Time at War

by Nicholas Mosley

  You say you will be back soon. Do come as soon as possible, for really it is not so bad, and now I have no one with whom to carry on abstruse discussions on Morality and the Cosmos. So you see your presence is necessary. I will end up now in case I become too tedious. Really I feel I could write for ages because I can write to you in a manner that is impossible in writing to folks in England. Do write again. If I am your way I will surely find out your luxurious quarters. Well there you are. Yours, Mervyn.

  I grieved especially for Mayo, who was a good and beautiful man. Close comrades inscribed on the cross of his hastily dug grave ‘The finest sergeant there ever was’.

  When I was in hospital I began writing a poem about the battle of the Liri valley, which for some time I was quite pleased with. But reading it now I wonder if it gives as true an impression of the battle as perhaps the laconic letter from Mervyn does. What is it about poetry: it prettifies tragedy? Makes palatable that which should be objected to and changed? Perhaps some prettification is necessary for humans to bear their predicament. Such questions have become my hobby-horses in later years. But then I have never considered myself a poet. However, this is one of the only two or three decent poems I ever wrote, so I reproduce it here because, all right, poetry is an effort to make something sacramental out of the obscenity of war. And one should try to see what does or does not work.

  LACRIMA LIRI

  The cornfields wave toward the sky

  And from above the clouds reply

  With smiles of gentle sleepiness.

  Below, the summer sun’s caress

  Lies softly on the silent plains

  And deep within the sunken lanes

  The trailing thorns hang down to dream

  And slowly in the silver stream

  The leaves of weary willows drift

  And sway to lazy winds that lift

  The heavy heads of drooping trees

  With tenderness of silken breeze.

  But Stranger, Stranger, don’t you see

  Behind each crimson-tinted tree

  Within those hollow, haunted walls

  And torn upon each thorn that falls

  So gently, gently, groping down;

  Beside the silent fields that crown

  The sleepy summer’s brittle glare

  With ripples in the sun-swept air …

  Stranger, don’t you see that there

  The devil’s terror-laden breath

  Suffuses all with taint of death?

  That here one summer long ago

  The silent lanes did slowly flow

  With drops of dying hearts that bled

  And drained the dying to the dead?

  That here vain tears of frozen grief

  Once trembled on each withered leaf

  And hung from every tearing thorn;

  And out amongst the golden corn

  Blind eyes did strain in vain to see

  The light that mocked their agony.

  Well, does that work?

  Does battle work?

  7

  I was in the hospital near Naples for two weeks. Then I got ten days’ convalescent leave. The world that I was finding myself in seemed to veer between the extremes of hell and heaven; to be demonstrating, if one was to understand it, the need to comprehend both possibilities.

  I wrote to my father –

  My wanderings have taken me into what I think is the most beautiful place I have ever seen. You remember Ischia? – the lovely island opposite Capri which we visited in the Vivien and where the peasants welcomed us on the beach with smiles and bottles of sweet white wine. How I got here I hardly know. Sufficient to say that my way from the hospital back to the battalion seemed about to become so tedious that faced with a delay of ten days at a dreary reinforcement centre, I stormed up to the CO and demanded leave. He complied with surprising readiness, only stipulating that I would have to find my own accommodation. From then on fate took charge. I arrived here yesterday evening from the preposterous barrel of a steamer … I was met by a smiling old man who took me to a clean white room with a balcony that looked out over the sea … the dinner that I ate that night was such as I have not dreamed of for years except in the noble precincts of Holloway. Today I strode over the high hills that run along the centre of this island: at Forio a crowd of children and old men gathered round me at the café begging for cigarettes and hoping to humour me by saying how wonderful the English were and how they hated Mussolini. I told them I was a fanatical admirer of Mussolini, and a hundred per cent fascist, at which they stopped plaguing me for money. One little boy broke into the lusty strains of Giovanezza until he was hustled away by a policeman.

  What I did not tell my father was that another small boy, about ten years old, had followed me round much of the island offering, with graphic gestures, to masturbate me – and looking surprised and hurt when I declined. In the Naples area in 1944 this was probably a profitable business; Allied soldiers were lectured regularly on the near certainty of getting venereal disease if they went with Naples prostitutes. I had given a lecture myself on the subject to my platoon, embellished with lurid illustrations of resulting physical deformities.

  Back in Naples I met up with some old Rifle Brigade friends in the Officers’ Club on the beautiful hill overlooking the bay. Together we enjoyed – I rhapsodised in a letter to my sister – ‘exotic bathing parties in the gardens of the Winter Palace of the kings of Naples at Caserta; parties in limpid rock-bound pools surrounded by classical statues and pink champagne. We went sailing from the harbour at Posillipo; each night there was the Opera.’

  It would have been impossible for me to exaggerate the joys of opera in the magnificent Naples Opera House which had reopened almost as soon as the Allies had taken over in 1943 and, so far as I know, continued in operation for the rest of the war. Anyone in uniform could get in cheaply – into the royal box if there were no other seats – and once I remember even lingering for a time in the orchestra pit. Singers were in the full-blooded Neapolitan tradition, ready to give an immediate encore of an aria if the audience demanded it. This style was a revelation; I still sometimes miss it at Covent Garden. Then from Naples I went to see the Greek Temples at Paestum. I wrote to my father –

  I made the pilgrimage, some sixty miles hitch-hiking over comparatively unfrequented roads, which meant that I arrived on the scene having walked the last three miles in the heat of the day. I came across the first temple quite unexpectedly rising rather bleakly from the bushes and long grass by the side of the road. In the suddenness of the discovery I think I was a little disappointed; it was such a cold and desolate ruin; the pillars looking rather thin and forlorn under the golden heat of an Italian midday sun. But then as I wandered up beneath the grey portico I caught a glimpse of the second temple – the only temple that really matters at Paestum – a glimpse of gold more golden than the corn which shone about it; more serene and beautiful than any concentration of Italian sun. I rushed towards it in an ecstasy of wonder.

  It would be impossible also to exaggerate the importance to me of being able to visit, whenever I had a break from war, the artistic treasures and beauties of Italy. They seemed to represent the efforts of humans for more than two thousand years to come to terms with their bewildering predicaments – for instance, that of claiming that they wanted peace and yet landing up in war. The large temple at Paestum was built in the sixth century BC in honour of the goddess Hera – both wife and sister of Zeus – whose chief characteristic was a jealous and vindictive rage against anyone she disapproved of, particularly any other goddess or mortal of whom Zeus was fond. She presumably provided an explanation of the rage of this kind that bedevils humans. Temples were built to placate her – monuments to order and serenity – in the hope that by this there might be a means of safeguarding loved ones and oneself, since it had not been possible to eliminate rage and jealousy altogether. Later, in Rome, I took trouble to get into the out-of-bounds Sistine Chapel and there to see
Michelangelo’s depiction of the expulsion of humans from the Garden of Eden – or of their preferring to risk the freedom of being able to make their own choices rather than to submit to the confines of God’s laws. So was making art the means by which humans could both honour their freedom and hope to assuage its consequences? Indeed not abrogate it! Even the operas I was so excited by – I mentioned Tosca again in a letter home – seemed to be trying to bind up the wounds of human tragedy and absurdity by passionate incantation and melody.

  Then, on my twenty-first birthday in June, I was in a train going up to rejoin my battalion which, while I had been away, had fought all the way from Cassino up past Rome and was now by Lake Trasimeno in central Italy. I was travelling with a young volunteer officer from South Africa, Christopher Cramb, who was on his way to join the battalion. I was with him when we found we had a day free in Rome and so decided on some stratagem to get into the Sistine Chapel. We tagged on to the end of a line of Roman Catholic priests who were on their way to an audience with the Pope and, once inside the Vatican, we flaked off and had been lying on our backs for some time looking at Michelangelo’s ceiling before the Swiss Guards arrived to escort us out.

  One of the attractions of war is surely that it offers chances to try out one’s own brand of anarchy – protected from the social disapproval and penalties that would be incurred in peace.

  In Rome I heard of Rifle Brigade friends who had been killed – Timmy Lloyd, one of the landlords of The Juke Box; Marcus Hawkins, who had been with me on my journey to the LIR. My old school friend Anthony, who had arrived in Italy just after me, had been wounded in the foot when his sergeant had trod on one of his own antipersonnel mines, and was now temporarily back in England. My South African friend and I heard that the 2nd LIR was coming back from Trasimeno so we should wait for them in Rome: we managed some more sightseeing, then joined them at Tivoli with its beautiful fountains and gardens. There I heard of more London Irish friends who had been killed or wounded. We were then told we were all going back to have six weeks’ rest in Egypt.

  So one learns to accept good fortune as well as bad. We travelled down to Taranto by train and set sail across the Mediterranean to Alexandria, and went into a camp in the desert halfway between Cairo and the Suez Canal. This was a base from which we could take turns to go on leave to Cairo, but we were happy enough for a while just to hibernate in the desert. I wrote would-be amusing letters to my sister. These were my efforts, I suppose, to insist that I still thought war was something to make jokes about –

  When I was in Naples I tried to buy you some silk stockings. But what the hell was Italian for silk stockings? With extraordinary presence of mind I remembered Rossini’s opera La Gazza Ladra, which I had understood [quite erroneously, as I learned later] to mean The Silken Ladder. So without further ado I bellowed Gazza! Gazza! At a terrified youth behind a counter, and bared my elegant if slightly hairy leg. When he had recovered from the effect of this inspiring spectacle a brief but sharp discussion ensued during which he professed to understand that (a) I desired to see an orthopaedic surgeon; (b) that I wanted him to shave my legs; (c) that I was an exhibitionist; (d) that I was challenging him to show a more shapely leg himself. In the end, inevitably, he led me towards a brothel …

  On the boat I bought a pipe, to emphasise the ‘outpost of empire’ pose that I envisaged. But I puffed and blew with little success. The bowl grew white hot and the spittle bubbled merrily, and the smoke burnt enough holes in my tongue to line the stomach of a carpet.

  Oh dear, these jokes, how they do go on!

  Could you try to get me a book by Aldous Huxley called Point Counter Point?

  Mervyn went away to an education course in Beirut; so when it came my turn to go to Cairo I went with another company commander called Peter, who was an exuberant character with a large wavy moustache and the reputation of an experienced roué. We shared a room at Shepheard’s Hotel. Cairo had for long been under no threat from war, so it was once more an exotic centre for people who were happy to be away from the austerities of Britain, whether they were working at one of the seemingly innumerable Middle Eastern headquarters, or were passing through on postings or on leave. My companion Peter was not much interested in seeing sights such as the Pyramids and the Sphinx; his idea of being on leave was to go to nightclubs and set about picking up women. For the nightclubs he found a ready companion in me; about the further part of his agenda he said – ‘Don’t worry, one of us can stay out of our hotel room for an hour or two, and then vice versa.’ I said I’d be happy to do this for him, but I didn’t think he’d need to do it for me. I don’t think he quite believed me.

  But we had much fun dining under the stars in the garden at Shepheard’s, getting drunk and racing in carriages like chariots to the Gezira racecourse; ‘playing Chopsticks’ (I reported to my sister) ‘on the austere Grand Piano of the Club Royale Egyptian, where it was explained that I was an indefatigable piano-tuner’. Cairo was full of people enjoying the anarchy of war, and Peter soon found himself an accomplice of the sort that he required. She said she was (and from her looks even might have been) an Eastern European countess; and when I honoured my part of the bargain by assuring them I would stay out of the hotel room for whatever time they needed, she said she was sure she could fix me up with someone later. I thanked her but said I would have a look around myself. I don’t think it was just squeamishness about venereal disease, or even residual homosexuality, that made me so reticent about sex: I think I felt that it was love that was being cried out for in war; the naggings of sex one could surely deal with on one’s own.

  But as it happened I did meet someone while my friend Peter and his companion were up to whatever. There was a girl at the Gezira nightclub called Kitty Costello; we walked hand in hand round the racecourse under the stars, caressed by the hot desert wind; we talked about love. And I must in some way have loved her, because I still remember her name. And we seemed to have got what we wanted. But about even this I had to make a joke to my sister: ‘I said I was a ballet dancer and executed an intricate pas-de-quatre in the middle of a racecourse.’ My new friend Kitty and I did not plan to meet again.

  I had a letter from Mervyn on his education course in Beirut –

  I thought I had better report on myself to you and also ask for your reassurance that you are not beating up the local clubs every day. This is a likeable place. The object of the course, so I am told, is to inspire an interest in citizenship. The chaps are earnest in the extreme, and I am sure they could not play Up Jenkins even if they tried. They like reading well-thumbed works on economics.

  We had to give lectures, so for the avoidance of work I have selected two obscure legal subjects on which there are library textbooks and I give an incredibly boring half-hour.

  Beyrouth is pleasant enough: the swimming is good and I am sorry to say I have been hearty enough to bathe before breakfast. The hotels are pretty empty, most people having gone up into the hills. So that any adventures that might be likely to befall me are extremely unlikely.

  Have you had leave? Do let me know how it goes and who you spent it with and who you had to avoid spending it with.

  There is an excellent library. All the chaps make a dive for K. Marx, which leaves the whole of the poetry section for me. Also those nice books that were coming out in England on the paintings of folks like Van Dyck (Gogh?) So I sit reading John Donne and looking at Art photographs surrounded by scratching pens amassing copious notes on nutrition, public health, sewage and drainage. I wish you were here. We could put on a shocking prig act.

  In Cairo there was trouble brewing between the troops on leave – the 78th Division of which the Irish Brigade were part – and the local population. This was August 1944 and it was felt that the war should be about to be over but was not. The party-going became more obstreperous. We were told that we might bump into King Farouk in a nightclub, so we sat around and banged our glasses on the table and sang ‘King Farouk King Farouk hang
your bollocks on a hook’. Out in the street the troops were angry at being pickpocketed and ripped off by traders; and it was said that boot blacks were flicking boot polish on to their uniforms. In August there was a full-scale riot by troops of the 78th Division with vehicles being overturned and windows smashed. The new commanding officer of the LIR, Bala Bredin, was reported as saying, ‘There will be no peace until we have them safely back in the line.’ So the rest period in Egypt for the whole Division was curtailed, and we found ourselves on our way back to Italy.

  I wrote to my father, ‘I’m not really sorry … I hope soon to be able to visit Florence and Pisa and Siena, and perhaps in a little while there will be Venice or Nice.’

  In Cairo I must have managed to do some sightseeing, because I wrote home that the Sphinx had ‘a pile of anti-air-raid sandbags under his chin, which gave him the appearance of having toothache’.

  The news from home was that my father and stepmother, having been released from prison, were now under house arrest near Newbury, and could not travel for more than a few miles without police permission. But the family, consisting of my sister and younger brother and our two small half-brothers, were now having the chance to reassemble again. My sister wrote to me, ‘We all went for a vast picnicking bicycling expedition: Daddy looks quite wonderful with a pair of clips on his trousers and an ancient cap turned back to front like a butcher’s boy.’ And then of a weekend to which she took my two old school friends who were temporarily back in England with wounds – ‘We all sat around till 3.30 a.m. listening to Poppa discoursing fascinatingly on the theme of Will to (a) Comfort, (b) Power, (c) Achievement – Superman to the Child and so on – with a bit of Democracy v. Fascism thrown in.’