearing a yarmulke, apparently, might make them a target for "potential assailants."

Not that Brussels would care.

Lancers, Fusiliers, Rats...The ongoing glory of the British regiment

National Review, April 21, 2003

WHEN the British, over 40,000 strong, arrived in the Persian Gulf they brought more than troops, hardware, support staff, and supplies. There was history, too, in their baggage. One need look no further than the names of just some of the units now deployed in the war—storied regiments with lineages that stretch back through the centuries, from Kuwait to Normandy, the Somme, the Crimea, and often far past. The Royal Scots Dragoon Guards (the successors of a regiment that served in Afghanistan, but in 1879-80) are in the Gulf for the war against Saddam, and so to pick out but a few more, are the Black Watch (whose battle honors include, ahem, a "'successful action" in Brooklyn. N.Y.. against one George Washington), the Life Guards (who first saw action in 1685), and that enduring symbol of Churchill's defiance and determination, the Parachute Regiment.

Each British regiment usually specializes in a specific type of soldiering. There are, for example, artillery, infantry, armored, and engineering (the "sappers") regiments—but when they go to war they are joined together in larger formations, "much like," a brigadier explained to me, "the way in which the different sections. woodwind, strings, and so on, are combined to make up an orchestra." This orchestra is one that often reprises the past: Much of the move across the sands towards Basra has been led by formations grouped together into the 7th Armoured Brigade, a unit that still wears the insignia of the "Desert Rat," that strange scrawny rodent that became a symbol of strange scrawny Monty's World War II triumphs in North Africa.

British history, it seems, is not ready to end quite yet. Who would have thought it? When, more than 20 years ago, the "task force," Margaret Thatcher's marvelous makeshift armada, returned from its Falklands victory to cheers, tears, and Union Jacks on the quayside, Brits were told that it was. at last, goodbye to all that. The curtain had fallen, chaps, and there was no time for an encore. The rascally, glittering, wicked, and glorious age of empire was finally done, finished, buried, and anathematized—exchanged for the obligations of a grayer, more sober era.

And so, it seemed, was the British military. The downsized heirs of Kipling's rough-and-tumble conquistadors were destined now for the shrunken campaigns of a mid-sized European power, fighting budget cuts at home, terrorists in Belfast, and boredom in West Germany as they waited, and watched, and waited some more for the Red Army that never came.

After the Wall came down, so did the money that the U.K. was prepared to spend on its military. A defense "review," carrying the sort of bland. vaguely threatening name—"Options for Change"—that is more McKinsey & Co. than Sandhurst, saw the size of the army reduced by a little under one-third; to not much more than 100,000 men. Regiments were merged or disbanded, often with startlingly little sentiment. To take just one example, the 16th/5th Lancers, a regiment with roots that stretched back over 300 years, led the way into Iraq in February 1991, yet within two years found its proud name on the scrap pile, lost in a merger with little patience for the past.

Yet, somehow, the past has endured, taught in every recruit's basic training and nourished by a system that is the British army's greatest strength: the regiment. To borrow the words of Field Marshal Wavell, "The regiment is the foundation of everything." The concept of the regiment stems from the fact that recruitment was once organized on a local basis, but its survival as an institution owes a great deal to one crucial psychological insight: Men may enlist to serve their country, but they will fight hardest to protect their friends. Most British soldiers spend their entire career within the same regiment—over the years it becomes their principal source of friendship, their clan., their community, almost a surrogate family.

This sense of community is intensified still further by the British army's perception of itself as a caste set somewhat apart from the rest of society. Currently the army is, as it has been for much of British history, made up entirely of volunteers. The notion of the citizen soldier has been rejected in favor of the creation of a smallish force of highly trained professionals. This professionalism is a source of enormous pride to the troops, something Donald Rumsfeld may have discovered if he paid heed to Sgt. McMenamy of the Queen's Royal Lancers in early March. After hearing misinterpreted reports that the defense secretary was considering either leaving the Brits behind or giving them a secondary role in the coming conflict, the sergeant (described by the London Times as an "intimidating figure") was quoted as saying: "We are second to none, so it's a bit cheeky to suggest we can't be trusted to fight in the front line." ("A bit cheeky," let's be clear, is a classic example of British understatement.)

Like any community, the regiment has its own institutional memory that, added to the shared experience of highly intensive training and active duty, binds together the current generation and develops a sense of collective identity far more effectively than abstract notions of patriotism ever could. Visit the head- quarters of a British regiment, and there will almost certainly be a museum dedicated to its past campaigns; dine in its officers' mess and you will, in all probability, eat amid the portraits and the heirlooms of those who came before—silver from India, perhaps, or a tattered banner from one of Napoleon's lost legions.

Even the regiments that have been merged or amalgamated away into bureaucratic oblivion still manage to live on in the souls of their successors. Take the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers, which is now with the Desert Rats in Iraq. Its men celebrate their regimental forebears—the Royal Northumberland Fusiliers, the Royal Warwickshire Fusiliers, the City of London Regiment, and the Lancashire Fusiliers—on four separate days each year (for Gallipoli, Normandy, Albuhera, and Minden). These honored ancestors are the insistent ghosts of countless past glories, and it would not do to let them down.

Today's warriors, the latest in a long line of British expeditionary forces, as they march through a dusty landscape not so different from the battlefields of Victoria's old empire, are fighting for the honor of their clan, for its past, and for its totems. For some of the men, a former captain in the Irish Guards told me, it's a little "like playing for a famous football team." And would a little scrap of cloth bearing the caricature of a rat really mean something to those who wore it? "Oh yes," he said. Another officer agreed, particularly for those who fought together as Desert Rats in the last Gulf War, but stressed that much of the attention on that famous rodent has been a media creation. a hook to catch the attention of the wider British public, to whom the name of Monty's legendary army will mean much more than the history of any one regiment.

But to the soldiers themselves, it is their regiment that counts the most—not the Desert Rats. It should come as no surprise that Lt. Col. Tim Collins of the Royal Irish, when he spoke to his troops about the conduct that would be expected of them as they prepared to fight in Iraq, chose to emphasize the duty they owed their regiment: Cruelty or cowardice, he warned, could "harm the regiment or its history." And nothing could be worse than that.

It's early yet in this war, but somehow I don't think that Lt. Col. Collins will he disappointed.