Books: The Pungency of War

NINE RIVERS FROM JORDAN (496 pp.)—Denis Johnston—Little, Brown ($5).

One summer night in 1942, as Britain’s Eighth Army reeled back on Cairo under the hammer blows of Rommel’s Panzers, a devil-may-care Irishman employed by the BBC as a war correspondent padded out to the Pyramids on the back of a weary camel. In the far distance, the Tommies sang without a care,

O they’ve shifted father’s grave

To build a sewer . . .

while in the lee of the Great Pyramid, a bearded dragoman told the Irishman’s fortune: “Here in your hand I see nine rivers that you must cross . . . When you have reached the last river, you will . . . find what you have been looking for.”

Nine Rivers from Jordan is the strange and tempestuous tale of how Irishman Denis Johnston, war correspondent and scholar, maverick and mystic, fulfilled the dragoman’s prophecy in three years of bitter fighting that carried him and his BBC microphones from the Jordan to the Danube. Half-diary and half-confession, it is a story of one man’s war, but with this difference: where others wrote of battles with an end in view—victory—Johnston was an outsider, an Irish will-o’-the-wisp who happened in on the holocaust not caring—at first—who won.

Murder & Common Sense. His first river was the Jordan, symbol of the Palestine campaign. There, with Bible in hand, Johnston set out to find an answer to the question which he never really answers: What is the meaning of war? His second river was the “once deified and permanently sewage-laden Mother Nile.” He saw the defeat of the Afrika Korps and recorded in harrowing detail “this confusing mixture of rascality and gallantry, of bloody murder and of common sense, of intolerable grimness and of surprising joviality” that was the desert war. When the R.A.F. bombed a port in Tunisia, Johnston went along. And so “the BBC made its first triumphal recording of a member of a bomber crew in actual flight over a target . . . Clear as a bell it came over the intercom: ‘Here come the obscenity obscenities,’ ” meaning German fighters.

The third river was the Sangro, in Italy. Johnston reports a hilltop debate with a priest about faith and heresy. Then, as in a nervous movie, he shifts the scene to a shattered village where hysterical Italians watched a British private thumping out Moonlight Becomes You on a piano in the smoking ruins. Near by, a Gurkha battalion had established its GHQ without bothering to check for snipers in the upper room. A British officer sent his aide to inspect the attic, and when the Gurkha returned, Johnston recorded this conversation:

“There were 15 of them up there, sir.”

“Good God! Did they show fight?”

“No, sir.”

“Surrender?”

“No, sir.”

“Well, what happened?”

“I shot them, sir.”

“What? All of them . . . Good God. Fancy all those chaps up there. In battalion headquarters, too.”

Five Hundred Prayers. Across the Tiber, the fourth river, Johnston recorded the welcome of liberated Rome. Pope Pius gave an audience to the Allied press, but what impressed Johnston were the shouts of the cameramen: “Hold it, Pope, we gotcha …” A Scottish pipe band marched into St. Peter’s Square, bent—in the words of the pipe major—on “gieing Popie a blaw.” The Pope was delighted, says Orangeman Johnston, but “all the same, they might have picked on a more suitable tune than Lillibulero.”*

Landing on the Riviera, Johnston lugged his recording gear through Savoy to the link-up with Patton’s army, advancing through the dragon’s teeth of the Siegfried Line. The Seine was his fifth river, but the only experience Johnston records in Paris is of an unsuccessful brothel crawl. Soon he was back with Patton, blasting a path towards the Americans encircled in Bastogne. That Christmas, General Patton issued greeting cards with a prayer for good weather so that his fighter-bombers could strafe the Nazi armor. When the skies began clearing slowly, old Blood and Guts ordered: “Print 500 more of those prayers.”

Napoleon & Me. The sixth river was the Liffey, in Dublin. There Johnston was married during a brief furlough. Soon he was back at the front, bridging the seventh river, the Rhine, and pushing on into Germany. With the hard-driving U.S. tankmen he felt at home. But he also felt sorry for the Germans, until one day when he came upon the Buchenwald death camp and choked as he recorded the story.

The eighth river was the Danube, and the ninth the Inn. Johnston went all the way—through Bavaria into Austria and over the Brenner Pass to meet the U.S. Fifth Army, stumbling up from Italy. “Do you gentlemen realize,” said the wiry American colonel who led the last advance, “that only three soldiers in history have ever forced the Brenner? Hannibal, Napoleon and me?”

Johnston ends his book with sheer fantasy: a description of his own death in the Brenner Pass. At first sight, this appears to be a crude and contrived gag, but Johnston insists that he is serious. His moral is that he has crossed the nine rivers of experience and reached his long-sought goal: an understanding of war, which is too terrible for a man to live with. Such fatalism—and conceit—seems out of character with the life-lusty Irishman revealed in the book’s earlier pages.

In form, Nine Rivers is bewildering—a cluttered collection of sharply etched battle scenes and blurry philosophizings, of scurrility and scholarship, of Kiplingesque snatches of dialogue and Sean O’Casey-style playlets, let into the text whenever some passing gallantry or casual brutality catches the author’s eye. The result is hard to read, and harder still to characterize. Yet ten years afterwards, at a time when the spate of war books is slowly drying up. Author Johnston, now an English professor at Mount Holyoke College, has resurrected the realities of war with eerie, acrid pungency.

* Also known as “the tune that lost three kingdoms.” It is an anti-Catholic, anti-Irish ballad (1687) which helped arouse English resentment against Catholic King James II.