Sword Of Bone by Anthony Rhodes

 

Sword Of Bone by Anthony Rhodes.

Published 20th May 2021 by the Imperial War Museums.

From the cover of the book:

In May 2021, IWM will publish two more novels in their Wartime Classics series which was launched in September 2019 to great acclaim, bringing the total novels in the series to ten. Each has been brought back into print to enable a new generation of readers to hear stories of those who experienced conflict firsthand.

First published in 1942, Sword of Bone is a lightly fictionalised memoir based on Anthony Rhodes’ own experiences during the Second World War – firstly during the so-called ‘Phoney War’ from 1939 – 40, followed by the terror of the evacuation of Dunkirk.

Shortly after war was declared, he was sent to France serving with the British Army where his days were filled with billeting, friendships and administration – the minutiae of Army life. 

Apart from a visit to the Maginot Line, the conflict seems a distant prospect.

It is only in the Spring of 1940 that the true situation becomes clear – the Belgian, British armies and some French divisions are ‘now crowded into a small pocket in the North of France’. The men are ordered to retreat to the coast and the beaches of Dunkirk where they face a desperate and frightening wait for evacuation.

The ‘miracle’ of Dunkirk was a brilliantly improvised naval operation that extracted more than 338,000 men from the Dunkirk beaches and brought them safely back to England. Some 850 vessels, including channel steamers and fishing boats, took part in this, Operation ‘Dynamo’. The final pages of the novel outline Rhodes’ experiences of the chaos of the evacuation where the scenes are depicted in vivid and terrifying detail.

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As I recently mentioned in my review for Pathfinders by Cecil Lewis, the other recently published addition to the IWM Wartime Classics collection, I find this series of books so thoroughly nostalgic in the way they take me back to reading my own father's wartime book hoard. They are so of their time, and I find this curiously moving. (see my review of Pathfinders here).

Sword of Bone is a very interesting book, because it takes us to the strange period of the Second World War before the conflict got started, when there was an air of strange calm about the whole proceedings. The experience of the Great War had left a false impression that this would be a largely static kind of trench warfare, with periodic episodes of senseless slaughter in the mud of no man's land, but for the soldiers who found themselves in France at this time, the war seemed very far away from where they were billeted, quaffing champagne and gorging on pate de fois gras.

Anthony Rhodes uses his own experience of this early period of WWII to show exactly how the men on the ground were bemused by this odd period of being manoeuvred around the French and Belgian countryside, being treated to the hospitality of the local population, who were more or less carrying on like normal - apart from the fact that many of their own menfolk had already been sent to the front. There are many surreal scenes described, which add an absurd comic undertone to the story, despite being set during wartime.

I did find this part of the book rather difficult to get into, even with the dark humour of the piece, because the view point is so overwhelmingly masculine, although it does provide an intriguing glance into how a wartime army was provisioned and accommodated on foreign soil. It's not until the German army suddenly surprise the Allies with a rapid and aggressive advance that this story really comes alive for me.

As the Allies are harried across the countryside and trapped in a pocket of northern France, the soldiers who have been playing at war suddenly realise the full horror of the situation. With their backs to the sea, they become trapped and subjected to a terrible bombardment from the German guns and bombs. Their only escape is to head back across the English Channel from the beaches of Dunkirk - a name that has been branded into our consciousness as the setting for an extraordinary evacuation operation called Operation Dynamo, when a rag-tag flotilla of marine vessels ferried an army back across the Channel to home shores.

This part of the book vividly brings home the traumatic experience of the men on those beaches, desperately waiting for a rescue that might never come, and the bravery of those that took up the call to come to their aid. The value of Anthony Rhodes' own first-hand knowledge of being among the men silently praying for deliverance, while all around them death rains from the sky, pays dividends here - doing exactly what this series of books is intended to do.

If you have yet to discover the excellent books available as part of this Wartime Classics series, then I urge you to check them out. They really do bring history alive.

Sword of Bone is available to buy now from your favourite book retailer or direct from the IWM shop here.

Thank you to the IWM for sending me a paperback copy of this book in return for an honest review, and to Anne Cater of Random Things Tours for inviting me to be part of this blog tour.

 About the author:

Anthony Rhodes (1916 – 2004) served with the British Army in France during the so-called ‘Phoney War’ and was evacuated from Dunkirk in May 1940. In the latter part of the war he was sent to Canada as a camouflage officer and was invalided out of the Army in 1947 having served for 12 years.

After the conflict he enjoyed a long academic and literary career and wrote on various subjects, including the 1956 Hungarian Revolution for the Daily Telegraph and well-regarded histories of the Vatican.