'Freedom, Faction, Fame and Blood': British Soldiers of Conscience in Greece, Spain and Finland (review)

Taking the first part of its title from Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Elizabeth Roberts's work 'Freedom, Faction, Fame and Blood': British Soldiers of Conscience in Greece, Spain and Finland asks why individuals are compelled to take up arms in conflicts beyond the geographical (and foreign policy) boundaries of their own nation. In doing so she charts both the 'visceral reality' and the 'complex moral terrain of [such an] undertaking'. As Roberts notes, engagements in armed conflict for reasons of conscience as opposed to compulsion or patriotic duty complicate the 'relationship between the individual, the state and the use of violence'. Thus, the book observes how labels such as 'soldier of conscience' and 'soldier of fortune' are used to view a war and its combatants as just or morally questionable, how labelling of this kind might be used to 'structure experience' and inform the 'identity' of individual soldiers and how war might be considered in terms of these 'individualisms'. In addition, the book sets out to explore the concept of war beyond its tactical mechanisms and historically-drawn dichotomies as a 'complex and multi-faceted realm of experience and discourse'.

This work originated in the author's interest in the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) and the International Brigades – four of the nine chapters deal with this war and the last two of the book consider unofficial British involvement in the Russo-Finnish War (1939-40). The first three chapters of this study examine the motives and experiences of Britons engaged in the Greek War of Independence (1821-33) and it is the second of these, concerning Byron, which is the focus of this review.

In the chapter entitled 'Ways of Feeling: Lord Byron and Edward Trelawny in Greece', Roberts juxtaposes the two men's personalities in an attempt to show Byron as a sensitive soldier of conscience representing 'a literal embodiment of the discursive link between' Romanticism and the war in Greece. Following Jorge Luis Borges, Roberts maintains that the life of the poet is more important to an understanding of this cultural era than his poetry. The key, for this historian, is the heady mixture of Byronic-Byron, the Hero in 'his position as an articulate individual in voluntary proximity to violence and death'. Byron as prototype-soldier-of-conscience creates a template for the volunteer warrior as 'a complex and self-reflective individual'. This is an interesting treatment of the subject, based on a worthwhile exploration of a fascinating topic; however, most individuals faced with the realities of war would be 'disturbed' by its 'more visceral aspects', be they Byronic soldiers of conscience, soldiers of fortune, conscripts or the most jingoistic regular recruit.

The fact that it is deemed necessary to employ the 'less introspective' Edward Trelawny (described as 'adventurer and fantasist') as a 'counterpoint to Byron's view of the conflict' is problematic. Roberts sees Byron as bringing together 'words and action [...] experience and expression' and attempts to offer an insight into the mind of the ideologically-driven volunteer warrior. This seems to require immediately placing him firmly outside the box marked 'adventuring fantasists', and yet Roberts's discussion is unable to show how one should disentangle words, action, thought, experience, expression, creativity, posing, touring, poet, exile and celebrity from the words 'adventurer' and 'fantasist'. Nor does it show how the 'less introspective' (if no less self-serving) Trelawny fails to be complex or self-reflective because he later chooses to colour the narrative of his Hellenic adventures with an attempt to become a retrospective embodiment of a cultural movement.

Trelawny's engagement with the Greek cause is 'zealous and violent' and Roberts charges him with 'strategies of appropriation, fantasy and self-invention' – while conceding that Bryon 'was not above' such things (we should recall, as the author does, that this is a man who 'arrive[s] at Mesolongi dressed...