Major Glendinning

Major Glendinning commands the British Army unit to which Alec Moore is attached on the Western Front in Jennifer Johnston's How Many Miles to Babylon? (1974). He is not softened by a personal history or a private life; Johnston keeps him deliberately opaque, a figure of pure function. What the reader sees is entirely institutional: a man whose identity has been absorbed so completely by rank and protocol that nothing human seems to remain beneath the uniform. His speech is clipped and purposeful, his manner cold, and his judgements delivered without visible deliberation. He embodies the military-social order — and Johnston uses that very flatness as a form of critique.

Glendinning's arc is static, and that stasis serves a purpose. He begins the narrative as an enforcer of hierarchy and remains unchanged by the carnage surrounding him or by any of the individual stories that unfold within his command. His motivation is not cruelty for its own sake but a chilling belief in the system. He maintains rank, order, and the social distinctions the war purports to defend because he cannot conceive of their absence. When Jerry Crowe goes absent without leave to search for his missing father, Glendinning does not pause to interrogate the human circumstances; desertion is desertion, insubordination is insubordination, and the machinery must be fed. His rigidity is seen as professional virtue.

The court-martial and sentencing of Jerry Crowe is Glendinning's defining action in the text. Jerry's motivation — a son looking for his father in the chaos of the Front — is irrelevant to Glendinning. The military code supersedes private grief, and he moves swiftly and without apparent conflict to have Jerry condemned to death. This moment strips bare the novel's central argument: institutional logic and human logic are incompatible, and the institution always prevails.

More revealing still is the order Glendinning issues to Alec: he must personally carry out Jerry's execution. This is not simply an administrative convenience. The command acts as a test and a punishment simultaneously — a demand that Alec demonstrate his loyalty to the officer class over his loyalty to his friend. Glendinning's awareness that the two men are close makes the order feel deliberate. He is forcing Alec to choose the system and expects compliance. That Alec ultimately complies, in his own tortured way, confirms the reach of Glendinning's authority even over the most resistant conscience.

With Alec Moore, Glendinning occupies the position of coercive authority to reluctant subordinate. Alec has always been ambivalent about his officer status — his friendship with Jerry is a quiet act of class transgression — and Glendinning seems to register this ambivalence with contempt. By ordering Alec to execute Jerry, he weaponises the very class hierarchy Alec distrusts, ensuring that Alec cannot escape it. This relationship offers Johnston one of the novel's sharpest ironies: the system destroys Alec most completely precisely because he was always half-resistant to it.

With Jerry Crowe, there is no meaningful relationship — only the relation of power to object. Jerry's working-class origins, his rank, and his emotional motivations register with Glendinning only as categories to be processed. The absence of any direct engagement between them underscores Johnston's point: to Glendinning's world, Jerry is a type, not a person.

With Captain Barry and Bennett, Glendinning operates as the apex of a diffuse hierarchy. These figures transmit and normalise his authority downward, demonstrating that institutional power does not depend on any single personality but on a structure that reproduces itself at every level.