There is a recurrent contrast between African disorder and violence and British order. Shot from a white British perspective, Africans are shown as a threatening mob in the opening sequence of the film, as British soldiers driving an army truck encounter African demonstrators, and in a later sequence that shows African demonstrators attacking the taxi in which Private Wilkes and Karen Eriksson are travelling. Following both these sequences there are cuts to the barracks and the mess as places where the British maintain order. Such order is symbolised by Lauderdale. In the first mess sequence a soldier takes down a portrait of the Queen, betting that Lauderdale will notice its absence within two minutes of arrival, and wins the bet. The emphasis on the domestic world inhabited by the British provides an ambivalent image, for the mess is not only a place of British order but also the place where, throughout the first half of the film, British soldiers are confined. In contrast to scenes of African action they are shown indoors, drinking, chatting, and playing billiards. Their passivity is emphasised by the comments of one soldier: ‘Bloody marvellous! Two hot chocolate mechanics chuck bricks at each other and the whole British army is immobilised’. He is rebuked by Lauderdale: ‘They’re not hot chocolate mechanics, they’re Africans’.

In the second mess sequence the order in the mess is connected with pre-1939 British colonial rule as the men swap stories about ‘best stations’, recalling ‘church parade in Singapore before the war’, and India — ‘Jewel of the East they used to call it — what a pity they had to give it away’. Lauderdale’s refusal to hand over Abraham to Boniface is linked to the imperial traditions of the British army. In a set piece confrontation with Boniface, Lauderdale tells him about serving on India’s North West Frontier: ‘Sometimes, Mr. Boniface, I’d lie awake in my tent with a hurricane lamp, sometimes in the middle of a blizzard, reading about the exploits of other British soldiers. Sometimes I’d be lying there in my freezing cold tent actually sweating. Beads of sweat pouring down my face from a battle two hundred years old’.

If Lauderdale symbolises the values of old imperial Britain, it is Miss Barker-Wise who symbolises the new era of loss of imperial power. The contrast between them is thus represented through sexual difference. Like Lauderdale, Miss Barker-Wise is unmarried and middle-aged, drinks whisky, smokes cigarettes, and speaks forcefully and with authority. The film makes clear that these are undesirable qualities in a woman, showing the acceptable unmarried female in a sergeant’s mess through the figure of Karen Ericksson who is youthful, pretty and sexy. Miss Barker-Wise is greeted with considerable derision by the men in the mess for her failings as a woman, and Lauderdale’s verdict — that she is an ‘old bag’ — is endorsed by the film. So is her championship of Africans in general and Boniface in particular. She claims him on various occasions as ‘a very humane man’ whose ‘principles are very sound’ and ‘a civilised and cultured man’. The film heavily underlines her error, showing Boniface as cruel, untrustworthy and unprincipled. At the end of the film, when she informs Lauderdale that Boniface has been made a Colonel, she admits that: ‘I disapprove of his (Boniface’s) methods as much as I do of yours’.

The success of the coup means that Boniface, not Lauderdale, has the last word, demanding that Lauderdale leave the country. The British Colonel confesses his own impotence as he orders Lauderdale to return to England by the next available aeroplane, at the same time admitting that in Lauderdale’s place he would have done exactly the same thing, ‘step for step’. The action of the soldier hero in the aftermath of loss of empire is thus shown as more likely to earn punishment than medals. In a brief moment of frustration and anger, Lauderdale disrupts British order, hurling a glass at the main symbol of authority in the mess – the portrait of the Queen. He then quickly reverts to his own meticulous standards, sweeping up the shattered glass, straightening the portrait, and marching briskly — even jauntily — away from the mess. Despite its closing image of an undaunted Lauderdale, Guns at Batasi is imbued with sadness for a lost world, and shows the British army profoundly affected by decolonisation — its capacity for action eroded to the point of immobility, its authority diminished, and its soldiers unhonoured.

Wendy Webster