'Zulu - the Greatest Historical Novel that Never Was' by A L Berridge

Last month saw an important historical anniversary. 22nd January 2014 was celebrated with features on the BBC and in every national newspaper, and marked in special blogs and posts on internet sites worldwide. 

So what was it?

Strictly speaking it was the 135th anniversary of the Battle of Rorke’s Drift in the Zulu War – but that’s not what the fuss was about. What we were all celebrating was the fictionalized version of that battle, and the fiftieth anniversary of the release of a film called Zulu.

How can that be? Would we celebrate the anniversary of Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan over that of ‘D’ Day itself? How can any reproduction – film, novel, documentary, anything – ever be more significant than the events it reproduces?

Well, obviously it can. Few would have even heard of the historical King Arthur without the literature of Geoffrey of Monmouth, and no-one would remember Lisa del Giocondo if da Vinci hadn’t painted the Mona Lisa. We can all dream of achieving such heights, but I think we’d all agree the benchmark is set pretty high.

A high benchmark

Yet Zulu has hit it. An ordinary commercial war film with no special effects, no sex, and virtually no blood, yet article after article discusses both its significance and its enduring grip on the British imagination. Zulu has done what we’d all like to do, and for that alone I think any historical writer would want to study it.

Zulu Exhibition at Cardiff Castle

Many of us already have. Indeed, in the world of military fiction and re-enactment, familiarity with the film is an essential password to prove one is serious in one’s love of the genre.  My own first re-enactment ‘gig’ was set in the Thirty Years War, but the ice was only broken with my new comrades when I was able to answer correctly the simple question ‘Which Victoria Cross winner at Rorke’s Drift was actually Swiss?’

All right, that sounds alarmingly ‘cultish’, but there are good sound reasons for the fascination. The 1960s were a golden age for historical films (Cleopatra 1963, Lawrence of Arabia 1962, Doctor Zhivago 1965) but Zulu was the first of the ‘British military’ genre, and its success immediately prompted a scramble for more. The Charge of the Light Brigade, Cromwell and Waterloo all followed within six years, but none hit the spot in the same way. What’s special about Zulu goes beyond its qualities as a film, and I don’t think its successors are to be found in the cinema at all. In fact I think they’re here, in the world of historical fiction. 

Perhaps even literally. The action-adventure school of historical fiction has been around for years, but the more realistic military genre only really starts with George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman and takes off with Bernard Cornwell’s Sharpe. And the idea for Flashman only came to GMF in 1966, two years after the release of a film he later praised highly in his ‘Hollywood History of the World’ – Zulu. 

He’s far from alone. I’m not aware of any significant writer in my genre who isn’t a fan, and down at the insignificant end I know how much it’s influenced my own writing. Yes, it’s a film, it’s a Hollywood epic, but I’d say it’s also historical fiction of the finest kind, and gave birth to the genre so many of us read and write today.

That’s why the piece of advice I give most often to aspiring historical writers is to study Zulu. I don’t mean as a film, as it’s usually done – but from the point of view of a writer. I know I’ve learned a lot from it myself and think even some of its most obvious lessons are worth restating.

Take the battle itself, for instance. It’s from Zulu that I learned the most important part of writing battles is the tension of the build-up – something the film does so successfully that Peter Jackson claimed it inspired the Helm’s Deep sequences in his ‘Lord of the Rings’ trilogy. It’s from Zulu that I learned to sustain long action sequences by dividing them into individual little ‘chapters’, each with their own defining moments. It’s from Zulu that I learned action means nothing unless we’ve already been given characters to care about. All obvious stuff, but how often do we read books or see films that don’t seem to know it?

Build up is all...

Or the world-building. True, a modern writer wouldn’t get away with that long opening sequence of Zulu dances, but once the action moves to Rorke’s Drift we are absorbed so quickly into the equally alien world of the Victorian military that we’re hardly even aware it’s being done. Since I’ve been studying Crimea I’m amazed at the authenticity of detail that’s so casually included here – from the overt Christianity of some British soldiers to the subtle rivalry between ‘regular’ Army and Engineers. Zulu is an object lesson in how to be accurate without letting your research show.

Or the language. That too is both natural and totally authentic – a wonderful anecdote to those who think Victorians all spoke formally, correctly and without contractions. Even the idioms are right, from ‘the fuzzies’ to ‘oh, my eye’, and every single character has his own unique voice. In the whole film there’s only one phrase I’m unsure about (Hook’s “Stuff me with little green apples”) and one line I think sounds unnatural – Bromhead’s comment “That’s a bitter pill” on being shot at with their own rifles.

Or the relationships! The totally egregious character of Miss Witt is there only to add misleading sex interest to the truly appalling trailer, but there are three strong character relationships within the defenders, any one of which could sustain a novel all its own. The breaking down of the class rivalry between Chard and Bromhead, the almost paternal love-hate bond between the dying Sergeant Maxfield and the recalcitrant Private Hook, and its simple echo in the journey travelled by Corporal Allen and Private Hitch. When Allen and Hitch are wounded, Hitch asks the martinet corporal if he can now undo his tunic button - and the corporal reaches to do it with his own hand...

Wounded Corporal Allen and Private Hitch

Kerry Jordan as the cook

Or even just the humanity. The most obvious example is the proper respect shown to the Zulus (‘I think they’ve got more guts than we have, boyo!’) but I love the way we’re given insight into so many different little characters – such as the cook who’s laboured under the hot sun to make soup for a hundred men, and is then ordered to throw it on the fire. Zulu taught me what can be done with minor characters, and I try to remember it every time.

Stanley Baker as Chard

Not everything works, but I think we can learn from the flaws too. The character of Chard, for instance, does sometimes slip into modern attitudes – being anti-war, anti-colonialism, and sympathetic to the plight of the Boers – and every time he does it the film seems to ‘jolt’. It doesn’t ‘feel’ right, and a viewer will know that even if he’s never thought about historical fiction.

Then there are the ‘liberties taken with the truth’. The most obvious ones are making the Zulus salute the British as ‘fellow braves’ (which they didn’t), and the 24th (Warwickshire) Regiment of Foot a mainly Welsh regiment (when it wasn’t) – but there’s still a dramatic truth in both these things and at least they do no harm. Besides, take the Welshness away and we lose not only one of the best scenes of the film, but one that's been described as one of the greatest cinematic scenes of all time. 'Men of Harlech' has never been the same since.

What I do mind are the ‘liberties’ taken with real people, and I learned an important lesson when the descendants of Henry Hook VC complained about the appallingly unfair depiction of his character in the film. People do care when their ancestors are smeared, and I saw it again when the descendants of Murdoch complained about the way he was portrayed in Titanic.  There is simply no excuse for this. If we need a villain and there wasn’t one – then are we really incapable of making one up?

James Booth as Hook                             The real Hook

There’s one other real person I mind about – but you won’t see him in the film at all. His name was Private Joseph Williams of the 24th Regiment of Foot, and he actually performed the single most heroic action of the entire battle. When the Zulus began to spear their way through the outer door to the hospital, Joseph Williams left his loophole to brace the planks with his own body, and held  the entrance alone while patients were carried to safety behind him. He was killed and cut to pieces, but if the VC had been awarded posthumously he would most certainly have ben qualified to receive it. It saddens me that Zulu didn’t recognize him either.

But in the end it’s a film, and its job is ultimately to entertain. Few would disagree that it does that, but it’s in the way it does it that I think I can learn most as a historical novelist. Yes, world-building is important, and yes, historical context is crucial, but arguably the greatest aspect of Zulu is the way it can sweep away both. War is universal. When Hook says 'Did I ever see a Zulu walking down the City Road? No! So what am I doing here?' he may be making a historically relevant point about colonialism, but he is also speaking for almost any soldier in any foreign war.

As does Colour Sergeant Bourne in one of the most crucial scenes of the film. Nervous young Private Cole asks him, ‘Why is it us, sir? Why us?’ to which Bourne replies, ‘Because we’re here, lad. Nobody else. Just us.’

Gary Bond as Cole

And that’s it. A soldier doesn’t need to know the rights or wrongs of the war he’s fighting – and neither ultimately does a reader. In the end there are only men we care about who must fight to survive. Not 1879, not history, but this moment, here and now.

That for me is the biggest lesson of Zulu. I’ll spend forever getting my research right and weaving my story in and out of specific and real events, but the best kind of historical novel is one where you can throw away the history – and still have a story.

***

A.L. Berridge's website is here, and is nowhere near as good as watching Zulu. Have a look at the scene above instead. 

And the answer to the question is (of course) Frederick Schiess of the Natal Native Contingent, from the Swiss Mounted Police.

'Time Travel and the Unknown Hero' by A L Berridge

Writers and readers both find it easy to visit the past. A few words, a little stir of the imagination, and we’re on a street in 17th century London as if we’d just stepped in a time machine.  But while readers observe what’s around them as discreetly as visitors to a museum, writers are a bunch of vandals who barge joyously into the midst of it and create characters of our own to interfere with the outcome. The past to us is a field of freshly fallen snow, and we can’t resist leaving our dirty footprints all over it.

Go on.... You know you want to.

 All harmless fun, of course, but I remember the film ‘Back to the Future’, where the hero’s visit to the past jeopardises his own future by inadvertently messing up the first meeting between his parents.

That’s a sci-fi fantasy, but the principle of a fragile time continuum applies to historical fiction too. Unless we’re writing ‘Alternative History’ we can’t whizz into Tudor England, kill Henry VIII at age 10, throw the subsequent six hundred years of history into chaos, then calmly stroll off whistling.

Well, we can, and we'll all have our own personal rules on these things, but I’m of the school of writers who like to leave the past as we found it. My own criteria are that nothing in my novels should ever contradict a genuine primary source, or require a single word of a reputable history text to be rewritten to accommodate them. Omissions are acceptable, and I don’t expect current history texts to mention my entirely fictitious heroes, but what was said must be said, what was done must be done, and credit must always be given to those who historically deserved it.

That’s quite straightforward where our main characters genuinely existed.
Hilary Mantel's ‘Wolf Hall’ gives us wonderful fictional insight into Thomas Cromwell’s mind, but as long as his body does what the record says it did, then history rolls on its way undisturbed.
A safer option is to keep our characters beneath the historical radar altogether – a romance between a Greek slave and a Roman soldier won’t make so much as a ripple in the tide of time. But if (like me) you want your characters to have an impact and still remain fictional, then that’s a lot harder.

It can be done. The first method is the dreaded ‘Helpful Friend’ scenario (aka the ‘By Jove, I think you’ve got it!’) virtually patented by the late great G.A. Henty, but growing in popularity ever since. This is the one where Julius Caesar is at a loss at the Rubicon until an obscure centurion clears his throat and says ‘Excuse me, Caesar, but might it be a good idea to cross it?’ Naming no names, but I’ve read one novel where the same hero advises both the Duke of Wellington and General Blücher, carries almost every message that was ever sent, and tops off his day by ensuring the battle is called not ‘La Belle Alliance’ but ‘Waterloo’.

 The second is arguably more elegant, and that’s simply to steal the actions of someone else. Most readers would raise an eyebrow if America were to be ‘discovered’ by Eric Smith rather than Christopher Columbus, but provided the subject is sufficiently obscure it’s possible to get away with it. Alexandre Dumas did it all the time, and it never bothered me when I was reading him. The same action happened, it was glorious and exciting, and the whole thing seemed more relevant and personal because it was performed by characters I knew rather than those I’d never heard of.

Yet I can’t quite bring myself to do it in my own novels. It would only mean a tiny change in history, only the substitution of one name for another, but to me it seems somehow immoral, like robbing the dead of their laurels.

Changing history in more ways than one

I recently read a Crimean War novel where the hero led a raid which was actually commanded by Colonel Egerton of the 77th Regiment of Foot, and the knowledge made me squirm. I wondered what Egerton’s descendants would think of the book if they read it, and how they’d feel. I knew how I’d feel. I know how I felt when I saw U-571 and realized Hollywood was glorifying Americans for a raid actually performed by British submariners in U-110.

But it’s the story that matters, and my smug moral superiority won’t do me the slightest good if my own characters are creeping round the margins of the action in awe of the real-life heroes shaping events in the middle of it. How can I get them at the centre of the action without compromising historical integrity?

Enter (modestly) the Unknown Hero. 

The Unknown Hero is as old as time. He (or she) has been there forever, a kind of ageless Forrest Gump who crops up at all of history’s greatest moments and sneaks away before anyone has time to ask for an autograph. He’s the sweating horseman who brings the news ‘the French are out’, the wounded soldier who rallies his comrades with the reminder that they are ‘Queen Victoria’s soldiers’, the sole voice in the crowd that cries ‘Vive le Roi!’ to give comfort to Louis XVI on his way to the guillotine. Time and again he (or she) makes a contribution worthy of the history books, but when it comes to the record no-one knows his name.

Which is why vultures like me are able to steal it. If it ‘could have been anyone’, then it’s jolly well going to be one of my characters. I scour the sources for his spoor, and for ‘In the Name of the King’ I was lucky enough to find several traces of his presence. 

 Somebody (no-one knows who) passed a copy of the conspirators’ secret treaty to Cardinal Richelieu – so in the novel it’s my fictional André de Roland. Somebody (no-one knows who) warned the Prince du Condé that the Spanish army had an ambush waiting in the woods at Rocroi – so here comes André again, panting heroically as he delivers his message. My character earns the title of ‘hero’ by making a difference, yet nothing in history is changed.

There’s nothing new in this. Historical novelists have always pillaged in this way, and the master of it has to be George MacDonald Fraser.

The real Kavanagh at Lucknow

His Flashman pops up at every historically significant event, and frequently in the skin of the Unknown Hero. One of my favourite instances is during ‘Flashman in the Great Game’, when MacDonald Fraser casts him as T. Henry Kavanagh’s ‘unknown companion’ in the daring break-out from the Siege of Lucknow in the Indian Mutiny. It’s true the original companion is described in some sources as an Indian – but Flashman makes the journey disguised as a mutinous sepoy, and once again history is undisturbed.

But the Unknown Hero has an equally valuable counterpart we neglect at our peril - the Unknown Villain. He’s just as pervasive throughout history, and in the Crimea I found he’d left footprints as big as a Russian Yeti’s. 

What else could a writer possibly make of an ‘unknown officer’ who repeatedly told British soldiers not to fire on the advancing Russians, who ordered disastrous retreats, who mysteriously appeared and disappeared but always with ludicrous orders that favoured the enemy? I know what I made of it, and this wonderfully useful man gave me the entire plot spine of ‘Into the Valley of Death’. It’s pure fiction, but I don’t think there’s a word in it that doesn’t chime with known historical fact – thanks to the Unknown Villain.

And really, of course, these two valuable entities are the same person. Villainy or heroism depends entirely on which side the reader’s on in the first place, and Forrest Gump can become Форест Гамп at the click of a mouse. All that matters to scavengers like me is that they should be unknown, unoccupied, empty vessels into which we can pour the fiction without disturbing the outside world. Historians may knit their brows at unexplained events, but we leap past with our sleeves rolled up, shouting ‘Out the way, fact-meisters, it’s our turn now.’

That doesn’t mean we don’t care about facts. They matter more than ever, as we construct our stories from every tiny scrap of information we can find and try to ensure the final result fits with every one of them. The hardest task I ever had came in ‘In the Name of the King’ when the conveniently mysterious death of the conspiratorial Comte de Soissons was attributed by different witnesses to suicide, an accident, death in battle, and assassination by an agent of Richelieu.

The very dodgy Comte de Soissons

With my hero straining at the leash it was pretty obvious which 'unknown agent' I was going to go for, but I still had to make it not only possible but likely that the known primary sources would still have written exactly what they did. Easy enough just to say ‘Yeah, well, those other accounts were just lying’, but to me that would be cheating. I used existing eyewitness accounts to create a possible version of the ‘battle death’, and choreographed the real death to fit with both the forensic evidence and the three other versions. When we know the Comte de Soissons genuinely had a habit of lifting the visor of his helmet with the barrel of his own pistol, then that’s not as hard as it seems…

But it’s round about now that the word ‘sad’ comes into play. What does it matter, for heaven’s sake? Tell a good story, see it doesn’t mess too much with the facts, and Bob can be your great-great grandfather if you like.

Only it does matter. I’ve only got a ‘visitor’s pass’ into the past as long as I don’t abuse it. I need to be like a responsible visitor to the countryside, who takes nothing with me, leaves nothing behind, and if I open a gate I need to close it behind me. 

 Dumas knew that. Nobody created more havoc than he did, and when it comes to crashing through facts we’re not talking so much about a coach and four as a bloody London Bendy Bus - but he always knew how to come home when it was over. In ‘The Man in the Iron Mask’ he even gives Louis XIII a secret twin brother, but the story ends in such a way that we can still read the history books without needing to change a word. 

That’s what I want. If someone who’s read my novels goes on to read a history book, I don’t want them to think I’ve told them a pack of lies. History and fiction can co-exist, and each can make the other more real. All we need to do is wipe away our footprints and remember to close the door when we leave.