Sword of Bone

Anthony Rhodes was born in 1916. He went to Rugby and the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich. The army sent him to Trinity College, Cambridge to study Mechanical Engineering. He graduated in 1939 just in time to join the Royal Engineers and serve in France as part of the British Expeditionary Force.

Sword of Bone describes what happened to him from the outbreak of war until Dunkirk. It is well written; he went on to be a professional writer. He has an eye for detail and brings soldiers and civilians to life in this memoir that starts light-heartedly before turning dark as he describes his evacuation from the beach at Dunkirk. Published in 1942 the events were fresh in his mind and I highly recommend this almost forgotten account of an almost forgotten part of the war – the nine months leading up to the British defeat on the mainland of Europe.

It is easy to buy as it has just beeen reprinted by Slightly Foxed. If my description hasn’t whetted your appetite, perhaps their’s will.

It’s hard to imagine that anyone who took part in the disaster of Dunkirk could write an amusing book about it . . .

But that is what Anthony Rhodes has done in Sword of Bone, his wry account of the events leading up to the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force in May 1940 – a ‘strategic withdrawal according to plan’ as the chaos was officially described.

But this isn’t a heartless book. Rhodes doesn’t deny the awfulness of war, though the fighting mainly takes place offstage. But being observant and cool-headed, with an ironic sense of humour, he manages to capture the absurdity as well as the tragedy of what took place. Sword of Bone is very far from what is usually meant by a ‘war book’.

Fresh from reading mechanical sciences at Cambridge, Rhodes was commissioned into the Royal Engineers on the eve of the Second World War. Memories of the First War were all too fresh in 1939, and he had nightmares about trench warfare. Instead, hanging about in France during the period known as the ‘phoney war’, he and his fellow officers were entertained to sumptuous meals by local dignitaries and enjoyed sociable springtime visits to Paris and to the Maginot Line. However, the French had failed to extend this supposedly impregnable fortification as far as the coast in order not to offend the neutral Belgians, so the British set about doing so – work for which Rhodes had to requisition the materials.

The whole experience had elements of French farce – the hastily arranged billeting of the platoon in a convent; the embarrassments caused by the fact that French doctors had red lights over their surgery doors; the lack of supplies followed by huge over-supplies of building materials – but when the Germans finally bypassed the Maginot Line, all that was over. Rhodes gives a terrifying description of what it was like being dive-bombed by the Germans on the beach at Dunkirk. It was an experience that would affect him deeply. For all its humour, Sword of Bone is a penetrating comment on the cruelty of war.

Are you slightly foxed by the book’s title? I was. It is taken from Milton’s Samson Agonistes.

Then with what trivial weapon came to hand,
The jaw of a dead ass, his sword of bone,
A thousand foreskins fell.

The last line is an example of cadence triumphing over the actual meaning of the words. Don’t let it put you off this remarkably good read.