Faces in a Dusty Picture by Gerald Kersh

...several thousand plain Englishmen of indefinable colour and temperament; short rather than tall, thin rather than fat, passionately devoted to football and accustomed to living on an average thirty-two shillings a week; men who are here because everyone else is here; men who hate nobody much, love nobody much, believe in nothing much--ordinary English wartime soldiers who get their martial spirit as they get their furniture, in greater quantities than they feel they need, for the sake of self-respect.  The Desert is a vast suburban street full of watching neighbors...fearlessness is an oaken dining-room suite--you can't very well be without it; everybody has it; people would talk.

We recently read a book of stories by Gerald Kersh, and today we continue our exploration of the work of the man reputed to be Harlan Ellison's favorite author.  You know I like to read World War II fiction written by men who actually served in the war; well, Kersh spent the early war years in the Coldstream Guards and the later part of the war as a war correspondent and had several war novels published while hostilities were underway.  Through the modern magic of e-commerce I have acquired one of these novels, a small and slender hardcover copy of Kersh's short 1944 novel Faces in a Dusty Picture.  My copy was printed in England, apparently while the war was still ongoing; on the publication page it is asserted that it was "produced in complete conformity with the authorised economy standards."  The novel is dedicated to Carl Olsson, a writer whom I am afraid is mostly forgotten, and bears a Biblical epigraph.  The other interesting thing about my copy of this book is that it was evidently used to kill a silverfish, and the back endpapers remain the final resting place of the noxious, now mummified, beast.

In the first line of Faces in a Dusty Picture, Kersh reminds us of a truth we'd like to forget: that if you are reading books you aren't really living, that reading books is like masturbating.

Mr. Mann stands outside the Hotel Bristol, gently ruminant, a man of books, mature yet virginal, heavy with the fruits of other mens' experience; mildly astonished like an artificially-inseminated cow.

(You can see how a sentence like this--semi-vulgar, daring the reader to be insulted--would appeal to Harlan Ellison.)

Lieutenant Mann is in a town in Egypt, serving with the fictional regiment "The Royal Archers," whom we are told are "a common regiment of foot-sloggers, a rough-house mob...recruited from the hard, dour men of the Midlands...."  Mann himself is a man of independent means who has a science degree and a vast mental storehouse of knowledge, making some of his comrades wonder why he is in North Africa and not doing some kind of scientific war work.  

The town is in an uproar, choked with crowds of refugees because the Germans are approaching, and we meet a bunch of other British soldiers and witness how each is dealing with the knowledge that they are about to be involved in a perilous fight with Rommel's Afrika Korps; a third of the way through the short novel (my copy is less than 130 pages of text) the British troops march out into the desert to take a position held by the enemy, and we see how they react to aerial bombardment, a sandstorm, and the danger of getting lost in the featureless waste where there is no water to be had.  In the final few pages the Tommies assault the Italians (and yes, just as those of you with delicate ears have feared, the British call their foes "dagos" and "wops") and take the position and all the little subplots--e.g., will this guy overcome his fear? will those sergeants who are feuding over a woman make up?--are resolved.  Of course, everybody knows that this is only the smallest of steps in the long march to win the war, and tomorrow's test, when the Germans, a far more formidable force than their Italian allies, arrive, will be a far more challenging one.  

Faces in a Dusty Picture is a series of bold and brief character studies; we get to know like a dozen different guys, a handful of them as intimately as we do Mann.  There is the general with the cold and selfish wife, the officer who just inherited a pile of money, the guy who is thinking of getting out of the fighting by shooting himself in the foot or hand, the private who is worried about his wife's pregnancy, those sergeants who are at daggers drawn over a woman the privates call "a gingerish tart," and several more.  Faces in a Dusty Picture is also a meditation on what an army--and I guess in particular, a British army--is like; for one illustrative example see the epigraph I have chosen for this blog post, and here is another sample:

Looking about him and seeing a mass of moving men, he [Mann] begins to think of their individual differences and their common similarities, and he wonders at the miraculous regimentation of an assembled Army....it seems to him that comrades in battle are comparable to people in love--they lose a little as separate personalities but, in the end, regain as parts of a united force, much more than they have lost.

Kersh's narrative includes a number of striking incidents, including sappers clearing mines, another sapper sacrificing his own life to make sure a supply column can get around an obstacle, a pair of men lost in the desert who are miraculously preserved when a plane crashes nearby and they can scavenge the water and food carried by the now dead pilot, and more.

As we might expect of a book published while the war was still raging, Faces in a Dusty Picture (while showing the terrible cost of war, with many characters killed) is a very sympathetic portrait of the British soldier and the British Army as an institution, and presumably the kinds of people who find military life abhorrent or took to twitter to broadcast their passionate hopes that Queen Elizabeth II had died a painful death would scoff, but Kersh's tribute is temperate and convincing, and presented with real literary skill, and I found it compelling and entertaining.  Faces in a Dusty Picture is more about human psychology than equipment and tactics, but I think people interested in the British experience of the Second World War will find it rewarding; thumbs up.