Going to The Wars
Max Hastings
Macmillan, £20, 400pp
While Max Hastings was, as he puts it, bobbing about in the China Sea after fleeing Saigon in 1975, his mother wrote a letter to Charles Wintour, then editor of the London Evening Standard. It was high time, she said, that Max got on to the executive circuit. "I know that Max himself thinks he could not be happy without the constant stimulus of excitement and danger, but one cannot be a schoolboy for ever."
But the self-confessed romantic, now in Wintour's editorial seat, could not resist what became the apogee of his career as a war correspondent, indulging again what he calls his "lifelong love and admiration for the British army". This was the 1982 Falklands conflict, accounting for more than a quarter of this book. "If the unbelievable was to happen," he writes, "if we were to fight, I had to be there." He told his wife he felt it was for this moment he was born: "I feel I don't want to go on living if I'm left behind on this one." ("I really said that," he confesses here.)
Hastings triumphed through a mixture of luck, wit and guile. He shared a language with the senior officers, though not all admired him. Nor did he endear himself to some his journalistic colleagues, least of all when he walked alone into the Falklands capital, prompting the Standard front-page headline "The first man into Stanley". He comments: "It was the happiest moment of my career."
Hastings, in many ways a warrior manqué, revelled in the company of soldiers. He is the son of Macdonald Hastings, the celebrated wartime Picture Post correspondent, and Anne Scott-James, and his autobiography is a racy account - revealing both boyish self-indulgence and self-doubt - of his picaresque career. He makes no bones about where he is coming from. In Vietnam, he writes, the communists won the propaganda struggle at home and abroad by "cloaking their own military and political operations in obscurity, even invisibility, while the Americans bared their follies and misjudgments to the gaze of the world".
He adds: "We know that Stalin and Mao killed more people than Hitler. Yet most people today unequivocally regard Hitler as more evil." On the following page, he confesses: "I have always enjoyed teasing lefties, who seldom fail to rise to the fly."
Well, I was reminded in this case of a review Hastings wrote in 1982 of a book I had written on land ownership, a subject as neglected then as it is now. It included a deliberately provocative coda: "Every once in a while," he wrote, "walking up Fleet Street, you may glimpse a flurry of activity, a sympathetic little knot of onlookers gathered round a struggling figure. And, of course, you know that yet another writer from the Guardian has run screaming from that hothouse of dotty idealism, and must now be led gently away to his or her padded cell."
Hastings has an element of the showman about him: he is not all he appears to be. Some of his observations here seem surprising only because of an image he has created for himself, consciously or otherwise."What has befallen Ireland since 1968," he writes, "is the fruit of British indifference for 47 years after the 1912 Partition Treaty."
In a graphic description of clashes between Catholics and Protestants at the start of the "troubles" in August 1969, he observes: "Never an admirer of the Unionist government of Ulster, that night I became its committed foe... the Catholics were victims not only of institutionalised injustice, but also of clumsy and brutal efforts by the Stormont government and the RUC to put them down." Perversely, he says, he has felt ever since 1982 that it was right to fight the Falklands war to show that Britain was still capable of taking on aggression, but wrong not to negotiate a settlement with Argentina on sovereignty.
On journalism, he makes acute and forceful comments. "Forget the pack," he says. "Do your own thing." He recalls the late Nicholas Tomalin of the Sunday Times advising "They lie. They lie. They lie", and David English, late editor of the Daily Mail, saying "All the best journalists are obsessives". But he also derides what he calls a school of modern journalism "which holds that a reporter is failing in his duty if he speaks well of those in charge of anything". This is an entertaining book. But somehow I still do not know enough about the author.
