For King and Country
by John Wilson
BBC Radio 4 : Saturday Night Theatre
Broadcast on Saturday 12th November 1988 at 7:45 p.m.
The 1917 Battle of Passchendaele is the setting for "For King and Country" which is powerful that play uncovers the officially forgotten casualties of war - the deserters. No less than 306 young men were executed during World War I. The play opens on an early evening on an August day in 1917. The place : the interior of a barn close to Passchendale in Belgium. Private Hamp is sole survivor of his platoon and he should be in a hospital, but he's on trial for desertion.
Hamp is not even remotely a protagonist on this grand tragic scale: a World War I private from the British North Country, he has deserted in battle and is to stand court-martial. But in catching a mirror image of existence in the features of a frightened boy, John Wilson raises questions that have disturbed and puzzled men since war began.
The lawyer-lieutenant chosen to defend Hamp is aloof, yet earnest, and thoroughly determined to help him. But Hamp is hard to help precisely because he is a simple soul of truth, a pebble of innocence without a tongue-wag of self-protective deviousness in his nature. "For King and Country" derives its tension and strength from a conflict between two goods, not between good and evil. Duty and discipline are obviously good and necessary in wartime, when communal responsibility is essential. On the other hand, mercy shown is also good, and morally imperative; none is shown to Hamp. As he says, softly and pitiably, "It were only the first time, sir." Here the playwright opens the play to the book of life itself. Life is always "only the first time" for every man, and, for all its late and early joys, he pays with a hundred trials and a hundred deaths. Hamp's death is a metaphor, not only for death in war but for death in the undeclared war of life.
Adapted for radio from his classic 1964 play, "Hamp", John Wilson based it from an episode of J. L. Hodson's 1955 novel, "Return to the Wood". The play was adapted by Evan Jones into a screenplay which became the basis for Joseph Losey's 1964 film "King and Country", starring Dirk Bogarde and Tom Courtenay.
Private Arthur Hamp : Peter Gunn
Second Lieutenant Charles Hargreaves : Kim Wall
Lieutenant Tom Webb : Crawford Logan
The Corporal : Ken Cumberlidge
The Guard : Ian Michie
The President of the Court Martial : John Samson
Captain Prescott : Geoffrey Whitehead
The Young Lieutenant at the Court Martial : Dominic Rickhards
The Padre : David Timson
Lieutenant Midgley : Philip Sully
Captain Fraser : Michael Graham Cox
The mouth organ played by Harry Pitch.
Directed by Martin Jenkins.
Note : There is a short trailer for the Ceremony of Remembrance broadcast at the end, and a slight glitch during the announcing of the play.
Not my recording - Big thanks to gildersleeve.net
Historical Background
The 1917 Battle of Passchendaele, also known as the Third Battle of Ypres or simply Third Ypres, was one of the major battles of World War I, in which British, ANZAC, Canadian and South African units engaged the Imperial German Army. The battle was fought for control of the village of Passchendaele near the town of Ypres in West Flanders, Belgium. The plan was to drive a hole in the German lines, advance to the Belgian coast and capture the German submarine bases there. It was intended to create a decisive corridor in a crucial area of the front, and to take pressure off the French forces. After the Nivelle Offensive the French Army was suffering from extremely low morale, resulting in mutinies and misconduct on a scale that threatened the field-worthiness of entire divisions.
Although the period of the battle saw spells of good weather lasting long enough to dry out the land, Passchendaele has become synonymous with the misery of fighting in thick mud. Most of the battle took place on largely reclaimed marshland, swampy even without rain. The extremely heavy preparatory bombardment by the British tore up the surface of the land, and heavy rain from August onwards produced an impassable terrain of deep "liquid mud", in which an unknown number of soldiers drowned. Even the newly-developed tanks bogged down.
The Germans were well-entrenched, with mutually-supporting pillboxes which the initial bombardment had not destroyed. After three months of fierce fighting the Canadian Corps took Passchendaele on 6 November 1917, ending the battle, but in the meantime the Allied Powers had sustained almost half a million casualties and the Germans just over a quarter of a million. The Allies had captured a mere five miles (8 km) of new front at a cost of 140,000 lives, a ratio of roughly 2 inches, or about 5 cm, gained per dead soldier.
Compounding this staggeringly Pyrrhic figure was the fact that the area was not even considered particularly valuable from a strategic standpoint; in March 1918 - a mere 4 months later - the Allies abandoned to the Germans every inch of territory gained at such cost at Passchendaele in order to free several divisions to cover more strategically valuable terrain during the German Lys Offensive towards Ypres.
Passchendaele was the last gasp of the "one more push" philosophy which posited that the stalemate of attritional trench warfare could be broken by brute offensive action against fixed positions. The enormous and tactically meaningless casualty levels - coupled with the horrendous conditions in which the battle was fought - damaged Field-Marshal Haig's reputation and made it emblematic of the horror of industrialised attrition warfare.
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