April 30, 2007
Foyle’s War Posted by Fredric Smoler at 09:35 AM EST At the recommendation of friend, I’ve been watching Foyle’s War via Netflix. Foyle’s War is (so far) a series of hour-and-20-minute or so episodes of a wartime detective drama, one set in and around Hastings in the spring, summer, and fall of 1940. The detective chief superintendent has a son beginning training as a Spitfire pilot. The first episode begins with the encirclement of the British Army at Dunkirk, and the episode I watched this week, possibly the eighth, is set in October. To a degree, Foyle’s War is simply a British detective series with a romantic setting, to some tastes the most romantic setting of all time, and it is likely that some of its interest consists in watching a few people behaving badly at a moment when most people behaved very well, and to the highest possible purpose. It is even possible that if viewers suffer from the increasingly common voyeuristic perversion of wanting to see through the “myth” of the Finest Hour, Foyle’s War will gratify that taste, too, although to do so they will have to view the show with at best intermittent attention. The series necessarily varies in quality, but it occasionally makes the historical distance it traverses gap wider than I’d thought likely. For example, in the episode I just watched, richer Londoners rent rooms in a country house very recently become an inn. The renters are buying their way out of exposure to the Blitz, and the episode is titled “The Funk Hole,” a phrase that originally meant a dugout or bunker, and when used by infantrymen was affectionate and self-mocking, but has in this new usage become strongly pejorative. A funk is a state of panic or fear, and to call a field entrenchment a place from which one takes refuge from artillery fire in panic or fear is, I think, mild although intricate irony, and does not mean to impeach the moral qualities of soldiers who fail to stand erect in open view while shrapnel bursts around them. Once upon a time, though, it was a source of stigma to even flinch in the proximity of shellfire. Many British troops saw it that way at Waterloo; standards of courage change over time. As for Foyle’s War, it first seemed a little odd to savagely mock as cowards people who’d left a city under bombardment, most of whom were performing no crucial military or economic function, although I was able to work out the logic of the judgment after a minute or two. In 1940 Britain was a deference culture with a very uneven distribution of income, and letting physical safety be rationed by market pricing was probably not the best way to sustain morale, any more than rationing scarce food by price alone. If morale failed, and it might have, since Britain was alone against Hitler in a seemingly hopeless situation, a shameful and likely catastrophic compromise peace was the likeliest alternative. Wartime has not traditionally been seen as the best occasion for letting markets decide the largest possible number of outcomes; children, for example, tended to be seen as the most deserving recipients of scarce milk, and also of scarce (relative) shelter from the Luftwaffe. While buying black-market food was indeed illegal, it was not illegal to buy your way out of the Blitz, but it was not much admired, and ridicule and scorn are, by some very influential theories, ways societies defend themselves against potentially dangerous behavior. On the older theory, elites should make especially visible sacrifices in wartime, and to the extent that they enjoy greatly disproportionate wealth, they should visibly sacrifice a disproportionate amount of it in wartime. Watching Foyle’s War, this suddenly seemed very long ago.
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