In the Guardian last Friday, Hitch gave his recommendations as the best novels about warfare. Actually though, he's restricted himself to war novels by British (and as far as I can see, English) authors published in the mid-20th century, which narrows the field down quite a bit. He explains his reason as follows.
If one should decide to select only from British novels about 20th-century warfare, then the impulse to cheat, or to compress or otherwise to circumvent the rules, would still be an honourable one. And this would be because, as most historians are now beginning to agree, there were not two world wars but a single global war, which probably began with the Russo-Japanese conflict of 1905 (trigger of the first and best Russian revolution) and may not have ended until the reunification of Germany in 1989, only to start up again in the Balkans and the Caucasus in our own day.
Goodness, don't tell me Hitch is trying to lengthen Eric Hobsbawm's short twentieth century from 77 up to 84 years! Eric posited the period 1914 to 1991 and his idea was taken on board by Susan Sontag among other notables. Era-making is a game anyone can play by setting their goal posts and penalty box to whatever dimensions they like. But do we really have to put up with this flatulent schoolboy claptrap from a loafer at the back of the class? Most historians, it's fairly safe to say, agree on very little. But they do agree on history's conventions about demarkating one war from another and periods of war from periods of peace. Hence we have the the Greco-Persian Wars, the Punic Wars, the Wars of the Roses, the Napoleonic Wars, the Israeli-Arab Wars the Balkan Wars, etc., all of which contained several distinct wars bounded by several distinct periods of peace, although not necessarily of quiet or harmony.
Now anyone who wants to posit that the Russo-Japanese War of 1905 and the Reunification of Germany in 1989 were part of the same conflict but the Balkan Wars that began in the early 1990s were not a part of that same conflict is clearly talking stuff and nonsense, bilge and piffle, tripe, twaddle, codswallop and gobbledegook. All Hitch had to do was bang out a thousand words pointing readers to a few potboilers set on the frontlines in wartime and preferably with a good plot and a bit of spice to keep the reader in suspense through 200 pages. Not much to ask, is it? —that he talk about the books without stamping his overweening ego over the exercise.
“The enemies of intolerance cannot be tolerant." • "If it is an offense to justice to hold people who may have been victims of mistaken identity or of vendettas by other factions, then it is also an offense to justice to release psychopathic killers who believe that they have divine permission to throw acid in the faces of girls who want to attend school." • "Don't be such a lesbian!
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