Time at War

by Nicholas Mosley

  I have become involved in a correspondence upon the Church with Aunty Nina. She was rather sensible about my fierce attack on the C of E, but one of her East End priests to whom she sent on my letter wrote me the most absurdly half-witted reply which only aggravated the grievance. I really do believe that these men do not understand what they say – which perhaps is best, for it is happier for them to be charged with ignorance and stupidity than with gross perversion and distortion. I’m afraid Nina thinks I have become over-influenced by Nietzsche. Which is untrue, for as I have said, with N’s ethical values I have no sympathy.

  Later, however, I learned that my anti-C of E diatribe had been sent by my other aunt, my mother’s younger sister Baba, to her own favourite priest who happened to be a Father Talbot, Superior of the Anglican Community of the Resurrection – which, as things turned out, was to play such a large and vital part in my life years later. I wrote to my father –

  Baba’s priest was a very good find – far less bogus than Nina’s, and very tolerant of my rather wild and woolly criticism. I seem to spend most of my spare time writing long and intricate religious letters; which does not help very much. Like GBS I ask the most searching questions, attempt far too vaguely to answer them, and finish in much the same muddle as I began. But it does keep one’s mind feebly ticking over, when one might, in the circumstances, so easily be mentally dead.

  In August I wrote to my aunt to say that at the end of the month I would be coming on embarkation leave before being sent abroad to heaven knows where. My aunt and my sister Vivien and my brother Michael and our old Nanny, who was now housekeeper and cook, would be staying in a small holiday house on the north Cornwall coast, and I said I would join them there. I wrote – ‘Eventually one will have to look at the world objectively and to decide what is to be one’s relation to it; whether to fight the horror or run from it; to search for perfection in the solitude of one’s own beliefs, or in the greater struggle for external fulfilment. At the moment however everything is unkindly settled for me, and thus all I can do is sulk or giggle’

  In Cornwall we swam and surfed and picnicked and climbed about on the rocks; we played cards in the evening; we had a good time. I was among people with whom I had spent the best part of my life and whom I loved. But it seemed that we did not quite know what to say to each other about my going off to war: what can one say? My aunt wrote in her diary that I was defensive about my father and was ‘shatteringly crude and offensive about Christ’. Perhaps it was not possible for me after all just to sulk or giggle.

  One of the last things I did before embarking on the troopship at Liverpool was to go with my grandmother to the Home Office and put in a request to a high-up official that my father should be released from prison; he could surely, we argued, no longer be considered a security risk. And he had phlebitis, which was getting worse, and his doctor had said that without a reasonable chance of exercise he might die. Watching the Home Office official, I felt I could see the levers of his mind clicking this way and that; but whether to the unlocking of prison doors or not I could not tell. My grandmother said, ‘This is his son who is going off to war.’ I wondered— Could it make any difference, my going off to war?

  3

  The war in North Africa had been over for some months. The British and Americans had landed at Casablanca, Oran and Algiers in November 1942, and had headed east to link up with the advance of the British across the desert in the west after the victory at El Alamein in October. Hitler had declared war on America in December 1941 at the time of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor; for a year the Americans had concentrated on fighting the Japanese in the Pacific. They had then, however, wanted to get a foothold in the war across the Atlantic. By this time the enemy in North Africa consisted almost entirely of Germans: the Italians had faded away after defeats by the British in the two previous years and the German Afrika Korps under Rommel had taken over.

  In May 1943 the Allied armies advancing from east and west met in Tunisia and the Germans surrendered en masse. In July Sicily was invaded, where the opposition was again mainly German. By the end of August Sicily had been cleared and the question was being debated among Allied leaders about whether, and how, Italy should be invaded. This was when my group of Rifle Brigade and KRRC officer reinforcements were setting out from Liverpool.

  We seemed to sail far out into the Atlantic; where on earth could we be going? No one of course had told us: this was the style of wartime information. There were the inevitable rumours – we were going round the Cape of Good Hope; we were to join up with another convoy coming from America. This guess appeared to be correct, because one day there were suddenly other ships around us. Then someone said we must be in the Bay of Biscay because it was so rough; and one by one figures disappeared from the breakfast table, leaving myself and one or two other sturdy gluttons to consume their leftovers: bacon and eggs, bowls of fresh fruit that had not been seen in Britain for two or three years. Our ship, the Vollendam, was Dutch and had recently been to New York, where it had stocked up with provisions. I wrote to my sister ‘I suffer more from being vomited against than vomiting.’

  We were discouraged from working off our self-indulgence on deck after dark because it was feared we might overconfidently light cigarettes which, we were assured, could be spotted by a U-boat miles away. Down in the stiflingly hot lower decks the mass of other ranks swayed and sweated in hammocks, and were sick. On a slightly higher level, in four-berth cabins, members of the old Juke Box clientele lay in comatose but still decorous states of undress. Then after a few days the weather cleared, and we thought we recognised the Rock of Gibraltar on our left.

  I wondered – Would we be like Aeneas who, on his way to Rome from Troy, had stopped off at Carthage, near Tunis, and had had a fine time making love to Dido? But then he had abandoned her to carry on with war, and she had committed suicide.

  It turned out that the Vollendam was heading for Philippeville, indeed somewhere halfway between Algiers and the old Carthage. I had arranged a code with my sister whereby I might be able to tell her in letters, without too obviously breaking the censorship regulations, where we landed up. My sister’s and my mythology was less Greek or Roman than 1930s films; so from Algeria I wrote to her, ‘We might be able to visit Jean Gabin or Charles Boyer.

  But how little had the style of mythology changed from the time of the ancient Greeks! They had loved stories of suffering and war: we now in films loved stories of sacrifice and grief. Why were there no myths of people getting on sensibly with peace?

  Near Philippeville we stayed for two months in a camp, four officers to a tent, among sand dunes. We bathed in a dangerous sea; we drank red wine and played poker and bridge. For a while we enjoyed the holiday atmosphere. I wrote to my sister – ‘Yesterday we played football in a temperature equivalent to the melting-point of flesh: ten effete and flabby young officers beat eleven horny old Scotsmen who have sulked most ungraciously ever since.’

  But then it seems we got homesick because I and some others volunteered for the parachute regiment. We understood that to succeed in this would get us back to England for a while; but when tested I was judged to be too tall and too myopic. We were sent on manoeuvres with armoured cars in the desert; during one scrimmage with the ‘enemy’ I reported to my father – ‘I captured an enormous Captain in a hush-hush job whose face seemed vaguely familiar. Unfortunately I treated him with respect, for it turned out to be Randolph Churchill. If I had known earlier I would have thrown him into a dungeon.’ When I was a child Randolph Churchill had been a good friend of my father’s; now he was so no longer.

  I began to have renewed fantasies about how, if or when I did eventually get into the fighting, it might indeed be sensible to be taken prisoner. What was this human lust for war? I had paid my respects to it, but I did not need to remain part of it for ever. And in prison camp I might be able to spend the rest of the war profitably studying and practising writing. This was to a large extent a joke
– yet not totally. The war really did seem to be as good as won; and what was the point of being killed in what seemed to be everyone’s insistence on unconditional surrender or destruction? And surely my father was right when he said that the only real winners would be the Russians and Americans? I wrote to my sister – ‘The whole thing is so obviously absurd, so tremendously ridiculous.’

  My sister became my chief correspondent when I was abroad; I had no regular girlfriend. My sister and I had always been close as children, like orphans in a storm. As I grew older I felt allegiance to my small circle of school friends, but my sister was never excluded from the style and substance of this. From Philippeville I wrote to her –

  Last week I was whirled away darkly at dead of night to guard some Italian prisoners, which I found most agreeable, the Italians waiting on me hand and foot, and me eating all the rations. Unfortunately my only companions were the most granite of Scotchmen, whom I found even harder to understand than the Italians. I was followed around by a flock of interpreters. Equally suddenly and darkly I was torn away yesterday, my rule at the prison camp I suppose having been too much like an operatic burlesque for the authorities. As I returned I met Anthony, very complacent in an ambulance, suffering from infectious diarrhoea, no doubt caused by the incredible quantity of food consumed, and complete lack of strength in the muscles. He is away at the hospital now, no doubt very comfortable and keeping the complaint well supplied with material.

  Anthony had been my great friend from infant school days, with whom I had volunteered for the Parachute Regiment, and with whom I had even briefly discussed the idea of being taken prisoner.

  We were allowed to send home one airmail letter a week, so I wrote to my sister very small on the flimsy paper and asked her to pass on my letters to other members of the family. I added – ‘I doubt if many others will get as far as this without a weary shake of the head, even if you are able to.’

  For the rest, my letters were full of the pleasures of a Mediterranean summer holiday – games of rounders on the beach, swimming out to a ghostly half-sunken wreck half a mile out at sea, in the evenings more of the old acting and paper games, then getting lost in the dark on the way back to the tent from the mess. I reported that I had difficulty in communicating with the Italian waiters in the mess because the only line in Italian that I seemed easily to remember was ‘Your tiny hand is frozen’. Then –

  I have at last been made to do some work, which is most tiresome. I plod around for miles over the most mountainous country, trying feebly to keep up with more great strapping Scotchmen who I suppose were born and bred upon such hills. How one’s thighs wobble! Anthony is still having the most blissful time in hospital. There is absolutely nothing wrong with him, but they put him into a diphtheria ward by mistake, and so he is now in quarantine. But he is allowed out briefly, so we meet for enormous teas at the café. The latest horror is a plague of toads who have completely occupied our tent and croak furiously throughout the night. We had a great hunt yesterday and found one in my spongebag. Our screams could be heard for miles.

  On one trip inland I caught a glimpse of the city of Constantine, which still remains in my mind as one of the most beautiful cities I have ever seen. On a road to the desert one suddenly comes across it glowing on its vast rock surrounded by a deep gorge. It seemed to be a place that war could not touch.

  By this time the Allies had landed in Italy – both in the ‘heel’ at Taranto, and above the ‘toe’ at Salerno, from which Naples was occupied on 1 October. Mussolini had resigned in July, and in September the Italian government that had taken over from him had capitulated to the Allies. Then in October, as part of a deal with the Allies which assured it of reasonable terms, the Italian government declared war on Germany. The Allies had wondered if in this event the Germans would retreat from Italy; but instead they reinforced the troops that had withdrawn almost intact from Sicily, and they put up unexpectedly strong resistance at Salerno. They seemed, in fact, ready to fight all the way up the mountainous terrain of Italy. However the Allied landings on the east coast at Taranto had gone smoothly. I wrote to my sister –

  Oh the news, the palpitations, the chaos! I am leaving here at 4 a.m. tomorrow morning, in about 7 hours’ time, and I am not packed and all my fantastic amount of luggage is strewn about the place. I know not where I go. In quest of Vivien? [The Vivien was the name of my father’s motor-boat stored in a cave near Naples.] To the place in whose beginning is the home of Scarlett O’Hara?

  I will send you a new address as soon as I am at rest. I really must be off, down to the busy sea, ‘but to hear the mermaids singing each to each’? Not B. likely. Down to the squelch of giant squids, to the weary bleat of whales. Give my love to all. It will not be long before, ivy-crowned, I roar through Rome on an elephant.

  So in November I set out with one or two others (though leaving Anthony in his hospital) on a troopship to Taranto. As we got close to the war a raging toothache overtook me; this was a calamity that seemed worse than the prospect of war. I learned later that at times of stress it was usually my teeth that savagely objected. There was no dentist on the boat; at Taranto there was one with a drill worked by a foot pedal, and an extraction instrument like a pair of pliers. However he said there seemed nothing organically wrong with my tooth; so i f pain was symbolic, should one not bear it? Perhaps thus death would be made to seem acceptable?

  Myself and the group I had been travelling with had been earmarked to go to a Rifle Brigade battalion which had suffered many casualties. But now we learned that this battalion was being sent home, and there were no more Rifle Brigade battalions in Italy, so we were to be parcelled out to other regiments in need of officers. This evoked mock alarm among some of our number: what – officers of a ‘rifle’ or ‘black-button’ regiment landing up with a common-or-garden ‘brass-button’ regiment? One of the Rifle Brigade friends I was with had a brother at Army Group Headquarters; he got in touch with him and asked – ‘Please spare us this indignity, and arrange for us to be sent to some eco-friendly “black-button” regiment.’ The brother said he understood our predicament (army morale was indeed kept up by such niceties) and he said he thought he might be able to get us into the 2nd Battalion of the London Irish Rifles, to be sure a black-button regiment, and which had done much fighting in North Africa and Sicily and was in need of officers. We thanked the brother. We had at least done something to affect our fate.

  We moved towards the front line through transit camps referred to by acronyms which I do not now remember: in one of these, somewhere between Taranto and Bari, we got holed up for a month while we waited for our summons to join the London Irish Rifles. One day in the ‘Information Tent’ (so I recorded in the diary I had been keeping) I came across a paragraph in ‘Home News of November 17th’ which announced that ‘Sir O. Mosley is to be released from prison for reasons of health’. My diary reaction to this news was ‘O frabjous day calloo callay!’ And then – ‘It is now imperative for me to get home as soon as possible.’ Did I think in some way that with the release of my father the point of my war was over?

  With nothing military to do in the transit camp, and having been encouraged now to dream about the future, I spent time in looking at and writing in my diary, which I had begun at Ranby and in which I had tried to elaborate my ideas about Christianity and the ‘perfectability’ of man that I had written about with such abandon in letters to my aunt and to my father. But I saw how critical and abusive I had been and was being in my diary about many of the people I came across; and in some shame I wrote to my old school friend, Timmy – ‘But I also say such rude things about myself that I can hardly read back without dropping a tear or two about what a horrible person I must be.’ Was this in recognition of the glibness of my ideas about perfectability?

  I had carried with me from England a large canister of books in order to try to continue the task I might have pursued at a university and which I had begun at Ranby – to read everything that
was considered of note in English literature. Like this I might at least not be naïve about my ideas. So now, in idleness in camps between Taranto and the front line, I read voraciously. I listed in my diary – Pendennis, Persuasion, The Scarlet Letter, The Mill on the Floss; also, continued from North Africa, Nietzsche and Plato. In one camp I found some of my old KRRC colleagues to argue with. I recorded – ‘But I fail to dissuade them from the idea that the blind chaos of government will not end up in the ditch just because it is English. I say we are already in the ditch, and will the blind get us out of it?’

  Then there appeared a further item in the Eighth Army News telling of crowds in London marching round Parliament Square and chanting ‘We want Mosley’ and ‘Put him back’. So what did they want him for – to lynch him? In my diary I launched a tirade – ‘People are either hollow or heavy wet sludge. What hope can there be for the world if Englishmen are thus, and one can find no one better than an Englishman?’