Punk in the trenches

Press, 29 August 1987, Page 23

Punk in the trenches

The Monocled Mutineer. By William Allison and John Fairlie. Quartet Books, 1987. 199 pp. $11.95 (paperback). (Reviewed by Oliver Riddell) The short and colourful life of Percy Toplis, petty criminal and confidence trickster, has been dramatised and romanticised in a recent television series. This is the book the series was based upon. Percy Toplis’s main interest lies in his First World War experiences and his involvement in a riot at Etaples when the brutality of the treatment of troops by the British Army proved unsupportable. The book is on two levels, with Toplis as the linking thread. First, it is

an anti-war book. There is nothing new in this and any serious reader of the First World War .cannot but be appalled at the incompetence and inhumanity with which it was fought. The scenes describing trench life are accurate. When the reader is taken out of the trenches to the base camps the pettiness, brutality and snobbery are appalling. Second, the book appears to be about class warfare with the bad upper class army officers maltreating the good lower class soldiers. But the reader comes to realise that instead it is about nihilism. Percy Toplis, as portrayed here, is a punk-culture figure transposed several generations into the past. He leads the mutineers, but is not of them. He is alienated from society, despises it, and is motivated only by opportunism in preying on it. He has no social conscience, although he is depicted as having a personal one. Against the backdrop of this surprising character lie the prejudices of the authors against early twentiethcentury Britain and its class snobberies and deceits. In romanticising Toplis they have sneered at the millions of men and women during 1914-18 who, no matter how horrible the circumstances, did what they conceived to be their duty. New Zealand readers will be specially interested in the account of the Etaples riot in 1917. The authors accord New Zealand troops a more pivotal role than their numbers may have actually warranted. There were New Zealanders present. In the television series the Anzac troops were shown wearing slouch hats, so identifying them as Australians, while the book identifies them wearing “lemon squeezers” — New Zealanders.

Less subjective accounts of this and other mutinies are found in William Moore’s book "Thin Yellow Line” and the 1985 book by Dallas and Gill, “The Unknown Army: Mutinies in the British Army in W.W.1.”