REVIEW BY STEVE NEWMAN ON BOOKSTOVE WEBSITE

With the last survivors of the First World War now gone, the story of that great conflict has, in large, passed to those sweeping histories of the war, written by such eminent historians as John Keegan. But, alas, what most of those large histories seldom give us are the stories of the individual experiences; we need the memoirs and autobiographies for that.

There have been quite a few of those over the years, most notably Robert Graves Goodbye to All That, T.E.Lawrence Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Vera Brittain Testament of Youth, and more recently Harry Patch The Last Fighting Tommy. With the demise of the last of those veterans we’re also seeing an increasing number of second and third hand accounts – sometimes fictionalised – taken from the journals,  diaries, and remembered stories of soldiers who served their countries between 1914 – 1918.

One of the best and most recent of these is Dale Le Vack’s Not Quite the Gentleman – A Fisherman’s War, which is as much a novel as it is a biography and a superb piece of military history. It is a cross fertilisation of genres that works beautifully.

Dale Le Vack is a journalist who has spent more than forty years in the newspaper and broadcasting industries and is currently writing business journalism for The Stratford-upon-Avon Herald. Not surprisingly, his journalistic experience shows in the splendid writing, writing that makes this book, which stars his grandfather Frank Clarke, an absolute joy to read:

“Come on Clarkey get ruddy moving,” he hears himself say. He clicks his rifle to safety and leaps out of the ditch, running four paces and timing his straddle perfectly over the farm gate. He pitches his rifle over a split second before leaping and lands cleanly. Instantly he picks himself up, gathers his rifle and starts bounding towards a gap in the hedge in the next field.

‘Just under 100 yards out he thinks he sees movement in the gap, side steps to the left, and feels the vibration of a series of bullets whishing past his shoulder. He collapses in a heap onto the ground and lies in a crumpled position quite still with his head pointing towards the hedge and his hand on his Lee Enfield. Four spiked helmets appear speculatively above the ground as the German soldiers scrutinise the spot where he has fallen. He can hear them talking. His gamble might pay off – they are inexperienced soldiers exposing themselves in such a reckless manner.

‘Now is the real test of years of marksmanship at the butts. Now he’ll know the true value of the trophies won in the regimental tournaments at Aldershot. Now he’ll find out if he really is the brilliant sniper they say he is. He springs to the firing position and brings the barrel of the rifle onto the targets – it is very close range at 90 yards but he has to be quick and he has to be cool. In the smallest of firing arcs he manages to get off four rounds in just a few seconds. One by one the Germans drop back off their feet…’

Those three paragraphs show just how confident Dale Le Vack is with his subject matter, and how, no doubt deliberately, he uses, in these passages, a style of writing that echoes the work of  the very best adventure novelists writing in the first two decades of the 20^th century, most notably ‘Sapper’ (Herman Cyril McNeice, MC), John Buchan, Edgar Wallace, and the brilliant, but doomed, Erskin Childers, and, in places, Hemingway, whose novel, A Farewell To Arms, set many a bench mark for later writers, not least Charles Whiting, who knew Hemingway but never liked him.

And if we can use the late Charles Whiting (who also wrote as Leo Kessler) as a prime example of a  wartime adventure novelist at his best, writing splendid yarns that place fictitious characters into real conflicts (invariably World War II), where the brotherhood of fighting soldiers helps spin a moral tale, then Dale Le Vack has, to a large extent – and with the help of his spirited grandfather – achieved a tale that Charles – who was a distinguished military historian and ex-soldier – would have been proud to have written.

What Dale also does in Not Quite The Gentleman is use the experiences of his grandfather, and his encounters, not least as a POW and an escapee, to give the reader a wider perspective of the conflict – another Whiting trick – including an encounter with Nurse Edith Cavell (and some minor royalty), who ran an escape route for Allied soldiers, a brave action she paid for with her life.

And, like Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, there is a love affair:

‘ “No don’t say anything,” she whispered, her large blue eyes revealing a sense of excitement and anticipation.
“Just come to me now. We have waited too long for this moment. You don’t have to say a word.”
He stood by the side of the bed, bent towards her and she kissed him on the mouth. He felt the softness of her tongue and smelled the familiar fragrance of her skin. He adored her and was almost overcome by his passion and desire to possess her. She understood his desire and gradually undressed him…’

There’s also fishing:

‘ The Princess said: “Everybody talks about how beautiful it is by the lake and for several summers before the war we had a large skiff down there for people who wanted to get out on the water. The Prince hasn’t fished it for years but some of our gamekeepers say there are huge carp in the lake whose ancestors were once an important food supply for the house. The lake is fed by fresh springs and so the water is quite pure…’

‘They stood back from the shoreline of the lake while he tackled up the rods keeping shadows off the surface of the bright water…’

Dale’s book is full of wonderful stories and characters, and, as I wrote at the beginning, is a delight to read, and a book that will appeal not only to afficianados of military history and wartime adventure fiction, but also to those who love family history and tales of human endurance and  endeavour.

TROUT FISHERMAN REVIEW

By
Jeffrey Prest
Features Editor

NOT quite the everyday fishing book, either. Journalist Dale Le Vack derived his love of angling from boyhood encounters with his grandfather, Great War veteran Frank Clarke.
An ardent diarist, many of Frank’s journals from before and during World War I were lost in a flood and Le Vack was prompted by relatives to capture his grandfather’s early year in a novel based on conversations he had with him as a child.
The result is an adventure story blended with fishing reminiscence and an intense love affair as we track Clarke’s attempts to escape from behind enemy lines and be reunited with the nurse who helped him back to health after he was wounded at Mons.
Unsurprisingly for one so frequently confronted by fear, boredom and despair in his immediate surroundings, Clarke’s mind frequently retreats into the past for solace, in the form of detailed recollections of fishing trips in pursuit of game and coarse fish across England, Ireland and Africa, including trout on the Derbyshire Wye, grayling on the Test and salmon the River Liffey.
So well do we feel we know him by the book’s end, indeed, that there is a temptation to grab a rod and follow in his footsteps at some of the locations mentioned.  There is something very poignant about one of the photos that accompany the text, showing Army anglers in 2007, fishing the same POW camp lake that Clarke had fishing 90 years previously.
Offering hints of A Farewell to Arms, Brief Encounter and A River Runs Through It, the book’s unlikely mix could have gone horribly wrong, yet the only slightly jarring note is when we’re invited to believe that being tortured by the Germans is slightly more tolerable if you happen to be a fisherman.
That apart, Le Vack is a good, restrained storyteller who skilfully develops tension and delivers a beautifully measured, bittersweet ending. I must take his word for it where attention to military detail is concerned – the office WWI expert has first dibs on the book after me – but Not Quite the Gentleman is, as the saying goes, a rattling good read.