It is difficult to know whether Clive Aslet intended a comparison between his debut novel, The Birdcage, set in Salonica during the first world war, and Sebastian Faulks’s similarly titled Birdsong. Whilst Faulks’s novel sits comfortably within the generally accepted narrative that the first world war was an unmitigated disaster, with lion-like Tommies led by donkey-like officers, Aslet has written what is effectively a panegyric to the officer class. Indeed, so casually heroic is every officer in the book it is almost as though Richard Attenborough’s version of Oh! What a Lovely War never existed.
The Birdcage begins with the almost Wodehouse-inspired scene of the first ascent in a balloon of Lieutenant Winnington-Smith, a failed aeroplane pilot and now an official war artist. Like every character in the book, Winnington-Smith has a nickname, ‘Winner’, and on his balloon flight to draw the enemy lines for his proposed painting he is accompanied by Captain Southall, or ‘Sunny’, commander of the Balloon Section. An encounter with the German ace fighter pilot ‘Earwig’ puts paid to this jolly jape and Winner lands in a field hospital run by redoubtable British women. There he inevitably falls in love with one of the nurses, Elsie.
At this point one imagines Aslet might have written a kind of first world war romcom, and to some extent the novel follows this course. Winner discovers Elsie loves him too, but on an ambulance run to the front line she disappears, prompting Winner to search for her. It is only when this storyline peters out that the real purpose of Aslet’s book is revealed. In turn each of the officers faces a life and death adventure, and Aslet ensures they each acquit themselves honourably and heroically. They are, after all, British officers.
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