New Purpose
Two British spies look out over war-torn Belgrade, and find the inspiration they need to go on with their dangerous mission.
1916
King George V 1910-1936
Two British spies look out over war-torn Belgrade, and find the inspiration they need to go on with their dangerous mission.
1916
King George V 1910-1936
In John Buchan’s Great War novel ‘Greenmantle’, published in 1916, Richard Hannay and Peter Pienaar are spying for the Allies, making their way under cover through occupied lands to Constantinople. At Belgrade, recently captured by Austria-Hungary, they look on the devastation of war and their hearts go out to the brave people of Serbia.
WE wandered among the battered riverside streets, and looked at the broken arches of the great railway bridge which the Germans were working at like beavers. The upper streets of the city were still fairly whole, and there were shops open where food could be got. I remember hearing English spoken, and seeing some Red Cross nurses in the custody of Austrian soldiers coming from the railway station.
It would have done me a lot of good to have had a word with them. I thought of the gallant people whose capital this had been, how three times they had flung the Austrians back over the Danube,* and then had only been beaten by the black treachery of their so-called allies.* Somehow that morning in Belgrade gave both Peter and me a new purpose in our task. It was our business to put a spoke in the wheel of this monstrous bloody Juggernaut that was crushing the life out of the little heroic nations.*
The Serbian campaign began with three notable victories for the Serbs, in the Battles of Cer, Drina and Kolubara. In 1867 Serbia had shaken off centuries of oppression under the Ottoman Empire only to be seized by Austria-Hungary in 1908, and the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, on June 28th, 1914, brought the German Empire in on Vienna’s side. See The Outbreak of the Great War.
That is, the Bulgarians, who had shared Serbia’s captivity under the Ottomans, but sided with Germany in the Great War; they had little reason to love Britain, after Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, who was Pro-Turkish, U-turned on William Gladstone’s policy of support for Sofia. The over-stretched British did eventually come to Serbia’s aid, but hesitation in Greece, where King Constantine I flirted with neutrality but Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos supported the Allies, delayed them at Salonica and it was a case of too little too late.
The Old Railway Bridge over the River Sava (which joins the Danube at Belgrade), built in 1884 by the French, was Austria-Hungary’s prime route into the capital. It was destroyed by the Serbs in the small hours of July 29th, 1914 but rebuilt two years later by the occupying powers, who destroyed it again in 1918 as they retreated. It was reopened in 1919.
The loan word Juggernaut came into English during the 17th century, as a reference to enormous wagons bearing the images of Jagannatha, Subhadra, and Balabhadra in processions at the Jagannatha Temple in Puri, Odisha (Orissa) in India. Buchan implies that the German Empire was a crushing bandwagon in the service of a quasi-religious obsession.
1. What is the author aiming to achieve in writing this?
2. Note any words, devices or turns of phrase that strike you. How do they help the author communicate his ideas more effectively?
3. What impression does this passage make on you? How might you put that impression into words?
Based on The English Critic (1939) by NL Clay, drawing on The New Criticism: A Lecture Delivered at Columbia University, March 9, 1910, by J. E. Spingarn, Professor of Comparative Literature in Columbia University, USA.
Suggest answers to this question. See if you can limit one answer to exactly seven words.
How did Hannay come to hear English spoken in occupied Belgrade?