The art of the war memoir
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Where'd you get those shoes? Easy. They're from DSW because DSW has the exact right shoes for whatever you're into right now. You know, like the sneakers that make office hours feel like happy hour, the boots that turn grocery aisles into runways and all the styles that show off the many sides of you from daydreamer to multitasker and everything in between because you do it all in really great shoes.

Find a shoe for every you at your DSW store or DSW.com. They said he will start a war. I'm not going to start a war. I'm going to stop wars. I recognize the challenges from Ukraine to Gaza to Sudan and beyond. War, hunger, terrorism. I just find bombs and I find dead people. But it's a really scary thing. I'm Roland Oliphant and this is Battlelines.

Now on this podcast and in this newspaper we spend a lot of time reporting on conflicts and wars around the world and we like to think we do a pretty good job but in the long run it's not the journalism that will be remembered but first-hand accounts by the participants themselves.

From Robert Graves' descriptions of the Western Front to Michael Herr's dispatches from Vietnam and Andy McNabb's account of an SAS patrol gone wrong in the first Gulf War, war memorists have shaped our understanding of individual wars and also the nature of war itself.

itself in ways that journalists seldom do. And it's not just a matter of past history. Memoirs are still being written. Last month, our sister podcast, Ukraine The Latest, hosted Lieutenant Yulia Mikhitenko of Ukraine's 54th Brigade.

who, with the help of the American journalist Lara Marlowe, has just published her own memoir called How Good It Is, I Have No Fear of Dying. It is a compelling firsthand account of the current war that really does hold its own alongside any of the writers that I've just mentioned. And during those conversations with Yulia, I found myself pondering...

These bigger questions. How have war memoirs shaped our understanding of wars and the phenomenon of war as a human activity? Has the art and role of the memoir changed over time? What is the role of the memoir in today's world of instantaneous Twitter news?

And will the autobiographies of today's soldiers, civilians and reporters similarly influence how future generations think about the wars our generation is fighting in Ukraine, the Middle East, Sudan, name any other? To grapple with these questions, I'm joined today by Matilda Gregg, the National Army Museum's resident Napoleonic historian, Francis Durnley, the Telegraph's assistant comment editor, and the foreign correspondent Colin Freeman, who himself is something of a war memorist. I hope you won't mind me saying that.

Matilda, I'd like to start with you. When we talk about war memoirs, we often think about the 20th century. In Britain especially, we think about the First World War and the great war poets. But the tradition of war memoir starts much earlier, and you've read an awful lot of them. Tell us, how did you end up reading Napoleonic memoirs, I think?

Absolutely. Well, it started during my undergrad history course. I was on a module about the revolutionary Napoleonic Wars. And the lecturer said, hey, guys, if you're thinking of doing a master's, there's all these amazing books that were written by soldiers in those wars. It would make a great thesis. And so my ears sort of pricked up. I went to see him afterwards and he said, yeah, there's a lot of memoirs, but no one has really looked at them very critically.

So I started and I found a mountain of these books, not only British but French. I expanded to Spanish, Portuguese. They were written by Germans, Swiss, Italians, Russians, everybody writing memoirs in the early 19th century. And historians do use them all the time. They're often used as sources for what soldiers thought, what the battles were like, you know, where the armies are moving on the map.

They are extraordinarily rich, these 19th century war memoirs. And we probably know more about them than we think. You may be listening thinking I've never heard of a Napoleonic soldiers war memoir. But if you or someone in your family has watched Sharp on ITV, Bernard Cornwell, that's based on it. Arthur Conan Doyle took a break from writing Sherlock to write a satirical set of stories called Brigadier Gerard, which is based on a French memoir.

and the schoolboys of the World War I generation would have been reading them because these books, which are obviously not the first time a soldier has ever sat down to write his life story that's been happening for centuries, are the first moment in at least Western history where a large number of men, especially junior officers,

there's a lot of soldiers are newly literate at this point, sit down to write long sort of novelistic or travel writing style accounts of their experiences. And this sort of intersects with a time when A, the public in general is more interested in soldier life stories because they've been slightly rehabilitated from being seen as like a low class in society to being a very interesting category. B, the printing press is booming. Paper is cheaper. Publishers are becoming professionalized.

And into this scene enters the soldier's life story. And you've kind of anticipated one of my questions, because one of my questions is going to be, look, who's writing these? You know, is it senior generals in the tradition of Caesar's Gallic Wars? And then I decided we would march here and send the 3rd Division over there and so on. Is it aristocratic junior officers talking about their adventures? Is it a war?

Is there anything by, I don't know, really from the ranks by ordinary enlisted men? Who are the voices? What are the voices that are coming through here? It is mostly officers. As I said, because of a widespread lack of literacy in Europe in the early 19th century, you mainly have to have some prior education in order to be one of these authors.

Although some authors of these memoirs learn to write in the army. So, for example, there's a very famous French memoir by Jean-Roch Coignier, whose spelling is still very bad when he leaves the army. So the first edition of his memoir is not very successful. I think the difference from previous times is that it's not just the top commanders, it's also junior officers. So men who are not directing the core of the army, they are directing a smaller group of men on the battlefield.

Also, we just note some women, although not very many, write memoirs. So, yeah, it's not as democratic as it is in the 20th century, but it is...

In terms of numbers, my PhD was on the Peninsular War in Spain and Portugal. And from there, there are about 300 war memoirs from France, Britain and Spain published in the 100 years leading up to the beginning of the First World War. Can you give us some examples? I think it's fair to say that very few people have read this stuff. I certainly haven't. Who are the great memorists of this period who you think really give us that immediacy of thought that we associate with this kind of writing?

So I've mentioned a few names. In Britain, if you're thinking of dipping your toe into the world of Napoleonic War memoirs, which is not as dry as you might imagine, I'd suggest maybe John Kincaid's Adventures in the Rifle Brigade. He was in the 95th Rifles, which is the, again, to make a Sharp reference, that's Sharp's regiment. He writes a really...

sort of rollicking, adventurous, very nonchalant description of war. Things like, you know, cannonballs exploding someone right next to you and you don't bat an eyelid, you go back home and have supper around a campfire in the great outdoors and it makes a man out of you. Also in Britain, there's George Gleig, who's quite an interesting different character. He ends up being a

and a writer and a friend of Wellington's. He writes another very sort of picturesque novel account of the war. In France, I've mentioned Coignet. I would definitely suggest him. He's this archetype of a soldier who rises all the way through the ranks from being a conscript to being one of Napoleon's imperial guard. So he's standing near Napoleon when he does things like sign the Treaty of Tilsit with the Tsar of Russia.

And these memoirs are picked up later in the 19th century and reworked by a literary editor who knows what he's doing. So corrects all the spelling and makes them really readable. These are still being reprinted. And then for a wildcard, I would suggest maybe if you want to, obviously these wars are not just fought by regular soldiers. This is also the period where the word guerrilla enters English and French sort of lexicon because of the war in Spain. One of the most famous guerrilla leaders is a man called Francisco Estoboth y Mina.

He's a real sort of good self-propagandist. And one of his many acts, including to win British favour for this sort of war effort, is to write memoirs that are more recognisable to us as sort of novels. One of them, If You Don't Speak Spanish, was bilingual. So it was published in English and Spanish, facing each other on the page. So yeah, if you want to know about how he tricked French armies and gathered tax on the border and assembled...

brigands into a fighting force, check out Mina. Thank you very much. But I want to move on to the next period of history shortly. But

How widely read were these when these were being published? And how did they or did they influence public thinking about those wars and war in general at the time? And I ask that because, of course, the kind of early 20th century war memoirists hold an immense place in our own kind of national imagination about war itself. Did these writers from the Napoleonic Wars have a similar impact in, I don't know, in Victorian Britain or...

I would argue yes. I mean, in my book, which is called Dead Men Telling Tales, I argue that they did, that they made a massive influence on popular imagination of what a war would be like. And that this is tragic in a way because then this generation who are inspired by these quite fictionalized romantic tales of war eagerly sign up to be part of the First World War battalions. This is a long answer I'll try to summarize down.

They are widely read in terms of they're printed by leading London and Paris publishers. They're printed in all these different formats. So some are very accessible, very cheap. Some are very expensive. For example, in Britain, you could buy a memoir for cheaper than you could buy a novel like Pride and Prejudice.

Women read them through libraries or through their father's bookshelves. The Ladies magazine is recommending collections of Napoleonic War stories in the 1890s. And they're also widely satirised, which again suggests that they're well known. Like, you have to know what something is in order to be able to laugh at a satire of it. And in terms of influence, I mean, there's a few factors to put into this. Soldiers who write military memoirs in the early 19th century...

are deliberately trying to change something. If they publish it during their lifetime, then there's a reason for that. I mean, military men or service people in general

don't always feel super enthusiastic about telling their story publicly, or they may have many reasons why that's a difficult thing for them to do and not something they are willing to do publicly. When you do, it's an active choice. So a lot of these veterans are trying to change history, including sending their books to leading historians or rehabilitate their reputation or influence the way their regiment has been seen. And

Their attempts to do this are helped by a legion of other people over like a hundred year period who take these stories and reinvent them or repitch them to different audiences. So you get a lot of examples of Napoleonic memoirs being reprinted when a new war happens. So, for example, in France around the 1870s, after the 1870s, there's something that editors at the time call a Napoleonic boom.

mainly because France has just been humiliated by defeat by Germany. So they're looking back to this past age of glory and saying, what can these soldiers from the past tell new recruits today? And can we sort of regain some of that Napoleonic glory? Thank you, Matilda. That's the Napoleonic War. But it's a conflict that began almost a century later that birthed really the war memoir as a pillar of the English literary canon.

Really, and to a large extent still shapes our ideas about war writing today. Frances Durnley, I asked you to look at, before we did this, what I've arbitrarily called the golden age of war memory. I'm talking, of course, about the First World War. You've heard a bit about what those poets and writers from that period of the First World War would have been reading when they were growing up.

Could you just give us a quick overview of those First World War, Second World War, early 20th century memoirists? Maybe you could pick out just a few because there's so many of them. And just tell us what is so special about those people? Why do they still have this lasting influence on us today? Well, I think a helpful way of trying, and I emphasize that word to answer that question, is asking what makes a classic worth?

And I think there are several factors in play. The classics of that genre, like any genre, capture the intensity of an experience, but with the rare luxury in the context of war of hindsight because those individuals survived. So you have to be in a situation where a lot of people have experienced something relating to

to what has occurred. And of course that was very much the case with the First World War as it was the case with another war I'm going to talk about in a moment which I think is also often missed but highly relevant in the American context. So you have to have a lot of pool of people who are interested

You've also got to have, I think, writers who have a unique perspective. And quite often those can be very senior figures, but also they can be figures who were in regiments or in units for whom many people did not survive. Robert Graves, of course, you mentioned earlier on, author of Goodbye to All That, one of the great memoirs of the First World War. He's extremely lucky to survive. There are numerous instances in that book where he almost dies,

And indeed, his parents were informed that he had died. It got that bad, but then he'd actually survived somehow miraculously. So when you look at a book like Goodbye to All That, it's popular because so many people want to read about that period. We're thinking 10 years on from the First World War, so you're far enough removed so that it feels like history.

You've got a unique perspective and also a literary gift. Of course, Robert Graves was somebody who wrote in many different genres, most famous perhaps for his Greek myths retellings, as well as I, Claudius and Claudius the God, one of my favourite novels. So he's a very, very gifted writer. But I think the other element of this, which is really important beyond all of that, is, as I say, the element of...

the period itself when people are wanting to reflect and look back. The 1930s are of course very famous for a good reason because the world is on the one hand the most pacifistic it's ever been. A forgotten element of the 1930s and the 1920s is that pacifism is not a fringe movement. It's popular. People go on pacifist rallies. People are vehemently anti-war after the horror of the First World War.

And yet, at the very same time that you've got that tension, you've got a world that is waking up to the reality that war may well happen again, on a scale as seen to the First World War. So you then get a birth of memoirs, and I'm using Robert Graves here as a good example, but there are many, many others I could be citing in English. Another example would be, of course, Sassoon's Shurston trilogy. So he did first the memoirs of a fox hunting man, which is

his life before the war as an aristocrat, A Life of Leisure, hence the title, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, which is the sequel to that which describes the sharp contrast and the horrors of the First World War, and then Shurston's Progress, and they're semi-fictionalised, but they really are sort of more akin to memoirs than fiction, of his time in Craiglochart, his hospital in Scotland, recovering from the trauma of the war whilst the war's still going on, and then he goes back to the front at the end. So,

These memoirs capture the horror of the war. They have, one might say, pacifistic elements. They're not pacifist, but they're elements of like, God, what the hell was that all about? But there's also a sense of like, this could all happen again. And I think that is the key element that makes them classics.

is that people are reading them and they're reading different things into them. And of course, in the period of the 1930s, a lot of people see those books and books like All Quiet on the Western Front, which is not a war memoir, but is related to the war experience of the author in Germany, and think this is representative of a very widespread opinion at the time, which is that it's basically very anti-war.

And I think that is true, that many people feel like we need to read these books now to warn us about the horrors of a possible war coming in the future.

But that's not the only story. And I think it is also important to remember that there are other books that are being published around Europe that recall the First World War, like Ernst Jünger's Storm of Steel. He was a German infantryman. German infantryman. And I think it wouldn't be too simplistic to say is much more perhaps akin to what we might see in the Napoleonic War memoirs, which is it's daring do, it's horrors of war, but by God, is it exciting.

And so there are other genres going around at the time. But when we think of the golden era of the English war memoir, it's very closely connected to the First World War. And I think it's also related because, of course, they knew them so well with the war poets like Wilfred Owen. Robert Graves himself was a war poet. Siegfried Sassoon himself was a war poet during the First World War. And, of course, whenever we think about the First World War poets and that great treasure trove of masterful English prose that they left behind,

We think mainly of the pity of war, to cite Wilfred Owen, and the horror of war, and we can't really separate them. But is it necessarily accurate of the war experience of the First World War related to the vast majority of people who went through that war? I'm not so sure. I think many of them are officers. I think many of them are sceptical about war generally. And I think also that many, many ordinary people who went through the First World War, the ordinary fighting Tommy, look

look on that period perhaps with less horror than a sense of nostalgia. But that's a different question. So hopefully that answers the broad spokes of your...

of your question, Merit. It does. I'm going to come to Colin shortly, but very, very quickly, while we're dealing with this period, I suppose the early 20th century period, and for international listeners, this is a very British conversation. And the reason that France is talking about these figures is because people like Robert Graves, especially Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, they still dominate our national curriculum. They're still seen as almost a central pillar of the literary tradition and how it's taught in this country. Very quickly, Frances,

If you had to select a small number, an example of memoirs to read from that period, what would they be? Well, I mentioned Sassoon, I mentioned Graves. I think they are probably the most famous and rightfully so for various different reasons. I actually feel in a way that the Second World War memoirs, which build on the tradition of those, are perhaps more interesting and varied to some degree. And so if I may slightly steal a march on the next period, but I think that...

There's a great tapestry of war memoir from the Second World War by not only those who were the victorious powers, but also the defeated. And on the latter, of course, was one of the most famous, Das Boot. It's really good. Very interesting memoir on the experience of U-boat war. And the reason I cite this is not in any way to be celebrating the cause they were fighting for, but the uniqueness of the testimony. U-boats, very, very new phenomena, really, on that scale in the Second World War.

And he was, because I did read that, that is written by, he was basically a correspondent. He was embedded on patrol with the U-boat. So it's very fascinating, fascinating reading. Another unusual one, Guy Saget's The Forgotten Soldier, which is an account of a French

by origin soldier but on the fringes I think he's from Alsace so of course one of the contested territories between Germany and so that's why he ends up fighting in the Wehrmacht goes to the Eastern Front and it's a vivid vivid account horrific account of war on the Eastern Front but it's from the perspective of a soldier who knows they're losing again I think that's quite unique and quite unusual it's somebody who is fighting despite knowing the war is lost so that's also another one that I would cite as being particularly relevant Francis thank you very much

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I'd like to turn to Colin. We've heard about the Napoleonic era. We've heard about that golden age of the First World War. You yourself, you're not only a very experienced and distinguished foreign correspondent, but I asked you to come on because I think you are a war memoirist in a way. Your first book, The Curse of the Al-Dalaimi Hotel and Other Half-Truths from Baghdad, not only is it very funny, but it's also interesting.

It's a memoir of a war, a different kind of war to those we've heard described. What were the influences on you when you were writing this? Did you find yourself channeling graves or Sassoon or something?

No, nothing so literary as that at all. Just by way of context, I went to Iraq largely by accident. This was the Iraq War of 2003 that toppled Saddam Hussein. At the time, I was working on the London Evening Standard and life was not going very well. I wasn't one of the editor's favourites and I wasn't picked to go and cover the invasion of Iraq itself.

And I realized that, you know, as this big defining moment in my own first really big story of my own generation was going to be happening, I was going to be stuck.

writing about tube delays and bus delays and things like that on the evening standard. So someone said to me, why don't you just go and cover the war yourself as a freelancer? And I thought, that's a brilliant idea. Other people did not think it was a good idea. They said, you don't speak Arabic, you've never been to Iraq before, you know nothing about the Middle East, you have no contacts there, etc.,

But out of pride and nothing else, I thought, well, I'll go anyway. If only to get away from the Evening Standard and the editor that I didn't like.

It wasn't a very promising start. I got out there, I think, on May the 1st. Most of the invasion was already more or less over. And I think within hours of arriving, George Bush declared the war had officially ended. But it was not a bad time, actually, with hindsight to be there because it was the invasion went like clockwork. It was the bit afterwards that was chaos and chaos.

you know, the occupation unraveled over the next couple of years, which was the time I was living in Baghdad. And what it is, is really, you know, when we talk about Ukraine on the podcast, we're always talking about front lines and big set piece battles almost. This was very different. This was war as a,

as an occupation gone wrong really just an absolute you know an insurgency on steroids really and the book i wrote was partly about that but also mainly about just about the lawlessness that thrived as a byproduct of that and the collapse of iraq into more or less anarchy for quite a while

And, you know, I was there as a freelancer, so I wasn't a big name. But in a way, that was not a bad place from which to observe it because you weren't birthed in a big, posh hotel with lots of security guards around you in an armoured car to travel around in. I was living in a flat in Baghdad. To some limited extent, I wouldn't want to overplay this, you endured some of the privations and

the fears of the people around you, the ordinary Iraqis, principally living in constant fear of being kidnapped and killed, them because they had nowhere else to go, me because I was a foreigner,

and also worrying about things like car bombs, which hit nearly every hotel I was living in when I was there. So it's really just a sort of story of chaos, really. And also you try to point out that in somewhere like that, that there aren't real front lines. I never saw any big battles. I hardly ever saw weapons being discharged. It was all hit and run terrorism stuff everywhere.

But the risk, the problem was that the frontline could come to you. You could be sitting in a hotel and didn't matter how guarded it was. Most of them were like absolute by the end, surrounded by concrete blast walls.

you know, 20, 30 armed guards, but they all got car bombed at least once. And we're not talking about, you know, people think of a car bomb might be much less impact than a Russian missile. They both carry about the same amount of weight, about, you know, 225, 30 kilos of TNT. They can both make a big mess of a hotel. And then also the kidnapping threat. About half a dozen of my friends, my fellow colleagues were kidnapped

in the same hotel I was in, which hence the name of the book, the title of the book. I was roughed up by a mob at one point and shot. I had a businessman friend who was murdered. You know, it was just a sort of tale of kind of

really. That's what I tried to reflect really in the book was the sort of chaos. Although with that comes quite a lot of black humour as well, which is something that is perhaps more prevalent in modern war memoirs, as far as I can tell, rather than older ones. This is a famous soldier's black humour. I'm quite curious. You listen to what Matilda was saying about those, those early memoirs from people who fought in the Napoleonic wars. And Francis was talking about that very well-known kind of era of

writing. You're obviously you're not a soldier. You were a witness. You were in whatever sense that journalists are participants. I mean, you're there. You experienced it. So it is a memoir of war. And it's also a different kind of war. It's not, as you say, a front line thing. But do you recognize any common threads between what Matilda and Francis were talking about and what you were trying to do when you wrote your book?

Not that many, really, if I'm honest. I think there's a world of difference between sitting in a trench expecting to die any day, which is the message that you get from the World War One memoirs and those previously published.

and what I was doing, which was sitting in a hotel room worrying that I might get kidnapped if I went outside. But the chances of that happening, awful though it would have been, were still probably quite a lot less than the risk of getting killed in World War I in the trenches. What you do get, I think it was the only time I've ever really been

while going out there. I would spend four or five months out there at a time on and off for two years. I used to get scared going out there in a way that I don't get going to Ukraine just because you didn't know what was going to happen out there. You didn't know if some kidnapper might jump out at you while you're driving, you know, through the traffic in Baghdad one day. And each time I went, I would sort of feel this clock ticking. You know, you'd come home on,

leave for a few weeks and you know it'd be like two weeks down a week to go you know three days to go right i'm now getting on the plane and that sense of a clock ticking before getting deployed going out there again i think is one thing that i would imagine

soldiers sort of also feel a little bit but to be honest I'm hesitant about comparing it too closely really Matilda we've talked about you know the historical sources and so on Colin's a guy who

lived through that horrible period of, or part of the period of that horrible civil war and wrote a book. I'm wondering whether you think that books like Collins, but like others, like Yulia Matiktenko's, are going to play the same kind of role for the historian, for documenting, for shaping our understandings of wars that they did in the past? Ooh, that's a great question, asking a historian to predict the future. Yeah.

I don't know. I mean, it's obviously the types of media that are accessible to people now are the ways that you can give a testimony of your experiences so much broader. I mean, in the early 19th century, writing and publishing is the internet. In fact, if you want them to be even more immediate, you could just print a pamphlet and stick it in your window as some of these Spanish generals did when they were trying to

slag each other off basically. I think the memoir has an amazing power to it that

is probably enduring and is one of the reasons why people still write them. I think it has power for the author and also for the reader. Many veterans write about it being a cathartic experience. It's a way of ordering your thoughts. I actually did some work on a previous project with a veterans mental health charity, Relive, who are based in Wales, who used some of our project funding to get a group of recent veterans to

take incidents of moral injury that had happened to them, a form of related to PTSD, not the same thing, and put it into comic book form. And they testified that like the process of working out how to put this thing that had deeply marked them into the format of a comic, which has to be really simplified, it has to be visual, it has to tell a story in some sort of chronology, was one of the most healing things they had been through.

So I think there's that angle. I think there will definitely still be a desire to try to tell your story. I think there'll also always be a desire to read them because memoirs, and I think that maybe this is one area where there is a continuity through time, have this sort of power of seeming to take you into an experience that otherwise you might never be able to experience or never want to experience necessarily. There's this idea scholars talk about of the autobiographical pact of

The idea that when you take an autobiography, you're sort of entering into a secret agreement with the author that you will believe that he is somehow talking to you from the moment that he experienced, he or she.

that when you're reading it, that is them back then in the storm of battlefield on the eve of battle, talking about their nerves, talking about their overwhelm. What about fear? Colin was talking about fear when he goes back to Baghdad. And I've definitely felt it every time I'm on an assignment, which is different, as he's saying, to like Ukraine's very different to kind of that kind of war. But

the fear is a constant thing and it shows up again and again in you know in Das Boot there's these horrible descriptions of being hunted by a British destroyer and the depth charges or you know Sassoon or Graves talking about sitting under a barrage is fear something that comes through in those Napoleonic memoirs

Yeah, I mean, I think we have to start with the caveat that different generations and different periods in history have what we might call a different language of war. So a different access to a different set of metaphor and the kind of things they're willing to talk about and the way they talk about them that has shifted over time. So, for example, Napoleonic war memoirists rarely talk explicitly about killing anyone.

Whereas that's something that does happen later. They will be very euphemistic about it. They also don't really talk very much about battles, weirdly. The majority of it is about daily sort of drudgery or relationships or things they saw. But one of the things that marks this sort of early 19th century period of writing apart from previous writing, and it

draws on 18th century literary trends of sentimentality and emotion is that they do reflect on their emotions to come back to your question. More than fear I think the emotion they talk about is a sense of overwhelm or this idea of the sublime which is really like borrowed from romanticism which is a big art and literary movement at the time where

something about being in the middle of battle, so the smoke and the noise and the... veterans often talk about it being like the gates of hell opening up, has this weird...

a weird moment of stillness, a sort of odd beauty, even as it's horrific. And some of the best memoirists, they're not all this good. Some of the best are able to really show you the intense and confusing contrast between beauty and absolute carnage. I was just going to say something that's related to this, which is that

we quite often in Britain draw the line between the Napoleonic Wars and the imperial history that follows, the Victorian period, and then into the First World War, and quite rightly. But actually there are unusual examples if you look at America. Because of course America still belongs to

an English tradition of writing, and yet it doesn't have the Napoleonic experience as such. And so when you look at the American Civil War, a period that I'm quite interested in, what you see is memoirs being written by ordinary soldiers that use some of the language of pre-Romantic eras, and yet infused with realistic descriptions of the horrors of war.

And so in some ways, I think it's a forgotten area of or genre almost when we in England are thinking about war memoirs. And I'm thinking of one in particular, which is one of the most famous memoirs of the American Civil War of an ordinary soldier. It's called Company H by a man called Sam Watkins, who fought for the Confederacy. But he went through almost all of the of the war and survived incredibly. He was one of, I think, only three or four men in his entire battalion that that survived.

And what you see in that is the archetype, as it were, of what you would see in the Napoleonic, some of the Napoleonic memoirs of ordinary soldier, innocent, rural background, romping through strange territory and the adventure, the sense of adventure that comes with that. And I'm not saying that he would have been familiar with Napoleonic memoirs, but clearly he is somebody who belonged to that same kind of world.

that many of those soldiers did. And yet, the horror of the modernity

that comes with the American Civil War, when you're using Napoleonic era tactics but with modern weaponry, brings out a truthfulness in his memoirs that are so horrific. And it reminds me very much of reading some of the First World War descriptions that come later. So you get this interesting fusion that is very, very, I think, quite unusual, quite unique of the 1880s, 1890s in America.

that England skips. And so we go from Napoleon to First World War. And that sharpness is what makes the First World War literature so important, is because of the sharpness of the contrast. And we still talk about that today. Colin, I just want to come back to you and ask if you've got...

Any more thoughts about this? I mean, one of my thoughts was that do you ever turn to memoirs written by soldiers or others in your work as a journalist? And do you have any that you would recommend? I've read one or two memoirs by soldiers. I tend to, to be honest, to read other memoirs by journalists, partly because I like to read what they've done and sort of see if there's lessons to be learned from my own sort of craft of writing memoirs or just general reportage.

I mean, I should point out that I think one thing that my memoir probably has in common with a lot of the Napoleonic memoirs that we've been talking about is that not many people in the present day remember them. They're somewhat obscure.

Publishers tend to be sniffy about journalist memoirs at the best of times, sometimes for good reasons. You can't just have everybody, you know, write and I did this, I did that, or etc, etc. There is a place for them, I think, sometimes, certainly the Iraq conflict, I would say, was one of them.

where there weren't many other people, foreigners certainly, wandering around the place. You had diplomats and politicians based in the green zone, the protected zone in Baghdad, but they were not really allowed out except in an armoured car and surrounded by security guards. And even when they did, they quite often got killed. So their view of the outside world was different.

It was probably one of the first conflicts where diplomats had a pretty sheltered, cosseted view of what was going on. And quite a lot of them used to complain to me about that and said, well, you know, I speak fluent Arabic, but I can't get out and meet people, which is what my job is supposed to be as a diplomat.

So, I mean, I do think journalists played a sort of a certain role there in that they were able to go out and about and we are trained observers. And there weren't any NGOs working in Iraq at that time, really, certainly no foreign ones. There were very few other Westerners. So the option for getting a Western perspective on how a Western occupation was going wrong was limited.

But there does seem to be limited interest in journalist memoirs. If we talk about that then, Colin, because we tend to separate them out between the journalistic memoirs and the soldiers' writing. But on the other hand, if you think of, I don't know, Michael Herr's Dispatches, for example, or we think about Das Boot, the guy who wrote Das Boot was a German journalist. You might call him a propagandist because he's working in Nazi Germany, but he was a journalist who did that. Vasily Grossman, obviously,

Which journalistic memoirs are you thinking of then? The best ones I've read, I've read many good ones, but one would be the one that a lot of people cite, which is My War Gone By, I Miss It So by Anthony Lloyd, which is an account of the war in the Balkans.

the 1990s partly just because it's so well written it's you know it's poetry basically um michael has dispatches is also a classic about the vietnam war it's a journalist spending a lot of time with uh embedded with u.s troops and gets himself into some very hairy situations again the

it is written in a very kind of new journalism hip style not one i would say is brilliant in actually if you want to read about what the causes of the vietnam war were which i think when i first read it i wanted to know about and i went away thinking this is not really quite what i've looked for what i'm looking for for

So it's limited in context. But again, I guess a lot of these books are more recently. I've been reading The Language of War, which is a book about Ukraine by Oleksandr Mikhed, who is a Ukrainian journalist that I interviewed earlier this year. I would certainly recommend that as being a book.

a book that gets you under the skin quite well of Ukrainian society and is written from the perspective of a civilian who's suddenly forced to take up a gun. It doesn't actually get involved in much direct fighting, as far as I'm aware, in the book, but you certainly you sense the raw fear of

and the chaos around him, which is what a good war memoir conveys to me. Because, you know, it's not all, a lot of the time, most people only get into one or two terrible scrapes.

and hopefully they come out alive. But what a good memoir will convey is just the sense of constant jeopardy that is going on all the time. Another good Iraq memoir, I'm not going to plug my own, I mean, I've plugged my own enough really, is The Spiders of Allah by James Hyder of The Times, which, again, he's a beautiful writer and he was there for about three years at the coalface of it

yet again one that is probably not particularly familiar to many readers like all those Napoleonic memoirs Thank you very much Mathilde Gregg Colin Freeman and Francis Durnley that was Battle Lines Good evening

Thank you.

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