Evelyn Waugh, who had some experience of the chaotic end of World War II, gives an account of a cargo of escaping refugees.
"There was a detachment of Slovene royalists, a few Algerian nationals, the remnants of Syrian anarchist association, ten patient Turkish prostitutes, four French Petainist millionaires, a few Bulgarian terrorists, a half-dozen former Gestapo men, an Italian air-marshal and his suite, a Hungarian ballet, some Portuguese Trotskyites. The English-speaking group consisted chiefly of armed deserters from the American and British Armies of Liberation. They had huge sums of money distributed about the linings of their clothes, the reward of many months' traffic round the docks of the central sea."
One large ingredient of these refugees was, of course, Jewish groups on their way East. Waugh's hero, a dim English Public School Classics Master, escapes with one such group to "No. 64 Jewish Illicit Immigrants' Camp, Palestine."
Scott-King. Douglas Patey (who thankfully spends more time explaining the Catholic Waugh instead of the misanthrope Waugh) in his informative "The Life of Evelyn Waugh" states that "the most penetrating review of Scott-King came from George Orwell" (267). A little-remembered 2008 book by David Lebedoff, "The Same Man: George Orwell & Evelyn Waugh in Love and War" makes quite interesting reading.
ReplyDeleteOne wonders what sort of comment Waugh would have regarding the "refugees" invading across the southern US border.
ReplyDelete