Time at War

by Nicholas Mosley

  However, there came a day early in May when we were on the outskirts of Ferrara and the crowds coming out with flowers were even more ebullient than usual, and the bangs and whooshes that could be heard were of fireworks rather than grenades or Moaning Minnies; and the German trenches we were occupying were deserted except for a litter of old love letters and a smell of stale bread. And the German radio was playing Wagner – the ‘Entry of the Gods into Valhalla’, I think– and it dawned on us that our war was over. Some of those I was with said later that they almost immediately began to feel strangely at a loss: for so long the war had provided a structure for their lives; a means of getting on with things in spite of doubts and fears. This feeling seemed to persist. However, I took the opportunity to borrow a jeep and drive into Ferrara to have a look at its fourteenth-century castle – a massive turreted building with reddish walls and a moat with drawbridges. This was a monument to war now to be preserved for tourists. And as an adjunct to triumphalism, there was the promise of loot.

  When the Germans began to surrender en masse on 2 May, and were rounded up and carted off to prison camps, they had to leave behind … everything. The sides of the roads were littered with both the large-scale and the personal detritus of war – tanks, trucks, heavy guns; but also, in piles, abandoned personal weapons and possessions. We searched through these for what trophies we might pick out – in particular the prized Luger pistol. I took my fill of pistols and even a shotgun or two; and then I came cross a small and pretty piano accordion – on which quite soon I learned to play the rousing and sentimental Neapolitan songs that had seemed so much part of our war. Also one’s platoon could now be fitted out with its own means of transport. I wrote to my sister –

  Kennen Sie what victory means? It means I am at the moment the tempestuous possessor of three cars – a Mercedes which goes at such a horrific speed that I am terrified to take it beyond second gear; an Adler saloon which cruises at 60 without the slightest indication that it is moving; an Opel which streaks hither and thither to the desperate confusion of stray pedestrians. It means that we dine on champagne each night except when we feel leery enough to start on the brandy with the soup. It means – oh well, so much really beyond cars and wine that I suppose they are of infinitesimal significance.

  The army was tolerant about such loot. Someone had to clear up the personal stuff by the road, and for a time we were allowed to keep the cars because transport was needed to get us to Austria – or to Yugoslavia, or wherever we were now heading. Rumours abounded; there were few official briefings. In Austria we might be needed to get to somewhere or other ahead of the Russians who were advancing apace from the east; for although the Russians had been our much-lauded Allies during the war, we didn’t actually trust them, did we? (What – they might carry on marching west with their vast armies till they reached the Channel ports?) About Yugoslavia the briefings were as confusing as the rumours. We had been backing Marshal Tito who had been fighting a guerrilla war for years against the occupying Germans; but Tito was a communist, and he would surely now be aligning himself with the Russians. Also he was a Serbian, and might well take the opportunity to annihilate his traditional enemies the Croatians, who had tended to side with the Germans. But the Croatians were trying to surrender to us, and so should we not prevent a massacre? But this might antagonise Tito and provoke Russia. And so on. One could begin to see how the simplicities of war might be easier to deal with than the complexities of peace.

  We drove north in our motley convoy bypassing Venice and going through Udine into Austria at Villach. We hardly cared where we would end up; this was the sort of uncertainty to which we had become accustomed. The rumours gathered like dark clouds: Tito might be wanting to grab a chunk of Austria, but if we moved too many troops into Austria he might grab Trieste in Italy. There was a pro-German force somewhere in the hills which consisted of Russian anti-Bolshevik Cossacks who had been fighting for the Germans; they too said they would only surrender to the British because in the hands of anyone else they would be likely to be slaughtered. In the meantime the Irish Brigade had taken over a warehouse containing tens of thousands of bottles of the Austrian liqueur Schnapps; so that the political situation assumed an air of less importance. It was even said that someone somewhere had captured a Mint which was churning out a stream of paper money. Then a new and mythical-sounding threat was said to be on the horizon – the Bulgarians! But no one seemed quite to know on which side they had been or would be fighting.

  The London Irish were sent off (though my memories of this are hazy) to make some sort of contact with the Russians. We made a dash to Wolfsberg in the eastern Austrian Alps; the Russians had got as far as Graz, some thirty miles further. We sent out scouting parties; what on earth were we supposed to do if we came across Russians? Offer them some Schnapps? I have a picture in my mind of myself and my platoon arriving in some small-town square and seeing across the road some men in strange uniforms whom we took to be Russians – unsmiling and bulging out of jackets that seemed too small for them. We eyed each other warily. Then, probably because none of us understood a word of each other’s language, we wandered into the middle of the square and nodded and made friends. In The History of the Irish Brigade it is recorded that there was a conference held at Wolfsberg in the Officers’ Mess of the London Irish Rifles, at which territorial boundaries were agreed between the British and Russian forces. This was facilitated, it is suggested, not so much by Schnapps, as by alarm about the intentions of the Bulgarians.

  After a week in Wolfsberg during which some of all this must have been sorted out – or must have come to be considered not really necessary to be sorted out – we withdrew to Villach, and then to villages on the northern coast of the Ossiachersee, one of the most beautiful lakes in Carinthia, the Austrian province bordering on the frontier with Italy. And there the London Irish stayed for the rest of my time with them in Austria.

  What had struck us all on our entry into Austria was not only the beauty of the place and people but the orderliness, peacefulness, the lack of signs of war. The people were neither overtly friendly nor hostile; they were dignified and courteous, and paid attention to what we required. This was especially striking to the communist Desmond Fay, who on entering a recently Nazi-dominated country had expected … what? A people arrogant and savagely embittered? Desmond could laugh and shake his head about what he in fact found; but it was something that made us all wonder, even if we could not work out exactly what. We were at first billeted in an orphanage for children whose parents had been killed in the war: there were Germans and Poles as well as Austrians. The children all seemed to have fair hair and the most beautiful manners as well as looks. The women in charge of them herded them into outlying buildings to make room for us; we found ourselves treating the women as if they were our hostesses and we were their guests. When we first arrived there was an army rule that there should be no fraternisation with local people; later this was relaxed because it was unworkable as well as senseless. There were few men except the old left in the villages; the girls and our young soldiers began to flirt not indecorously.

  We eventually had to hand over the cars we had taken as loot. Some officers came to arrangements with local farmers to keep and hide their cars until such a time as they could come and pick them up when they were out of the army.

  There was still much to do with the huge number of German soldiers and officials who were keen to give themselves up – for the reason that they wanted to be fed, as well as not to fall into the hands of the Russians. From the crowds of these there had to be weeded out and interrogated those who had been Nazis in positions of responsibility who might now be prosecuted as war criminals. In the early stages of this process I was sometimes called on to act as an interpreter with my primitive German. This attempt was apt to dissolve into farce. But there were other situations that became tragically serious.

  The Russian Cossack Corps that had been fighting for the Germans against what they
saw as an alien Bolshevik Russia had succeeded in surrendering to the British; many had their families with them; they knew that if they were sent or taken back to Russia they would all almost certainly be shot. The Russians demanded that they should be handed over; the British prevaricated. But there had been an agreement between Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt at the Yalta Conference earlier in the year that all such prisoners should be returned to the country they originally came from. The Cossacks could claim that they had been turned out of their country by the Bolsheviks and thus they had no country, but this carried no weight with the Russians. Orders came down from London that the Cossacks and their families, who had been camping in fields, were to be put forcibly into railway trucks and handed to the Russians. By good fortune the Irish Brigade were not required to do this. But we heard of it; and worried. What would we have done? There was a story that heartened us of a commanding officer of the 6th Armoured Division who went to the assembled Cossacks in their field and told them of the orders he had received, and that as a dutiful soldier he would have to obey them; but he would not do so until morning, and in the meantime he would remove his soldiers who were guarding the field because they were tired. And so in the morning the Cossacks and their families had gone – to mingle presumably with the hordes of displaced and often unidentifiable persons throughout Europe.

  There was a similar situation with the Croatians who had been hostile to Tito’s partisans and in some cases sided with the Germans. Tito was demanding that they should be handed over to him because he was now de facto ruler of Yugoslavia, but if this happened it was likely that they too would be shot. Tito gave assurances they would be treated according to conventions. They were handed over, but there is evidence that most of them were shot.

  Could anything have been done to prevent this? The world of politicians and top military authorities is dependent on words and bits of paper: there have been such and such discussions and agreements; out of the boundless chaos of five years of war such people have to try to produce order. On the ground, individuals face a different kind of obligation; one should not be responsible for sending off persons to be needlessly murdered. Perhaps, indeed, the individual soldiers on the spot have a duty to try to save politicians from the sins of their terrible calling (this was a view voiced at the Nuremberg trials). The politicians may be faced with unavoidable choices of evils; soldiers may have to risk covering for them and suffering the cost.

  But in the vast maelstrom that follows from the crackup of the ice floes of war, what can any individual do with certainty, whether soldier or politician? One hopes to do one’s best.

  At the Ossiachersee I was made Battalion Sports Officer, whose job it was to provide occupation for those who had nothing much more militarily to do. I organised conventional games; I could pick myself for any team I liked. I had never been much good at cricket, but at this I could at least show off. Also at hockey, which I had never played before. But at football I had to deselect myself: almost anyone seemed better than me. I had been a good runner at school, so I entered myself for the 440 yards at the Army Games at Klagenfurt – and came in a long way behind the champion of the Jewish Brigade who was said to have run at the White City. After this I thought I should retire from organised sport. At Ossiachersee I watched with some admiration the flirtation games that one or two of my fellow young officers played with a very pretty young Austrian nurse at the orphanage.

  It was during these days that in the course of conversation with Desmond Fay I let on that I had been to school at Eton. He had long since come to terms with me being the son of Oswald Mosley; he had said – ‘Oh well, he was a serious politician.’ But at the news that I was an Old Etonian he announced he was so upset that he was not sure if he could carry on with our friendship. This was not entirely a joke: it is part of Leninist theory that fascism is not the unequivocal enemy of communism – it can be a necessary stage in the collapse of capitalism. The clear-cut enemies of the communist proletariat have always been the upper classes.

  I went on a week’s leave to Venice and stayed on the Lido, where I had stayed with my father and mother in the summer holidays of 1930. Then, my father had spent much time flirting with my future stepmother Diana, who at that time was married to Bryan Guinness. My sister and I, I remembered, had spent much time being outraged not at my father’s behaviour to my mother, which I suppose we either did not notice or took as normal upper-class behaviour, but because Randolph Churchill, one of my father’s and mother’s entourage, insisted on referring to us children as ‘brats’. Now, on leave in Venice, I wrote to my father that I did not want to do any more sightseeing; I wanted to come home. In continuation of the letters I had written from Ranby and Naples, still in pursuit of what now increasingly obsessed me – the question of how to look for what might be an alternative to humans’ propensity for war – I wrote –

  I wonder if Neitzsche’s final madness was really the decadent desperation that people suppose – if it were not ‘tragic’ in the ultimate sense – the culmination of a tragedy in the true Greek style – and therefore something to be greeted and accepted with a ‘holy yea-saying’? Is anything much known of Nietzsche’s final madness? It is a theory that entrances me – that it is perhaps the culmination of all ‘great spirits’ that they should appear to be what the rest of the world calls mad: that perhaps this one form of madness – the Dionysian madness – is really an escape into the ‘eternity behind reality’: neither an advance nor a regression in life but just a sidestep into something that is always beside life. Or am I slightly mad?

  It seems to me that the physicists have argued themselves out of their original premises and are floating blindly … if all our sense-perceptions, measures, observations etc. are unreliable, indeed misleading, when it comes to interpreting the ‘real’ world, why do they presume that any experiment they make has any bearing on reality at all? The only thing they can be certain about is that they can never be certain of anything …

  It seems that the infinite only makes itself known to the finite by means of selected symbols or ‘emotions’ (which perhaps are only the result of symbol-action): it is beyond the comprehension of the finite (human?) mind to understand the reality behind these symbols. But this does not exclude the possibility of creating – througha fuller understanding of the symbols – a higher form of consciousness which might ultimately glimpse the reality that lay behind.

  I had long since seen that my father looked on Nietzsche’s work mainly in political terms whereas I saw it as dealing with metaphysics – in that Nietzsche had seen that language was what humans used in their exercise of power, and that any idea of ‘truth’ had to recognise this and somehow overcome it. Hence Nietzsche’s extraordinary elliptical, ironic, highly wrought style that had to be understood by a reader as an artwork rather than an argument. I hoped to go up to Oxford after I got out of the army in order to read philosophy and to try to get more straight my ideas about all this. (But then, when I did get to Oxford, my tutor said, ‘We don’t do Nietzsche’ – implying that he had been a Nazi).

  Mervyn had left the London Irish in Austria in order to work on the staff at Central Mediterranean Headquarters. It seemed that I might not be in a close working relationship with him again. I had a letter from him –

  The chaps here are nice, but at present they seem solely interested in their work – not because they like it, because they seem to have been allowed hardly any other interests during the war. How terrible. There is also a large content of ‘the affected young man’ – not your sort of affectation but a far more transparent species of this sometime delectable trait.

  Am READING seriously and furiously. Do you know that we have been living in ignorance (I have anyway) of décadence (French) as opposed to honest English decadence. The French sort is far more awful and I must define it to you as soon as I understand it so that we can practise it like mad.

  Hope you have opened a branch office of the SDA; you should get many members now.
I am having difficulty in extending it here of course.

  PS Has your mighty epic (which we planned you would publish at the age of 80 years) taken any less amorphous shape?

  For many years I forgot I had planned an epic. But here it now is, rarefied and distilled over a lifetime of not knowing quite in what style to write it.

  I had been impatient to get home, not only to my family but also to my old school friends; and now when I got back to the battalion from Venice I learned that this would be possible – under the aegis of an army order that all officers and men under a certain age and with less than a certain time of serving overseas were now eligible to be sent to the Far East to continue the war against Japan – with the benefit of a month’s leave in England first. So my wish to get home was granted – but rather in the manner of that ghost story in which a couple are given three wishes, the first two of which are fulfilled in such a horrific manner that the third has to be that the first two should be cancelled. However, I wrote home –

  The authorities declared I was eligible for Burma by just three weeks, and nothing that any kindly CO or brigadier out here can do can stop me. But as it happened I received the news with something like relief, and would not now alter the arrangement even if it were possible. I have been growing moribund in Austria with the harassing job of organising sports from the confines of a stuffy office. Leave, I am sure, will miraculously revive me.

  I don’t know how much this was bravado: it was perhaps a fatalism I had learned; and there might be a way of going east with my old clique of friends. So off I went from Austria on the long and by now familiar journey back through Florence and Rome to Naples to wait for a boat to take me home, if only en route to tortuous approaches to Japan. I was sitting with a few fellow travelling companions on the terrace of the Officers’ Club looking out across the beautiful bay at Vesuvius, which was smoking rather ominously in the distance (it had caused some consternation by half erupting the previous year: this was August 1945), and I was thinking that after all on no account did I want to go to fight Japan. Then we read in the local army newspaper that a bomb had been dropped on Japan that was a new sort of bomb – something to do with what goes on at the heart of the matter – and its effects were so horrific that countless thousands of people had been killed and the Japanese were already talking of surrender. In fact, its effects were so unknown and so uncanny that in future large-scale wars might be made impossible. So I thought – Well that’s not so bad then! Good old whatever-it-is at the heart of matter!