David Holbrook
Page from the manuscript of Flesh wounds
[Ashwell, Hertfordshire?, August 1962]
From MS Add. 9987

Transcript:

2.

turned out by thousands, cheap and deadly. Sometimes they would fire, sometimes not. They would jam and burst, and one corporal on D Day had jumped from his tank with one on his shoulder and the jar of his landing had set his Spam Gun off, shooting pieces off his calf muscles.

By comparison the German Spandaus and Schmeiser guns were masterpieces of devilish simplicity, beautiful in their engineering. The Swedish designed Bren was a fine piece of machinery, but clumsier than the Spandau, whose subtlety of simple ingenious construction took one’s breath away in admiration at its evil fine efficiency. The Sten was of the age of mechanical degeneracy, bred of the welded crudities of the body of the Ford motor car and the massed-produced can factory. To be shot dead by a Spam gun would be the depth of degradation.

Paul recalled from museums the exquisite spear-heads from tombs of the later Stone Age, finely split stone, covered with pearly crescents where flakes had been split away, the whole shapely and beautiful. They expressed a joy in the creativity of human intelligence.

By contrast the light, inaccurate, black, and unreliable Sten gun spoke of the