'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 articleafter 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.

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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.

'The History in the Words' by A L Berridge

All historical novelists know to avoid the ‘wrong words’ – the little anachronisms that boot us into the wrong century will the speed of a train crash. What I find much, much harder is learning when to avoid the rightones.

You know the ones I mean. The ones that are perfectly, demonstrably, authentically in period – but somehow sound as if they’re not. An astute copy-editor wisely advised me not to use the word ‘scan’ in ‘In the Name of the King’, because its rock-solid pedigree in the 16th century didn’t prevent it from sounding as if it sprang to life with a chunk of technology in the 20th.

Not what I meant

He was right. Not just because of the terrifying reader who’s so certain I’ve Got It Wrong that he can’t wait to tell the world on Goodreads, but because it creates a ‘blip’ – a moment of surprise that jolts the reader out of the story.  Anything’s better than that, so we swallow our pride and our research and consign our historical darlings to the dump.

Sometimes we can find ways round it, but they feel equally counter-intuitive. I have a character in my Crimean series who uses a lot of 19th century London slang, and since much of it sounds screamingly modern I often find myself choosing the oldest versions I can find. ‘Mug’ is a perfectly good 1850s word for the face, but I opted for the equally accurate but archaic ‘phizog’ instead. I only do this in the early chapters when readers are still adjusting to the voice, but it still feels strange to make my world seem more alien and distant than it really was.

And how far should we go anyway? The totally authentic ‘Shut your trap’ sounds suspiciously modern for 1854, but if I replace it with the original ‘shut your potato trap’ then I’m risking an altogether different kind of ‘blip’. I want my readers to be following a story, not stopping to think ‘oh, so that’s the origin of that expression!’ Words should be invisible, the mere medium of the story, and never the focus of the reader’s attention.

But they’re all we’ve got, and it’s sometimes a real struggle to make them convey what we intend. Numbers are clean things, fresh with every use, but words are second-hand and come to us laden with history and association. I wanted to use the historically-correct word ‘kid’ in ‘Into the Valley of Death’, for instance, but had to avoid it because of its modern associations with America, gangsters and cowboys.

Not what I meant. Though I think I could be persuaded...

Sometimes our innocent immersion in a period leads us to miss even more dangerous interpretations, and I still blush to remember a copy-editor’s polite suggestion that a character’s fast movement from a wall might be better not described as ‘jerked off’.

Sometimes it’s really frustrating. When writing the Battle of the Alma for ‘Into the Valley of Death’, I had to really struggle to avoid the one single phrase that would have described exactly what was happening as the Russians harnessed their cannon to field carriages to draw them from the field. Those two-wheeled carriages were called ‘limbers’ and the correct expression is ‘limbering up’, but I wanted the reader to see a scene like this:

Russian artillery at reenactment of the Alma (Sergey Kamshylin / Shutterstock.co)

and not something like this:

That may seem appallingly patronising to my readers, but the power of word-association can be stronger than logic. I know exactly what a limber is, and so will many of my readers, but the modern association still kicked in and gave me a ‘blip’ as big as a solar eclipse. Out went ‘limbering up’ and in went ‘backing to limber’, which in context was just as accurate.

And ultimately – I don’t mind. This kind of thing doesn’t happen with dead languages, but ours is a living record of our own past. I like the fact that the word ‘limbering’ remains like a ghost of its extinct military origin. I like the fact we still say ‘scot-free’ without the slightest idea that we’re using an Anglo Saxon word that means ‘exempt from royal tax’. The words stay when the meaning has gone, pebbles thrown up on the beach when the tide has gone out.

Mostly we hardly even notice them. A word just ‘is’, and we rarely stop to question how it got that way. Some people still refer to a ‘drawing room’, without any idea it’s an abbreviation of the ‘withdrawing room’ to which ladies would retire during the port and cigars. Many more will actually own a ‘penknife’ – but how many have ever used it to sharpen a quill? 

Or how about this:

The BMW i8 plug-in hybrid sports car, unveiled in Frankfurt 2013 – with an engine that produces 231 horsepower.

After all these years. Few of us have ridden in a horse-drawn vehicle, but that’s still the standard by which we judge those driven by the combustion engine. We can see both together in this fabulous colour footage from 1920’s London, but when we do we know we’re looking at history. Only the words have kept the history alive – just under the bonnet of our cars.

I suppose it’s natural to retain ‘horsepower’, since units of measurement are often the last to change. The horse itself is still measured in ‘hands’, just as many of us still measure distance in ‘feet’. How far does that go back? When did we last even think about it – except perhaps to marvel at men with twelve inch feet and to wonder if the size were proportional?

‘Hands’ and ‘feet’ will probably go in the end, as imposed metrication grinds its way through our remaining scraps of measuring heritage, but it’ll take more than that to expunge the many centuries of the horse from our language. Our idioms are steeped in it – ‘give him his head’, ‘rein him in’, ‘spur him to action’ – and they won’t disappear in a hurry.

Or will they?

Enter the Historical Language Saboteur, the chap who uses words without the slightest interest in what they actually mean. He’s the man who gives us the utterly meaningless ‘tow the line’, because he doesn’t understand the Naval historical concept of ‘toe the line’. He’s the man who writes about ‘giving free reign’ or ‘reigning in’ because the idea of controlling a horse by means of reins is beyond him. He's the man who infects millions of innocents, who dutifully repeat his mistakes because they've seen them written down on the internet. Distortion of language used to take centuries to accomplish, but these days it can happen in a matter of weeks.

But perhaps that’s as it should be. Perhaps he too is part of history. Mistakes and ‘back-derivations’ have played their own part in shaping our language, and they often enrich our understanding in how people thought and spoke in earlier times. Those who complain about today’s ‘sloppy diction’ might want to ask how the words ‘norange’ and ‘napron’ became respectively ‘orange’ and ‘apron’ – and if they say ‘a norange’ aloud, then they’ll know.

That’s the best part of language history for me: what it tells us about our ancestors and how they lived. I’m fascinated, for instance, by the fact we use English words for an animal in the field but French ones for the same animal on the table – and what this tells us about life under the Norman Conquest. The peasants were English who knew cows, sheep and pigs, but the court aristocracy were only familiar with boeuf, mouton, and porc – beef, mutton, and pork.

The history of language can obviously teach us far more profound truths than that, and I only wish I knew more about it.  My mother was lucky enough to attend the lectures of Professor J.R.R. Tolkien himself, and one of the remarks she recorded in her notebooks takes my breath away even now. Tolkien told his students that the first languages to develop a future tense were those of peoples who lived by the sea.

I have no idea how accurate that is, but it makes me tingle because of its essential truth. To comprehend the idea of a future, one has to have a sense of the ‘beyond’ – and who would learn that quicker than those who can look further than the edge of the world?

But the past is ‘beyond’ too, and words can take us there if we let them. Words aren’t just a record of the whole of human history – they arethat history, and the living chain that joins it all together. If we choose to, we can follow them right back to the beginning, when the first people came out of the forest to stare in wonder at the power of the sea.

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If you think words can never be dull, you should visit A L Berridge's website.
If you care about the history behind the words, you should visit the Crimea Appeal.