Spike Milligan's Wartime Autobiography

I first discovered Spike Milligan in the comedy section of a used bookstore, where I picked up a book called "Adolph Hitler: My Part in His Downfall. I was immediately drawn into his hilarious and heartfelt description of his time on the front lines in WWII. Milligan wrote this book both as a send up of the traditional wartime autobiography and also as a way to inject his own frenetic and surreal sense of humor into a time so bizarre that survival was only possible through humor.

One of the best parts of the 6 books I have read is a description of the fall of Tunis. He shipped out first to the North African battle, and he stayed on until Rommel was defeated. One of the most fascinating moments in the book is the time after the Germans had surrendered, and the Allies and Axis soldiers were wandering up and down the roads, chatting and hanging out with each other because they had nothing else to do.

Milligan believed beyond anything in the importance of the small man and his story. Post-war he organized a multitude of reunions, not just of his own regiment, but of soldiers who had actually fought against one another during specific battles. He discusses a reunion in which he and a German soldier figure out that they actually shot directly at each other, an officer present comments that their survival was due to their being "bloody awful shots."

But it's not all humor. Milligan discusses his bout with shell shock and subsequent removal from his beloved regiment in heartrending detail. It's a wonderful, honest discussion of shell shock, of trauma and of pain, in a series of books otherwise known for their lightheartedness. Milligan's black moods and traumas followed him through the rest of the books and his life.

In the 6th book Milligan is running around post-war Europe with a group of soldier artists. This is the least funny of the books, but contains a wonderfully true and sweet love story between Milligan and an innocent Italian dancer named Toni. He and Toni fall desperately in love, and by the end of the book he has decided to marry her, but returns to England after he is discharged from the service. I have never read the 7th book, but I tracked down the story of Toni. Milligan married several times, but he left Toni behind, although he sent her flowers every year for the rest of her life.

Milligan's story is essentially British, the working class boy's first trip to Europe, the joy of being young and in an adrenaline spiked environment. But somehow it speaks to me more than any other book I have ever read about war, it seems to hit some essential truths about war without making it seem grander or easier than it actually was. It is the polar opposite of "The Things They Carried", devoid of cynicism, but able to admit the pain of loss and death. It contains the poignancy of being young, of great love and great loss.

Why I wish I were Rudyard Kipling

It's hard these days to defend an unqualified love for Kipling, as he has become something of an anathema due to his time period, and the language he uses to discuss Asian people. That being said, he was a brilliant author in his day, and the book Kim was his masterpiece.

Kim starts out as the story of a young Irish boy orphaned in India in the latter half of the 19th century. He is raised by his dead father's mistress until he meets a Tibetan Llama, and follows him as his apprentice. The Llama is searching for the River of the Arrow, a holy site in Buddhism, and decided Kim was given to him as a a guide to his quest. At the same time, Kim is recruited by Mahbub Ali, an Afghan horse trader, into the "Great Game" or the world of intrigue between Britain and Russia around the control of India.

In the world of Kipling, loyalty to the Raj supersedes all other virtues, at least as far as those around Kim are concerned. The Llama lives in his own world where "there is neither black nor white, Hind nor Bhotiyal, but only souls seeking escape." Ranged against the Llama are the forces of the Afghan horse dealer, a massive red bearded man who runs the length of India selling horses and gathering information for the Raj. He and the enigmatic Creighton Sahib, the head of the British secret service, watch over Kim and his secular life, as the Llama takes care of him spiritually. The crisis comes at the end of the book, as the Llama becomes ill, and in the course of his illness finds the fulfillment of his quest. Kim gives all he has physically to sustain the Llama, and at the end he finds himself unconscious from illness.

The Llama and Mahbub Ali decide together the fate that Kim will have, and he will continue to spy for the Raj, but has already achieved enlightenment through his work for the Llama. Kim is Kipling's book of second chances, mostly for himself, but for Kim, Mahbub Ali and Creighton Sahib as well. Kipling even gives Lispeth, from "Plain Tales from the Hills," an Afghan woman forsaken by her English lover, a second chance, when she appears in Kim as the proud chief of a small village. It is one of his only books that has a genuinely happy ending.

This book contains the best of everything else that Kipling has ever written, a much more sophisticated version of the Jungle Book, and perhaps his own long denied wish to stay in India, instead of being sent back to England as a miserable 6 year old child. In it, Kim is allowed to adventure, free of the restrictions of the life of the English child in India, but always with the protection of belonging to the dominant ethnic group.

Kipling put more of himself into this novel than into any of his other writing. He put the wish for acceptance that he felt, caught between his Indian life and his British life, a conflict he was never able to completely reconcile, into Kim, who fits perfectly into the Indian way of life, yet maintains his connections to the English. Kipling also describes what a spy is, and exposes more of himself than he might have thought, as the description fits the journalist that Kipling became, "From time to time, God causes men to be born--and thou art one of them--who have a lust to go abroad at the risk of their lives and discover news--today it may be of far-off things, tomorrow of some hidden mountain, and the next day of some near-by men who have done a foolishness against the State. These souls are very few; and of these few, not more than ten are of the best." In Kim he created a world of possible adventure, of his life as it might have been, as he might have wished it could be.