REVIEW: Alms for Oblivion – Peter Kemp (1961; Mystery Grove, 2020)
Writing in the early 1960s, the war in Vietnam had already begun. The Gulf of Tonkin was still a few years away, but the military situation in Southeast Asia was at its tensest point since the Second World War. And Peter Kemp, surely not unaware of at least some of these international developments, happened to have spent quiet a bit of time in the region some fifteen years previously, overseeing the transition of powers at the tail end of the war with the Japanese. These experiences form the core of Alms for Oblivion, the last chapter in Kemp’s decade-long series of wartime adventures that began with his foreign service in the Spanish Civil War. This time, it’s destination: Asia!
Two striking differences about Alms for Oblivion against Kemp’s previous adventures come immediately to mind: the relative lack of direct action, and Kemp’s attention to women. With regards to the latter, Kemp’s time in Eastern Europe, battling the elements, illness, injury, and betrayal around every corner seem to have rubbed off on him a certain appreciation for the simpler, softer things in life. Either that, or, with the consideration that this was the last book of his wartime memoirs, and that it was significantly shorter than the other two, Kemp’s editor may have suggested a bit more skin thrown in to reflect the tropical climate.
Whatever the case is, the former aspect—the comparative lack of action—is far easier to explain. Kemp’s time in Southeast Asia began very shortly before the end of the war. He never actually had an opportunity to exchange shots against the Japanese because by the time he encountered any, Japan had already surrendered. Instead, Kemp spent his time mostly managing locals: various tribes and political factions in Laos and Thailand, and later in Bali. The situations there were delicate even at the international level, as American victory in Southeast Asia meant they called the shots—and the empire had an interest in the scaling back of European colonial assets in the region.
This turned out to be an intensely personally interest of Kemp’s, when native Anamese soldiers, enemies of the French in Siam, gunned down Kemp’s French friend and guide in the region shortly before Kemp’s premature exile from Laos. That particularly harrowing escapade is one of the book’s highlights, and not because it’s one of the few major moments of action, either. The duplicity of the Anamese unit, coupled with the manner in which diplomatic interests in the region worked, made it so that of a trio of foreigners, only the Frenchman was targeted—and executed in the back while walking away, no less. The American involvement and response to this affair—or more accurately, the utter lack of it—made the event encapsulated the American presence and plans in the region.
On greater display than in the previous two books is how many of Kemp’s adventures come across with almost a Loony Tunes-flair of danger mixed with the absurd. An airplane ride to Bangkok illustrates this the best; their Siamese pilot navigated them across a mountain range in a barely-functioning aircraft whose engine cut out at irregular and unpredictable intervals, nearly killing them all in several near-miss conditions. While one can only imagine the harrowing experience, Kemp’s staid prose delivers it with a stiffness that only an Englishman could muster.
Such humor is quickly shuffled aside, however, during the book’s more somber moments. The incident with the Anamese mentioned above is one such example, and Kemp’s description of receiving the surrender of some Japanese naval forces operating out of Siam is another:
I happened to glance at Okuyama. He was sitting quite still with his hands upon his knees, his head bowed and his lined old face puckered in grief; tears dripped slowly down his shrunken cheeks. As I watched him my heart was filled with an overwhelming pity, and the glamour and glory of my position faded to a shadow. Perhaps I ought not to put my feelings on record for I had suffered nothing at the hands of the Japanese. Their callousness and cruelty, the brutality of their prison camps, and the horrors of the Burma-Siam railway were things I had heard of but not experienced. I had never met Japanese in battle, the most I had had to do was keep out of their way. Now in my unearned hour of triumph I felt ashamed to watch this veteran sailor, who had spent his life in a service with a great fighting tradition, weeping openly over his humiliation at the hands of a jumped-up young lieutenant-colonel who had never even fought against him.1
The bitter self-awareness would be hard for anyone in that situation to stomach, but Kemp manages to address it head-on in his usual unflinching manner. It is, yet again, a testament to Kemp’s reflection on his time in action and his ability as a writer.
Communism, predictably, rears its head again in this installment, further stressing its seemingly limitless reach across the four corners of the Earth. Upon arresting belligerents in Bali, Kemp visits their prison cells as part of his customary routine. They mock him and the colonial powers they view him as imposing:
‘We do not mind at all being here,’ laughed their spokesman. ‘We know that we must suffer to win our freedom. After all, the great leaders of the Russian revolution were often in prison before they came to power.’
‘Do you then mean to follow the examples of Lenin and Stalin,’ I asked, ‘when you win this freedom you talk about?’
They smiled again, but gave me no answer.
I pondered sadly on the strange contradiction whereby men who will gladly become martyrs in the cause of freedom will invoke the name of freedom, when they themselves achieve power, to persecute their own people. The result in Indonesia was to impose a heavier oppression than any endured under the Dutch.2
Even there, in the tropical heat of Bali, surrounded by beautiful women and great food, communist revolutionary ideology rears its head amid the gradual decolonizing of the region. It makes one wonder whether the impact of American efforts to bully European powers out of their colonial enterprises was a net negative after all. Kemp, although he doesn’t come out and say it, certainly seems to think so.
The book ends on something of a sorrowful note, as Kemp’s comparatively comfortable adventures in Bali draw to a close. He goes on leave in the region for a few weeks, languishing, he claims, over the news that his wife had remarried. It’s difficult to feel bad for him given the frivolity with which he indulged in the women in the area, to say nothing of his genuine interest in travel and adventure at the expense of whatever home life he could have had back in England. As the beginning of the book points out, using your free time to attend “frenzied round of parties, bars, and nightclubs […] did nothing to restore a constitution already weakened by the two extremes of Russian and Irish hospitality.”3 Kemp partied and drank as hard as he adventured, which is of no surprise—but that the woman who called herself his wife couldn’t handle that also should not have come as one, either.
Alms for Oblivion is a worthwhile engagement as a capstone to Kemp’s wartime adventures, marking the end of roughly ten years of near-constant deployment in the field. As these adventures were all written some fifteen years after the fact, Kemp’s maturation is only traceable through his behavior as it was recorded. These aren’t diaries, although it’s likely Kemp drew from diaries in order to write them. These books are personal histories recalled long after the fact.
If someone is reading Alms for Oblivion, it stands to reason that they’d be doing so after reading the previous books of Kemp’s life: Mine Were of Trouble and No Colours or Crest. Across these books is the arc of an English law student who, with a certain ideological vigor, abandons his comfortable life in the Isles to throw himself into the dangers, horrors, adventures, and camaraderie of war. But it is a story that has two distinct levels to it: Kemp’s personal trials comprise the obvious tale, but he is also a person active in the machinations of history.
As Kemp moves from the streets of Zaragoza and the hills of the Sierra Palomera, to the treacherous mountains of Kosovo and the plains of Poland, and finally to the jungles of Laos and the beaches of Bali, there is at work all around him the end of the last vestiges of the old world. Kemp witnesses the forces of Franco extinguish the immolation inflicted upon Spain by the Republicans and their Communist insurgents. He watches (and is victim to) the treachery of Allied command in the Balkans and the raw deal sold to the Polish before the War’s end. He experiences American foreign policy punctuated by the end of an Anamese rifle at point-blank range in Siam. The story unfolding here is one of global deconstruction, of rising American hegemony, of the perfidious spread of Communism.
Where the old world was gassed, shelled, and machine-gunned to death in the trenches of the First World War, there remained some vestiges of it left in the interests that colonial powers managed to maintain into the middle of the Twentieth Century. Kemp’s wartime activity took him directly to theaters in which these last vestiges were actively broken apart in the service of the new world order. Where those colonial interests didn’t exist—such as the Balkans and Poland—the new order found itself manifested in questionable prerogatives utterly detached from the realities on the ground.
It’s for this reason that I most recommend Kemp’s war memoirs. The winsome action and adventuring of his escapades across the world are entertaining, certainly, and so is his dry English wit; but the books offer more than a single account of one man’s journey into war. They’re a glimpse of the Cold War’s geopolitical architecture at a time when it was being erected, by someone who was involved only in maneuverings on the ground at a time when nobody at that level knew what was really coming.
Highly recommended.
1Kemp, Peter, Alms for Oblivion, (1961; Mystery Grove 2020), 78-79.
2Ibid, 102-103.
3Ibid, 4.
