When you’re wounded and left
on Afghanistan’s plains,
And the women come out to cut
what remains,
Just roll to your rifle and blow
out your brains
And go to your God like a soldier.

Rudyard Kipling,
The Young British Soldier

“Making mock of uniforms that guard you while you sleep” was a phrase of Kipling’s that caught in George Orwell’s mind. And there were patent reasons why the line should have nagged at his conscience, for in the dramatic years that preceded the writing of his celebrated essay on Kipling in the middle of World War II, Orwell—a more complex and far less consistent man than is commonly thought—had undergone an abrupt and profound reorientation of his political thinking. His view of Soviet totalitarianism (the attitude for which he is best known) did not change. He learned to despise Stalinism during the Spanish Civil War, and to his death the intensity of this loathing remained unimpaired. But his feelings toward the liberal “bourgeois” states, particularly those possessing colonies, were another matter. His hostility toward the social injustices of these states was so strong that he thought them not worth defending against even such as Hitler, and consequently was a fervent supporter of the anti-war party during the Munich crisis of 1938 and sneered most contemptuously at the socialist “warmongers” who felt that Hitler had to be stopped. In January 1939, eight months before the German attack on Poland, he wrote to Herbert Read: “I believe it is vitally necessary for those of us who intend to oppose the coming war to start organizing for illegal anti-war activities.”

In July, in Adelphi, he wrote: “What meaning would there be . . . in bringing down Hitler’s system in order to stabilize something that is far bigger and in its different way just as bad? . . . Nothing is likely to save us except the emergence within the next two years of a real mass party whose first pledges are to refuse war and to right imperial injustice.” In the last issue of Left Forum to be published before the German attack in the East, Orwell was still fulminating against “left-wing jingoes,” saying if their eyes were open they must be aware that “their [anti-Hitler] version of ‘defense of democracy’ leads directly away from democracy. . . .”

On September 1, the German Blitzkreig against Poland was launched, and France and his own country declared war. Orwell was silent. We know that he tried repeatedly to join the army and was rejected each time as medically unfit, but no article or dispatch or personal letter issued from his pen to explain the change in his thinking. September: silence. October: silence. November: silence. December: silence. On January 8, 1940, with no transition, explanation, or peccavi of any sort, Orwell wrote earnestly to Victor Gollancz, his publisher: “What worries me at present is the uncertainty as to whether the ordinary people in countries like England grasp the difference between democracy and despotism well enough to defend their liberties. . . . The intellectuals who are at present pointing out that democracy and fascism are the same thing etc. depress me horribly.” Two days later, to his close friend Geoffrey Gorer, he wrote: “I have so far completely failed to serve HM government in any capacity, though I want to, because it seems to me that now we are in this bloody war we have got to win it & I would like to lend a hand. They won’t have me in the army, at any rate at present, because of my lungs.” (Orwell was tubercular.) In April, a month before the German attack in the West, he wrote, in a review of a book by Malcolm Muggeridge, who had just joined the army: “I know very well what underlies these [deeply moving] closing chapters. It is the emotion of the middle-class man, brought up in the military tradition, who finds in the moment of crisis that he is a patriot after all. It is all very well to be ‘advanced’ and ‘enlightened,’ to snigger at Colonel Blimp and proclaim your emancipation from all traditional loyalties, but a time comes when the sand of the desert is sodden red and what have I done for thee, England my England?”

The German onslaught began. France fell. Belgium fell. Holland. The British army was cut off, but, abandoning all its weapons and equipment, was evacuated at Dunkirk. And Orwell, soon to be admitted to the Home Guard, wrote his extraordinary essay, “My Country Right or Left.” “The night before the Russo-German pact was announced I dreamed that the war had started. It was one of those dreams which . . . sometimes reveal to you the true state of your feelings. It taught me . . . that I was patriotic at heart, would not sabotage or act against my own side, would support the war, would fight in it if possible.” He confesses that “To this day it gives me a faint feeling of sacrilege not to stand to attention during ‘God Save the King.’” He pities people “whose hearts have never leapt at the sight of the Union Jack.” And he closes with a ringing affirmation of the “spiritual need for patriotism and the military virtues, for which, however little the boiled rabbits of the Left may like them, no substitute has yet been found.” When a man says things like this, can Kipling be far behind?

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I write in such detail of Orwell’s astounding reversal of attitudes toward patriotism and “military virtues” once his own country was placed in deadly peril because we seem at present to be living through a substantial shifting of opinion on these same subjects in this country; and because two significant new movies have appeared about these “uniforms that guard you while you sleep” (a subject obsessional with Kipling and of deep significance for Orwell also), the two films displaying sharply constrasting attitudes toward everything these uniforms stand for.

The first is Australia’s Breaker Morant, a story of Australian soldiers in the Boer War. Beyond its international success and a top prize at the latest Cannes Film Festival, the movie is the biggest commercial money-maker in Australian history and, in America, without a known name connected to it and competing with works by celebrity directors like Polanski, Resnais, and Truffaut, it is proving one of the leading foreign box-office attractions of 1981. The second film is about wearers of another sort of uniform that even more obviously “guards us while we sleep,” policemen. Fort Apache, The Bronx, protested against and picketed by offended South Bronx residents, has nonetheless, at this writing, been the number-one commercial film in the country for several weeks. Hence: two successful, strong, highly ideological films about men in uniform.

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The Boer War was a nasty piece of business, resembling in many ways our war in Vietnam. Even some of the statistics were similar. The British, at the end, had almost half a million men there under arms, imperial, colonial, and even a few local African—the Africans being attracted to the British because of their more liberal racial policies. Boers fought on both sides (one-fifth of them siding with the British). Africans died on both sides. Much of the veldt was a great free-fire zone. The British practiced defoliation, burned crops and houses and everything that might give the Boer guerrillas support, did not have “strategic hamlets” but built thousands of blockhouses, herded the families and retainers of the guerrillas (including over 100,000 blacks) into vast concentration camps—a dazzling novelty of the period. Both sides killed prisoners, the Boers, at least partly because guerrillas cannot take many prisoners, doing so first and most systematically. They openly admitted killing armed Africans whenever they captured them and there is abundant evidence that they killed unarmed ones as well. A leading British missionary in the Transvaal wrote privately of the commandos led by General Jan Smuts, one of the most respected of the Boer leaders: “The Boers under Smuts captured this post last month & when afterwards a column visited the place they found the bodies of all the Kaffirs murdered and unburied. . . . They look upon the Kaffirs as dogs & the killing of them as hardly a crime. . . .” The British forces suffered over 100,000 casualties, the death roll of whites on both sides together being in the vicinity of 50-60,000. The number of black dead was not even estimated.

It was the 20th century’s first anti-colonial war, with a modern army bogged down in battle with fierce and determined nationalist guerrillas on the guerrillas’ own terrain. In his more morbid moments, the British commander Lord Kitchener felt the only way to win the war was to “exterminate” every last one of them. The expression “body count” had not yet been invented, the British talking, instead, about the daily “bag.” Enlightened opinion on the Continent condemned the British almost universally, but, unlike the U.S. during the Vietnam war, morale in Britain remained comparatively high; Kipling, needless to say, backed the war to the hilt. And support for the war among the self-governing members of the Empire, such as Australia and Canada, remained surprisingly enthusiastic, the only episode sticking in the craw of the Australians—whose combat units displayed much valor—being the affair of the so-called Bush Veldt Carabineers, a special anti-commando unit formed to fight in enemy territory in the wild northern Transvaal. Six of its officers were court-martialed for killing Boer prisoners, and two of them, “Breaker” Morant and Peter Handcock, were executed by firing squad.

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The execution caused an uproar of protest in Australia as the Boers had been killing prisoners from the beginning and it was no secret that the British, particularly the colonial deep-penetration units, were retaliating in kind. (“Hold up your hands, men!” called the second-in-command of a unit of Canadian Scouts after coming upon the bullet-riddled body of its commanding officer, shot after capture. “I want you to take an oath with me not to take another prisoner!” Recalled a sergeant solemnly long afterward, “We held up our hands.”) But Germany was intervening diplomatically on behalf of the Boers, peace feelers were out to end the war, and many thought that Morant and Handcock were offered up by Kitchener as scapegoats to international opinion. Thomas Pakenham, author of the excellent recent study, The Boer War, feels that this is a “misconception,” but offers no supporting evidence and grants that the view is “still current.”

On the face of it, the scapegoat interpretation seems far from implausible and, in any event, it is still widely believed in Australia and played for all it’s worth in the present movie. Breaker Morant is the only film I can recall whose press material includes a detailed historical bibliography—an invitation to the critic, if he doesn’t like the film’s view of history, to run the facts down himself in the major sources. Unfortunately this is a thing which film critics, sometimes for practical reasons, sometimes from sheer psychological submission to the entrancing world of make-believe presented on the screen, seldom do.

Breaker Morant is a superbly made film. The rolling veldt. The horses. The period uniforms and faces. The patrols coming in over the ridgeline against glorious skies. Bruce Beresford, the director, uses a wonderful mix of long establishing shots and tight close-ups of faces. They are faces worthy of a Fellini—except of course they are from a different world. These are the faces of Australian roughnecks and stiff British soldiers, with pomaded hair and black handlebar mustaches. And the stiffest faces are some of the best of all, with, behind the stiffness, ghost-like but palpable, the thoughts of the characters plainer than if printed in ink. Men’s blue eyes, whether filled with rage, or duplicity, or even cautious decency, have rarely been used to such dramatic effect.

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The frame of the story is the court-martial of three of the Carabineer officers, with deft flashbacks to the key moments of their story—cut in usually on the “off-beat” (not in the wooden, old-fashioned manner which seemed a clumsy attempt to reproduce narrative). Morant (Edward Woodward), who owes his nickname “Breaker” to having been the best horse breaker in Australia, is curiously enough a black-sheep English gentleman who went out to Australia at nineteen and has been recommended for a DSO for valor in South Africa. Handcock (Bryan Brown) joined up because he was jobless during a depression, and Witton (Lewis Fitz-Gerald), the youngest, because his father, an old soldier, said it would make a man of him. They are all lieutenants. We see the engagement during which their commanding officer, Captain Hunt, is wounded and captured, and later the scene when they come upon his body, savagely mutilated by the Boers before they killed him. Morant, who was engaged to marry Hunt’s sister, had up to this point never killed a prisoner, but when the next one falls into the unit’s hands, his instructions from an English captain, delivered in an icily quiet voice, are, “Avenge Hunt.” When a whole batch of prisoners comes in, and there is no place they can be kept or guarded with the unit on the move in enemy country, we hear the same icy, cold voice, the same order: “Execute them. This is guerrilla war, not a debutante’s ball.”

We see Kitchener at his headquarters. It is an unattractive portrait. Germany has protestedagainst the execution of a German missionary, and Kitchener says sanctimoniously, “The Kaiser is our late Queen’s grandson you know,” and then more practically, “The Germans would like any excuse to come in on the side of the Boers. They don’t give a damn about the Boers, of course. All they want is the gold and diamonds.” To which a staff officer replies, “They lack our altruism, sir.” Considering its subject matter, there is much humor in the film. During the court-martial, when another soldier gives transparently false evidence against them, Handcock bursts out at the witness, “You couldn’t lie straight in bed, Donaldson!” When Donaldson invites him outside to settle the matter, Handcock, ready to go, cries, “Any time, mate!” at which the presiding officer of the court warns him, “Control yourself, Lieutenant, or you’ll find yourself in serious trouble.” This brings a laugh of genuine, if bitter, amusement to Handcock, who is already, of course, on trial for his life.

_____________

In the middle of the court-martial there is a Boer attack on the barracks in which it is being held. Morant, Handcock, and Witton are served out weapons and fight gallantly to repel the attack. When the court-martial resumes, their defense counsel, Major Thomas (played by Australia’s leading film star, Jack Thompson), pleads that British army tradition since Wellington calls for prisoners who fight bravely against the enemy to be pardoned. But there is no pardon. Biased ruling after biased ruling is made against the defendants. A key witness for the defense is transferred to India before he can testify. Thomas, who has had only twenty-four hours to prepare his case, destroys the credibility of witness after witness, but the court remains unmoved. Everything indicates that the three men are being railroaded.

Thomas rises at last for his final summation, delivered with great eloquence. “War changes men’s natures,” he says. “The barbarities of war are seldom committed by abnormal men, but by normal men under abnormal circumstances. They live every day with fear and anger and blood and death, and when rules are departed from by one side, they will be departed from by the other. Soldiers at war are not to be judged by civilian rules. Their actions, viewed calmly afterward, often seem un-Christian and brutal, but if all men who committed barbarous acts in war were court-martialed, courts-martial would be in permanent session.” He closes quietly, with the stunning statement, “We ourselves are not fit to judge such men.”

This speech won, first gasps, then great cheers at the Cannes Film Festival, where the audience tends to cheer, not artistry, but sentiments it agrees with, and where Thompson’s performance also won him the top acting prize. The speech also earned cheers when I saw the film in Paris, and even, they tell me, at the first performances in New York. The events portrayed in the film, of course, took place long, long before the Nuremberg Trials, where it was decided that the fact that a soldier was “following orders” did not exonerate him from responsibility for actions contrary to the Geneva Convention. Consideration of the Nuremberg principle would naturally have been a gross anachronism in 1902, and a substantial part of Breaker Morant’s court-martial is devoted to whether or not Kitchener had in fact given “secret orders” to kill Boer prisoners, later to disavow the orders publicly—a proposition for which the film establishes at least a plausibility. But Morant, Handcock, and Witton are all sentenced to death. Two of the judges recommend mercy, but Kitchener orders that the death sentence be carried out on all but Witton, the youngest, whose sentence is commuted to life imprisonment.

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The mood of the film’s last scenes is extraordinary. There is gallows humor to the end. “Live every day as if it’s to be your last, lads,” says Morant. “One day you’re certain to be right.” He reflects that perhaps they’d been fighting “on the wrong side” after all, and drinks to—“The Bush Veldt Carabineers! The best fighters in a bad cause.” Somberly he says, “This is what comes of empire building.” Earlier, at headquarters, Kitchener has said to a staff officer, “The sacrifice of these Australians wouldn’t seem an unreasonable price to pay for a peace conference,” to which the officer replies, “No, sir. Although the Australians might see the matter somewhat differently.” Now, when the defense counsel makes his last desperate plea for the three men, the same staff officer tells him, “Forget it, Major. It’s a sideshow of the war. Good news, by the way. It looks as if we’re going to have a peace conference.”

The night before their execution, Morant pens a poem. It is high-flown. Men marching off to war, patriotism, high hopes, and to what end? Handcock writes a long letter to his wife, saying no matter what he has done, he has always loved her. The letter’s last line is “Australia forever!”

In the light of dawn, Morant is asked what he wants written on his tombstone and he says Matthew 10:36—“And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household.” Both Morant and Handcock spurn the consolation of the padre. Both spurn the blindfold. They hold hands for a moment as they march out in front of the firing squad, and then go to their death like soldiers.

In 1970, almost seventy years after the event (a scene not shown in the film), the British officer who commanded the firing squad, then a very old gentleman, remembered Handcock as a “charming young man.” Handcock had given him his cigarette case, and he had kept it those many years.

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What is this film about? It is anti-British, up to a point, anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist (“the wrong side,” “this is what comes of empire building”). It has bitterness of a particularly acute kind against senior officers, “brass,” who cold-heartedly treat their men like cannon fodder, to be sacrificed, declared expendable, occasionally offered up as scapegoats. But on the most profound level, it is about something even larger. It burns with a white rage against societies as a whole, from military leaders and chiefs of state to (more common in our time) comfortable civilians in easy chairs, who send rough men out to serve their interests brutally, murderously (what is war?), and then—when circumstances change and in the exquisite safety and fastidiousness of their living rooms they suddenly find these rough men’s actions repugnant—disown them.

There is deep hypocrisy and injustice here and Breaker Morant’s director, Bruce Beresford, makes no bones about his feelings. He declares openly that one of the main things that drew him to the film’s subject was its parallels to the war in Vietnam and to the story of—yes—William Calley. That a motion picture made in conscious defense of William Calley should be receiving ovations today is a historic event in itself. Badgered by an interviewer from the New York Times who suggested that the film could be seen as an “apologia for war crimes” and “for dangerously reactionary behavior,” Beresford stood fast. (Who actually approves of the killing of prisoners?) “If you’re stuck with a charge of atrocity,” said Beresford, “it’s not that simple; it’s not just a case of being a madman with a gun in your hand. The film says that in this kind of situation you can’t simply turn around and condemn the people who’ve done the deed.” Jack Thompson (the defense counsel), who has served in the Australian army himself, was even more emphatic. His great speech in the film, he said, tells us mainly that “people behave desperately in desperate situations. Others who sit in judgment and call them criminals are the ones who put them in that situation—and are highly suspect” (emphasis added). The statement could hardly be more clear. It is not difficult to infer that Beresford and Thompson feel that the uneducated young Americans who answered their country’s call and did its dirty work in Vietnam deserved better on their return than jeers like, “You were in Vietnam? How many kids did you kill?”—particularly when these jeers came from sons of the liberal, privileged elite which had sent them to Vietnam to begin with, and whose heroism during the war was confined to performing prodigies of draft evasion. There was no honor in this; and no amount of cheering for returned Teheran hostages, some of whom endured rigors rather less severe than what an ordinary Marine goes through in boot camp, will wipe out the stain.

Breaker Morant, of course, plunges us into a world of undiluted Kipling:

For it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy
that, an’ “Tommy, wait out-side”;

But it’s “Special train for Atkins” when the trooper’s on the tide.

It brings back the peculiar quality of Kipling’s soldiers, stoical, hard-bitten, unconcerned with political objectives or lofty ideals:

“What was the end of all the
show, Johnnie, Johnnie?”
Ask my Colonel, for I don’t know,
Johnnie, my Johnnie, aha!
We broke a King and we built a
road—
A court-house stands where the
Reg’ment goed.
And the river’s clean where the
raw blood flowed
When the Widow gives the party.

Given the many decades during which Kipling was looked on with disfavor by the literary intelligentsia, it is remarkable how many writers of refined literary sensitivity found him so fascinating they felt compelled to write about him: not only Orwell but Edmund Wilson, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Lionel Trilling, Randall Jarrell, Angus Wilson, C. S. Lewis. Many of these wrote to pay Kipling a sometimes grudging tribute. There are numerous reasons for disliking Kipling, as all these writers are aware. Among others, he identified totally, and with relish, with coarse men of action against liberal humanists, which many intellectuals saw as a betrayal of his own class and calling. But as set out by Orwell—the intensity of whose love-hate for Kipling perhaps gave him the deepest perceptions—Kipling “sees clearly that men can only be highly civilized while other men, inevitably less civilized, are there to guard and feed them.” Lewis echoes the same theme: “It is a brutal truth about the world that the whole everlasting business of keeping the human race protected and clothed and fed could not go on for twenty-four hours without the vast legion of hard-bitten, technically efficient, not-over-sympathetic men, and without the harsh processes of discipline by which this legion is made. It is a brutal truth that unless a great many people practiced the Kipling ethos there would be neither security nor leisure for any people to practice a finer ethos.”

I have no doubt that all the writers I have mentioned knew this to be true, whence their dark fascination with Kipling. In times of ease and security such ideas as Kipling’s have not been wildly popular in the intellectual class. When the very survival of their culture is seen as in jeopardy, however, then liberal humanists rejoin the nation, and, as Victoria Crosses and Congressional Medals of Honor are handed out to harsh, not always very lovable men, they consider themselves lucky to count such men as compatriots, and toast their Rangers, and Green Berets, and Blue Light, and, indeed, their Handcocks and Morants and Bush Veldt Carabineers.

Auden wrote that for Kipling civilization was “a little citadel of light surrounded by a great darkness full of malignant forces and only maintained through the centuries by everlasting vigilance, will power, and self sacrifice.” Kipling’s peculiarity, according to Auden, was that he was obsessed exclusively with dangers threatening civilization from outside, whereas there were also dangers which threatened it from within. Auden was thinking of corruption and “the ennuis of the cultured mind,” whereas in our own time one of the dangers threatening American civilization from the inside presents itself in startlingly Kiplingesque terms like the external dangers of old—as the title Fort Apache, The Bronx so clearly suggests—and the “hard-bitten,” “not-over-sympathetic” men who protect us while we sleep are policemen.

Needless to say, when the enemy is within a society the battle lines are never as clearly drawn as when it is without, and since Fort Apache has well-made, exciting action scenes, Paul Newman’s best performance in many years, and detailing and niceties of construction not normally encountered in network police dramas on television, great numbers of viewers have been issuing from movie houses under the impression that they have seen simply a “good cop movie.” But Fort Apache, without being so absurd as to suggest that police forces should be disbanded, is deeply and systematically hostile to the police, to the way they are compelled to do their job, and, perhaps most of all, to the rough kind of men willing to do this work. It misrepresents the police. It misrepresents crime. And it even misrepresents the South Bronx.

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The film begins with a double cop killing. Before the titles, a black prostitute, “whacked out of her mind” on Angel Dust, weaves across a street toward a halted police squad car. Two rookie cops, lulled into a false sense of security by her drugged state, watch the prostitute with amusement as she approaches, invites them seductively to “party” with her, and then fumbles in her bag. From the bag she draws a pistol and empties it into the two policemen. After the titles, back at the station house, we meet Patrolman Murphy (Paul Newman), who has what even his patrol partner designates as an “anti-authority” streak. With eighteen years on the force, he has been broken twice from sergeant, once for protesting against what he considered trivial disciplinary spit-and-polish. As the film proceeds we will see that the only good cop is an anti-authority cop.

But a change of command is taking place in the South Bronx’s Precinct 41. The easygoing Captain Dugan is being replaced by the firm, authoritarian Captain Connolly (Edward Asner). Connolly is critical of the state of affairs in the precinct and Dugan defends himself indignantly: “Sure. Let the politicians and everybody else off the hook. Blame Dugan, that’s the easy way. You got a forty block area with 70,000 people packed in like sardines, living like cockroaches. And that’s Dugan’s fault, right? You got the lowest per-capita income and the highest rate of unemployment in the city. That’s my fault. Why aren’t I out gettin’ all these people jobs? Largest proportion of non-English speaking population. Dugan’s fault. Why ain’t he out there teachin’ ’em English? Families that have been on welfare for three generations. Youth gangs, winos, junkies, pimps, hookers, maniacs, cop killers. Dugan’s fault.”

But two cops have been killed and Connolly calls for draconian measures. All criminals in the district are to be pulled in, he tells his patrolmen sternly. No more looking the other way. “We’re going to bring them in, book them, toss them, and see what they spit out. And we won’t quit until we get a lead!” Murphy, before all the other patrolmen, somewhat incredibly, objects. “If we all go around with our noses buried in the penal code we could make a hundred bum collars a day. The jails would be full, the neighborhood would be empty, and we wouldn’t be one step closer to clearing these killings.” Murphy spells his humane doctrine out even more explicitly to his partner while on patrol: “You don’t go turnin’ this neighborhood upside-down every time somebody gets killed. Not even a cop.”

For someone who knows anything about the behavior of policemen when other policemen are killed, particularly in their district, this is a truly breathtaking statement. And as for Murphy’s remark that the jails “would” be full, the jails are full already, as everybody knows (most especially policemen), they are in fact ewer-full—two men to a one-man cell—which is why dangerous criminals are being paroled, a considerable part of the problem in itself. In any case, Connolly’s orders are followed. Hundreds of small-time criminals, all black or Puerto Rican, are run into the precinct house, plus a few members of the “South Bronx People’s Party,” and soon a jeering crowd is forming outside, chanting, “Let the brothers out! Let the brothers out.” Murphy is standing by a window, cupping his hands, joining in the chant. When he sees Captain Connolly’s angry eye on him, he continues the chant defiantly, “Let the brothers go!” Later, when Connolly orders him to take a black leader of the crowd into custody, Murphy, ever a friend of the oppressed, says to the man quietly when he resists: “Hey, man, we don’t want you in here. You just cool it, and let us book you, and you’ll be out on the street in an hour.”

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Another key scene occurs later on when fire engines answer a call and neighborhood youths start bombarding the firemen with bricks from the roofs. Police squad cars come to the firemen’s aid and are bombarded in their turn, and a particularly tough cop named Morgan (brilliantly played by Danny Aiello), rushes to a rooftop with his partner, spots a Puerto Rican we know to be innocent (but he does not), and brutally throws him from the roof into the alley. The scene is witnessed from a nearby roof by Murphy, and a crisis of conscience ensues: should he rat on a fellow cop?

Murphy, of course, is given ample opportunity throughout the movie to demonstrate that he is the kind of humane, compassionate, “caring” person policemen should be, but, alas, are usually not. He delivers a baby. He beguiles a homicidal maniac into surrendering his weapon to him without the senseless force so often used on such poor creatures. He saves a hysterical transvestite, a “jumper,” from plunging to his death from a rooftop after a fight with his roommate over a Donna Summer wig. There are a few wicked people in the South Bronx too, of course. How could one deny it? José and Hernando (played with imposing authenticity by Miguel Pinero, distinguished off-Broadway playwright and ex-convict, author of Short Eyes) are heroin pushers who, trapped in a neighborhood hospital, take doctors, nurses, and patients hostage—which gives Officer Murphy, assisted by a Puerto Rican colleague, the opportunity to prove his heroic qualities as well by descending from the roof in a harness, entering a back window, and gunning down the evildoers.

The plot also manages to work in a love affair for Murphy with a hospital nurse, Puerto Rican, of course. To Murphy’s grief he discovers that she is a heroin “user,” if not quite an addict. By her definition “smack” is her equivalent of a vacation. She dies of an overdose, administered to her deliberately and cold-bloodedly by Hernando, who sees danger in her relationship with Murphy (this before he is blown away by this same Murphy).

We have heard Murphy’s partner warn him that a policeman who informs openly on another policeman—by testifying against him in a murder trial, for example—is ostracized and must leave the force. But Murphy, in his grief at the loss of the woman he loves, decides that he must turn Morgan in for murder nonetheless, though the connection between the two events is murky. The only causal link I can see between the nurse’s death and this momentous decision is that Murphy feels that, after all the evil perpetrated by White Society upon the poor suffering residents of the South Bronx, to let a murderous white cop go unpunished would be too much (although if someone can find a better explanation I will be delighted to hear it). The film ends in a blaze of virtue. In the last scene, Murphy’s urge to preserve the law proves too strong to resist, and he, implicitly but unmistakably, reverses himself and decides to stay on the force after all. Presumably he and his partner walk off together into a good cop’s sunset, ostracized but happy.

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The story of Fort Apache is organized around a series of deaths. The first is the murder of the two rookie cops by the black prostitute whacked out on Angel Dust. This surely is a tragedy. But who is responsible? The point could be debated in this first case, but my view is that what this movie is telling us, by and large, is that if White Society had only provided this unfortunate black prostitute with a good job downtown she wouldn’t be wandering around zonked out of her mind on Angel Dust murdering cops.

We now have killing number two (arranged in order of logical sequence). The black prostitute is knifed to death by José, the partner of Hernando, the two of them drug pushers. Since Hernando and José, not visibly under the influence of drugs, behave like truly vicious people, in the simple terms of the movie it would be implausible to claim they are portrayed as victims of White Society. But every ethnic group has its bad apples, does it not? Hernando and José are villains. But, lo, in killing number three, Hernando and José having taken hostages at the hospital, are shot to pieces by Murphy and his partner. Of all the killings in the film, this is the most conventional, the film’s offering to accepted piety: good destroys evil. But with the death of the nurse, Murphy’s love, we approach the film’s moral center. Who killed the nurse} Now, “mechanically” speaking, it was Hernando who killed the nurse by deliberately giving her an over-strength, undiluted sachet of heroin. But if the nurse didn’t shoot heroin, she wouldn’t have been exposed to this sort of viciousness. And why does the nurse shoot heroin? If there is perhaps some ambiguity about what drove the black prostitute into prostitution and taking Angel Dust (since we never learn what they call in Hollywood her “back story”), I submit that what we are being told by every scene in this movie, every shot, every foot, every frame, is that if White Society hadn’t erected a wall of both racial and economic prejudice against the nurse (whom we come to love and admire) she would have been able to take real vacations in the Bahamas and wouldn’t have been driven to surrogate vacations by means of heroin.

The last killing, of course, is also central to the film’s meaning. Officer Morgan, a racist white man, throws an innocent Puerto Rican youth from a rooftop to his death. Considering the chorus of apologetics the film has given us for every kind of criminal behavior committed by non-whites in the South Bronx—even declaring that the police had no right to turn a neighborhood upside-down every time “even a cop” is killed—we hear not a word in extenuation of Morgan’s action. No one tells us he was an abused child or had a cruel father. No one reminds us that the fire engines have come into the precinct to help it, and that they have been greeted by a hail of bricks—which can kill very easily. Remember, also, that two cops have just been killed. A cop killer is on the loose. But, no. Morgan is a white man and is condemned utterly.

Near the end of the film, Captain Connolly makes a speech to Murphy at the moment Murphy announces his intention of resigning. Connolly says with great gravity: “I want this neighborhood to know there are cops up here to protect them when they’re in trouble, and arrest them when they’re wrong. I want them to know that this precinct isn’t a clubhouse or a freak show, but the house of law. And that the law means something in their lives!” The speech is well written, and delivered with strong feeling by Asner. But Murphy (Newman) rejects it flatly and bitterly: “You’ve run this district into the ground in two fuckin’ weeks. Look outside at your domain, Captain Connolly. Blood’s been runnin’ like sewer water in the streets. Riots and homicides and who knows what else is laying out there that we haven’t found. But nothing’s changed.”

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It must be obvious that what we are dealing with here is nothing less than the full “liberal” doctrine on crime. Crime is caused by poverty. If poverty is not somehow abolished, nothing can be done about it. Punishment of crime, since it does not attack the root of the problem, can have no effect. Another idea associated with the liberal view is that since prison demonstrably fails to rehabilitate prisoners, and since these people lead such miserable lives anyway, what is the point of aggressive police and judicial action against them? (This view is much easier to maintain if the speaker lives in Scarsdale or New Canaan, Connecticut.) And indeed, cozily conforming to this attitude, all the native South Bronx evildoers in Fort Apache are conveniently wiped out: the black prostitute, the two drug pushers, all neatly done in by their environment. In the normal course of human events in the South Bronx, truly dangerous criminals are tidily destroyed, you see, so why all the commotion?

As a description of big-city crime, the above analysis has drifted so far from the reality of recent years as to read like some kind of liberal fairy tale. First, most street criminals are not punished. In fact, on the odds, it is extremely rare when a street criminal is. What with the tiny proportion of violent street felons who are apprehended, of apprehended felons who are indicted, of indicted felons who are convicted, and of convicted felons who are actually sent to prison, the chances of a violent street criminal spending even a day in jail are almost microscopic. Criminals, to all appearances pragmatic people, are acting accordingly, and crime continues to increase. Second—very disturbing to liberal orthodoxy—as welfare programs and aid to non-white inner city ghettos have risen to historic proportions in this country in the past two decades, crime has not dropped, as it theoretically should have, but continued to rise.

We have on our hands a case of profound social pathology concerning which Orwell (since I have been quoting him) offers a clue. In Down and Out in Paris and London he points out that people who live on the dole, when this is offered in a depersonalized, institutional way, are not grateful. If anything, although they speedily accept what is given, they demonstrate an active resentment toward their benefactors. (Orwell was describing tramps, who did not even want to work, so he was dealing with a pure case.) What seems to be involved is a psychological quirk. Common sense should tell those on the dole that if it weren’t for the compassion of others they might be starving. But they have also accepted a state of dependence, and this is an offense to their pride and self-esteem, and they resent it.

The most clear-cut manifestation of this today, in my opinion, occurs when firemen who enter ghetto districts to extinguish fires, or policemen to apprehend murderers or violent robbers, are welcomed by storms of stones, bricks, and even ashcans thrown from the rooftops. Sometimes there are gunshots. To my knowledge such scenes are unprecedented in history. They have nothing in common with Sicilian neighborhoods cowed into submission by the Mafia and omerlà, the law of silence. Nor do they have much to do with oppressed populations who, repeatedly in history, of course, have risen against their oppressors. It is hard to see how a fireman on his way to put out the flames in a neighbor’s home is oppressing you. Some non-white ghetto residents have shown again and again and again their tendency to feel that a fellow ghetto non-white can do no wrong. A ghetto resident murders another ghetto resident? The neighborhood youths throw bricks at the policemen who come to arrest him. He’s a soul brother. They don’t want him arrested. A community in which behavior of this sort is standard has lost not only its sense of law, but its sense of survival.

As it happens, most people living in the ghetto communities—as we know from polls and other evidence—are against this kind of behavior. They are the ones who are victimized by it, and they repeatedly call for more police protection, not less, and tougher enforcement of the law. The irony is that most of the intended recipients of Fort Apache’s benevolence—in effect a kind of “benign racism”—reject it vehemently.

As for Murphy’s reaction to a cop-killing—regretful but unvindictive, kindly, unwilling to disturb the South Bronx’s forgivably illegal folkways just because two comrades have been murdered—this is the fairy tale of fairy tales. Cops often feel lonely, they often feel society (above all the judiciary) isn’t backing them up, and they’re the only ones who even care about catching criminals. But they take care of their own. Unlike a liberal-minded actor playing a cop, a real cop’s life is on the line. Criminals who kill cops are normally resisting arrest, desperate and half-crazed. Their life expectancy can usually be counted in seconds. In 1976 Tom Walker, a former police lieutenant in the same 41st Precinct, wrote a book of memoirs also called Fort Apache. A passage concerning the mere “stomping” of a police officer is worth quoting (Officer Marsh was in trouble and had radioed for support): “Marsh was being unmercifully beaten when the responding unit knocked down the door. They were followed by another unit and together they did a job on the three men. Marsh lay still, his face already swollen, his arm broken. Infuriated by the sight of him lying on the floor, the officers evened the score . . . you can’t allow precedents. Word gets around and the next thing you know cops are being stomped on street corners.”

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So we are back among Kipling’s rough, hard-bitten, not-over-sympathetic men without whose willingness to administer harsh justice and brutal discipline the refined, humanitarian culture of more civilized men would not last a day.

How is it that the authors of the movie Fort Apache, The Bronx do not see this? I return to Orwell—whose changing attitudes in a time of crisis are relevant here also. In April 1940, during the so-called “Phony War,” when Orwell himself had already rallied to the flag but when it was still unclear what was in the heart of the mass of Britons, so recently believers in Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement policy, Orwell wrote: “The truth is that it is impossible to discover what the English people are really feeling and thinking. . . . One cannot be sure until something of a quite unmistakable nature—some great disaster, probably—has brought home to a mass of the people what kind of world they are living in.” One month later German panzer divisions broke through in the West, the Allied armies collapsed, and Britain stood alone against a totalitarian world stretching from the English Channel to the Bering Strait. The British people learned at last the kind of world they were living in and rose, it must be said, to their “finest hour.”

In international affairs, in a piecemeal fashion, a long string of events from Pol Pot and the Boat People in Southeast Asia, through Afghanistan and the Ayatollah Khomeini to growing awareness that most of the world’s vital oil supplies are under the control of none-too-friendly powers, has led the American people, and some other nations of the West, to glimmerings of the “kind of world they are living in.” Hence the making, and the triumph, of Breaker Morant. But when the enemy is within the gates the problem is murkier. I personally feel there is a mounting tide of feeling in this country to repress criminal and lawless elements (Chief Justice Burger’s recent speech to the American Bar Association is only one example), but this tide has yet to reach the liberals of Hollywood—who, naturally, do not live in or anywhere near the South Bronx. What’s more, in this area of public policy, I can imagine no “disaster of a quite unmistakable nature,” no Dunkirk or Pearl Harbor, capable, in one dramatic stroke, of bringing these liberals back to reality.

I refer once more to Orwell—the post-Dunkirk Orwell—and again to his essay on Kipling. Orwell continued to think Kipling a “jingo imperialist” and “morally insensitive,” but Orwell had a perception of genius. Kipling’s notorious identification with authority and the ruling power, so distasteful to later intellectuals, conferred upon him one tremendous advantage, a “sense of responsibility,” which was the secret of his strength and influence. “The ruling power,” wrote Orwell, “is always faced with the question ‘in such and such circumstances what would you do?’—whereas the opposition is not obliged to take any real decisions. Where it is a permanent and pensioned opposition . . . the quality of its thought deteriorates accordingly.”

Some wealthy Hollywood entertainers, along with many of the tenured professors in our universities, are members of our “permanent and pensioned” opposition, and the quality of their thought has, indeed, deteriorated appallingly. For all I know the authors of Fort Apache, The Bronx think themselves perfectly capable of making “real” decisions, and even preeminently suited to take over command of New York’s Police Precinct 41. If so, I would like to see them tell a muster room filled with cops about to go out on patrol in the South Bronx that two of their comrades have just been shot to death but they shouldn’t give the incident undue importance. I would like to witness the scene.

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All that remains to be said about Fort Apache, The Bronx is that the people who made it had talent and it ran away with them. Excellent casting, acting, exciting action. Real Puerto Ricans. Real-looking cops and pimps and hookers and pushers. Real garbage. The nightmare vision of the South Bronx, crime and vice, death and putrescence. If ex-President Carter made a tourist’s circuit of this new zone of horrors, why shouldn’t American moviegoers want to make it as well? The film’s didactic message (and I have quoted chapter and verse) plainly went sailing over the audiences’ head, just so much verbiage between the action scenes. If the public had responded to the didactic conclusions the film’s authors were so earnestly trying to convey, I suspect most theaters would have been empty.

Random House, 1980. I am indebted to this impressive work for much of the above information on the war.