James Bond: Born in the trenches

[Blowfeld]

A new James Bond film has been announced in the run-up to Remembrance Day: there is an odd, and oddly poignant, symmetry here, for 007 was born out of the carnage of the trenches, a cultural reflection of the death in action of one young man, among the hundreds of thousands.

In August 1914, an officer named Valentine Fleming rode off to war. At 31, Fleming was a Tory MP, good-looking, highly intelligent and a rising political star. “A man of thoughtful and tolerant opinions” was how his friend Winston Churchill described him, with a “lovable and charming personality.”

Fleming left behind a wife and four young sons; the second of these was Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, then only six years old.

Unsurprisingly, the Fleming boys hero-worshipped their father, whom they called “Mokie” on account of his “smoky” pipe. Ian, intriguingly, sometimes called him “M.”

The boy wrote letters to his father in the trenches, and Fleming wrote back in cheery fashion: “I saw a lot of aeroplanes today. The place where they live is near here. They send up rockets in the evening in case any of them lose their way in the dark.”

He did not, of course, tell his son the real story — the unspeakable turmoil of mud, blood, noise and terror that was the Western Front. He described the “terrain of death” to Churchill after the Battle of Ypres: “Day and night in this area are made hideous by the incessant crash and whistle and roar of every sort of projectile, by sinister columns of smoke and flame, by the cries of wounded men, by the piteous calls of animals of all sorts, abandoned, starved, perhaps wounded ...”

Val Fleming spent three appalling years on the front line, rising to the rank of major. On May 20, 1917, at Guillemont Farm, a forward post near St. Quentin, his unit was pinned down by heavy German bombardment. Fleming was crawling from one trench to another when he was hit by a shell and killed instantly. He was posthumously awarded the DSO and buried under a wooden cross. Ian Fleming was nine.

The character of James Bond, Ian Fleming wrote, sprang from many sources, including “all the secret agents and commando types” he had known as an officer in naval intelligence during the Second World War. But undoubtedly the central, commanding personality behind Bond was the father killed in the line of duty in 1917, the ultimate man of action from Fleming’s impressionable boyhood.

As Fleming’s biographer Andrew Lycett writes: “Val became the paragon of manly virtues.”

The Fleming boys ended their nightly prayers with the invocation: “Please, dear God, help me to grow up to be more like Mokie.”

The Times obituary of Val Fleming was written by Churchill. Ian Fleming had it framed and signed by its author, and kept the words on his wall for the rest of his life.

Although he seldom spoke about his father’s death in later life, Fleming filled the paternal void in his life with fiction.

Churchill’s description of Fleming’s father might be a description of James Bond: “He never for a moment flagged, or wearied, or lost his spirits. Alert, methodical, resolute, he did his work without the slightest sign of strain or stress ... utterly fearless, full of resource ... in the discharge of what he conceived to be his duty.”

Ian Fleming spent much of his war behind a desk. He sent others to perform missions of daring and ingenuity, outside the normal rule of war.

“I couldn’t possibly be Bond,” he once said. “He’s got more guts than I have. He’s also considerably more handsome.”

Those qualities were instead projected on to a father he had barely known and a figure he invented in fiction. Fleming himself could never live up to the mythologized ideal of his father’s heroism, but 007 could. Bond is himself a war veteran: Fleming hints at action “behind the lines” in the Ardennes in 1944; Bond kills two wartime enemy agents, a Japanese code-breaker in the Rockefeller Centre and a Norwegian double agent he stabs to death in Stockholm.

There is something hard and unknowable about the Bond character created by Fleming (a trait more evident in Daniel Craig’s interpretation of the film role than earlier versions).

“The bitch is dead,” Bond says after Vesper Lynd dies in Casino Royale.

Valentine Fleming would never have said something like that. Indeed, his letters from the front reveal a sensitivity to the bleak horror unfolding around him that is far removed from Bond’s wry, brutal belief in necessary killing.

The elder Fleming described the trenches with deep repugnance: “Imagine a broad belt, 10 miles or so in width, stretching from the (English) Channel to the German frontier near Basle, which is positively littered with the bodies of men ... in which farms, villages and cottages are shapeless heaps of blackened masonry; in which fields, roads and trees are pitted and torn and twisted by shells.”

But like Bond, the elder Fleming stuck to his guns. His death in the war to end all wars helped to create the ultimate hero, an immortal warrior on the side of the good. Even the code name 007 may come from the First World War: 0070 was the German diplomatic code for the famous Zimmermann telegram of 1917, which was cracked by British code-breakers and helped to bring the United States into the war.

The First World War utterly transformed the cultural landscape in countless ways. Valentine Fleming was just one of the “lost generation” that included poets Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, Rupert Brooke and so many others. Had he survived, he would have left his mark on the world, as a politician, certainly, and quite possibly as a writer. His sacrifice left a lifelong impression on the imagination of a little boy, of which James Bond, that icon of popular culture, is the enduring monument.

Bond is pure entertainment, infinitely adaptable, fantastic, unreal, escapist fun. But he emerged from a long-forgotten tragedy on the Western Front, the death of a man who, in Churchill’s eulogy, represented so many of his doomed contemporaries: “It seems as if one watched at night a well-loved city whose lights, which burn so bright, which burn so true, are extinguished in the distance in the darkness, one by one.”

The Times, London

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[commander0077again]

I just posted on the 'Fleming Commando' subject; after reading about his father, my opinion of Fleming is raised a lot. Surely, the kind bits we see in Bond reflected Fleming's father. Bond of the novels was never the psychotic killer; he killed in war, and he derived no thrill from it. The guys who have really seen action rarely tell their families anything. I speak from experience with my own dad. A toast to all the Val Flemings of the world.