Their Promised Land

by Ian Buruma

  Bernard received this letter more than three months later in the middle of October. “Your travelling experience,” he writes on October 19, “recounted with all its interesting details deserves a reply at some length & I shall shortly devote an air mail letter to it & Americans in general.”

  Alas, that letter either got lost or was never written. I would have liked to know more about Bernard’s views on the Americans. From what little I was able to glean from his correspondence, he was better disposed to Britain’s main allies than Win, reflecting perhaps a greater distance from them.

  Bernard’s opinions on the Russian allies, too, are more indulgent than Win’s. In the autumn of 1943, he met a man on the train “who knew Russia so well” and who claimed that the Russians were reverting to their old imperial ways and had recently kicked out all the Jews from important offices. “I wonder if that is the case,” he writes. “I have often debated to myself & with others the relative merits or tyrannies of the Nazi and the Soviet dictatorships. We know so little about the latter but somehow one imagines that no nation could have fought a comeback so admirably unless the regime were pretty healthy.”

  Bernard was more inclined than Win to give the Soviet Union some benefit of the doubt. She was quicker to see the relative decline of British influence in the world, and deplored it. At the beginning of 1944, months before D-Day, she admits, on January 28, that “only the Russians seem able to deal successfully with the Boches, and that fact is rather bad for our prestige.”

  In November of that same year, after D-Day and the Battle of Arnhem, after the south of Holland has already been liberated, American troops are fighting inside Germany, and General Douglas MacArthur has landed in the Philippines, Win ends her letter on the fifth with this comment on the latest news: “The political future of the world looks bleak. Russia’s attitude is quite blatant & uncompromising, & America self-seeking as ever, to say nothing of France or the lesser countries. Russia’s attempts to corner all the European oil supplies strike me as ominous in the extreme. We really seem to be the only country seeking nothing for ourselves & dear, self-sacrificing Churchill globetrots to try and smooth out everybody else’s troubles. But we shan’t always have him. Worse luck. Goodnight beloved. Come soon to your adoring Win.”

  Churchill could do no wrong in Win’s eyes, even when he got hopelessly mixed up in the simmering civil war in Greece. The German occupation had inflamed old divisions between supporters of the prewar fascist Greek government and its left-wing opponents even further. Left-wing guerrillas fought on the Allied side against the Germans and their Greek collaborators. At the end of the war, however, British troops were actually helping to crush a rebellion of left-wing guerrillas against a new Greek government that included former Nazi collaborators. The situation was murky. Communists dominated the Greek left. And yet many people in Britain felt that in this instance Winston was fighting on the wrong side. His rousing speech made in Athens on Christmas Day did nothing to stop Greece from spiraling into a horrendous civil conflict that would last until 1949.

  But Win never doubted Churchill. On December 9, she writes, “I am feeling very angry about the mud which is being slung at Churchill by the leftwing extremists in our own country over this unhappy affair in Greece. Truly, he has courage and resilience beyond the ordinary or he would give up in despair & disgust. That section of the people and the press in the USA, who are always anxious to besmirch the British, have some good material to work on now, handed to them on a plate by our socialists.”

  Bernard replies on Boxing Day. He had spent his Christmas overeating in the officers’ mess in Agra and playing games of squash to overcome the ill effects. Nights are spent in the open air despite the cold. He agrees with Win that the news “still remains tricky but slightly firmer and it’s just like splendid Winston to go flying to Athens in an attempt to settle things on the spot.”

  Win tries to make Christmas at Kintbury “as happy an occasion as possible” in the absence of Bernard and John, who is finishing his training in the north of England. The remnants of the family join a group of carol singers in aid of new bells for the local church at Inkpen. Win tries to keep her “head high, but underneath there is a great ache & anxiety & weariness.” An Algerian wine (“not bad when sufficiently warmed”) is served with the Christmas turkey. Since this is a special occasion, Wendy is offered a cigarette by Win. “I believe,” Win writes, “she smokes a lot in her digs at Lynmouth. They are growing up with a vengeance. Come back soon, for heaven’s sake. We all miss you and need you so much.”

  The account of seventeen-year-old Wendy, described by Win as “a keen potential smoker,” taking up a habit that would help to cut her life short less than three decades later, fills me with melancholy. I can still picture my mother, smiling through a grey haze of smoke from her Player’s Navy Cut cigarettes. In fact, it was she who offered me my first smoke, as a kind of rite of passage, when I was about fifteen.

  And so the last year of the war began, with a mixture of relief that surely now the end was in sight, and profound apprehension about horrors yet to come, not least to John. “Poor, poor John,” Win writes on Christmas Eve. “Never was anyone less suited for the ordeal that is before him, and my heart bleeds for him, but fate moves on inexorably, & there is nothing I can do, except hope and pray.”

  Bernard responds to this on February 26, 1945, in a straightforward manner that shows his deep humanity: “I know [John] is not a warrior, but then so few of us really are; only he worries about it more than most. We are nearly all cowards basically, or shall we say not cut out as heroes at any rate, but it is only the few unfortunates who are frightened that they will show up thus.”

  Nine

  THE END

  Near the end of April 1945, on the twenty-first to be exact, Bernard is on his way to Srinagar in Kashmir. News must have reached him of U.S. and British troops liberating the survivors in German concentration camps, Ohrdruf on April 4, Buchenwald on April 11, Bergen-Belsen on April 15—Auschwitz had already been reached by Soviet troops in January. The news provoked a rare outburst of fury in Bernard, who was normally so measured in his pronouncements, so keen to see the best in people and situations; if there was a silver lining anywhere, Bernard would be the first to spot it.

  “The war,” he writes, “is going stupendously, but what fiendish bastards the Bosch are, running true to their evil form right to the end with their atrocities. What is one to do with a nation like that, short of castrating the lot, which is obviously impossible, or is it?”

  Three months earlier, on January 11, Bernard reacted rather differently, and for that time with unusual human sympathy, to an encounter with soldiers from the other Axis power still at war: “I saw some Jap POW patients the other day at one hospital. Far from looking like the scowling villains depicted in the propaganda posters or the half-starved wretches written up in the papers, they looked rather a nice and cheery crowd who gave one a polite bow of the head as one passed through the ward. They made a much better impression than did those Germans of the Luftwaffe at Benenden in 1940. I was told these particular Japs were mostly farming people & no doubt longing to get back to their Mount Pleasants as the rest of us. How mad it all is.”

  But Japan was farther from home. And there was no silver lining in the German camps. The shock of seeing newsreels of filthy emaciated corpses stacked up in the woods of Belsen made many people in Britain feel the same way as Bernard about the Germans. General Eisenhower was so shaken by what he found at Ohrdruf in April that he wanted the whole world to know about it, in the hope (vain, as it turned out) that such things would never be possible again. (General Patton refused to see the corpses inside the torture chambers of Buchenwald, for fear that the sight would make him vomit.)

  Apart from shared disgust, Bernard’s letter, and Eisenhower’s response to Nazi crimes, showed that the world was already moving on beyond the inevitable German defeat. People were look
ing ahead, imagining the future, beginning to draw lessons from the past, and starting to plan their postwar lives.

  Bernard wonders whether his grown-up children will still remember what he was like. He would have to get to know them all over again. He vows to stop seeking prestigious posts at London hospitals, for “those climbs up the ladder of ambition” only “led to frustration, disappointment & the wrong sort of hectic London life.” And so, he writes, “I pray that this coming year will at length see the end of the world’s travail, so that you and I, and others like us, together may again live in peace the rest of their years & try and make up for what we have lost.” This was on January 11, 1945.

  Win replies on February 7 that she cannot bear to wait much longer. Now that the reunion is in sight, she feels more anxious than ever: “I dream of you day and night, & curiously enough I even hark back to our childhood courtship and our feelings in those early days of 1914 when we first met. I feel that it will be almost the same all over again; in any case wildly thrilling.”

  Bernard thinks of John too. In the same letter where he vents his rage at the German fiends, he tries to be reassuring about the future of his eldest son, even though he could not have been more wrong in his prediction. “I am sorry for [John],” he writes. “He can’t help his make up; still I think if he battles through the next few years satisfactorily & finally meets the right girl to love & help & advise him in life—like mine did & does—he should do alright.”

  Wendy, the other child who was so often the cause of parental concern—her untidiness, her sloth, her lack of scholarly application—had failed to get into Oxford. “She is such a dear,” Win writes on September 13, 1944, “if only she were any good at anything except being nice!” Bernard replies that being nice “is already a rare achievement.” BMB, the formidable Badminton headmistress, had put Wendy’s name in for a social science course at the London School of Economics. Win does not really approve: “I should have preferred King’s or University College, if that had been possible, as the L.S.E. is full of dagoes and Communists, but I suppose old Wendy will hold her own.”*

  The term “cold war” was not heard of until October 1945, when George Orwell used it in an essay about the atomic bomb. As a description of Western relations with the Soviet bloc it only entered the general lexicon in 1947, when the American journalist Walter Lippmann wrote a book with that title. If there were such a thing as a premature Cold Warrior, Win was it. Her picture of the postwar future was darkly clouded by the prospect of Communist villainy, near and far from home.

  Win’s closest bugbears were her neighbors in Kintbury, the Padels, who taught the youngest Schlesinger children before they were sent off to school. And then there were the refugee relatives in London, Maria and Ernst Stern (“the Stern Gang”). On February 11, Win writes, “Maria is a complete Red, à la Padel, influenced by her son David (née Hans), up with the Russians & down with Churchill etc. The old, old slogans that always make my blood boil.”

  “Uncle Joe” Stalin was still a hero to many people in England, including the much-revered BMB. And there were plenty of people who felt strongly that the world, and British society in particular, had to change. The old class privileges had become intolerable to men and women who had sacrificed so much in the war. Win was slower to spot this change in the national mood than Bernard, although she did make it clear that she had no intention of returning to the kind of social life they had had at Templewood Avenue. Those days are over, she writes on March 25: “I have strenuously avoided all artificial and polite social duties & functions which sap one’s energy & waste valuable time to no purpose.”

  Win’s conservatism had something to do with her pessimistic outlook. But her distrust of the Soviet Union, although often couched in exaggerated British patriotism, was not without foresight. She was frightened with good reason about the way the postwar was shaping up. On April 28, she writes, “In certain quarters there is still a definite tendency to take rather than to give—and backed by the prestige of great strength and achievement, it looks as if there would be another dictatorship.”

  In May, Bernard alerts Win to an article he has read by a politician named Stephen King-Hall, on the situation in Russia. King-Hall reports that the “anti-God museums” have been closed down and Communism has been largely replaced by Russian nationalism. Attempts to evangelize the world with Communism have been abandoned. Bernard is impressed by this “unbiased account.”

  Win is not. She has read the article too, she writes on May 20, but still feels that the “present political unrest” in many parts of the world “is all at the instigation of Russia, whether her game be Power Politics—with her as the Great Power—or world Communism. I am prepared to believe that the latter idea vanished with Trotsky, but that is not helping us any just now. If mankind continues grabbing by force & eschews sweet reason at the conference table, before the blood is dry upon the ground—shed so that reason might prevail—then it was shed in vain—and more will be shed within a generation.”

  “How can we ever deal with Stalin and his satellites,” she continues, “shielded behind their obstinate secretive obscurity? It will be appeasement again, all along the line until the next war. Ghastly! We were born either too early or too late, but anyway into a terrible epoch. I have never been so deeply & depressingly affected by world events as I am now. That is why the victory over the Nazis has passed over me as though it had never been.”

  Win wrote this a year before Churchill’s famous speech in Fulton, Missouri, about the Iron Curtain descending across the Continent, and three weeks after the German defeat, to which the Soviets had contributed so much. She had felt no better just before the Third Reich came crashing down.

  The war had gone on for too long. Fear and separation from Bernard had taken their toll on Win. She didn’t see, on April 28, how “the beastly Boche” could go on for much longer. And yet “curiously enough I can feel no elation or excitement about this approaching end—just a dull listlessness. When we invaded N. Africa and when Italy gave in, I was wild with excitement—now all that is over. I think we are all too tired.”

  In India, too, the writing was on the wall. Things could no longer go back to the way they were, even if some people refused to admit it. After three years of working in military hospitals catering to Indian patients, mostly common soldiers known as “sepoys,” Bernard no longer spoke of the Indians as children. To be sure, he still shared some of the common British views on the native populations. “Johnnie Gurkha” was “a grand fellow, never depressed, always full of go.” The Tibetans in Sikkim were all “such nice friendly people and always meet you on an equal footing.” But he had more respect for the Indians than did many of his fellow countrymen.

  On one of his forays out of Agra in February, Bernard comes across a doctor who once had a flourishing practice in Bombay and is now a major in the British army, “45,” a refugee from Germany, and a bit “too full of himself and his powers—a common failing among this type & such a pity.” Whether “this type” refers to the German or the “45” provenance, or both, Bernard doesn’t say. At any rate, the major “does not much like the idea of working under an Indian officer in command—others, not ex-Germany, have I think tacitly felt the same. I think it’s nonsense and prejudice, but I haven’t had the experience myself, so perhaps cannot judge.”

  On March 3, Bernard tells Win about a dinner he had had with a padre with a sore eye, who had been in India for ten years, and “I thought somewhat lost his sense of proportion as a result. ‘We were meant to rule, not serve under Indians’ was a sentiment that kept on cropping up on his part and yet he thought he had, I suppose, a true Christian attitude to life.”

  There is no reason to think that Bernard was in favor of Britain pulling out of India. He thought that British socialists, who were advocating such a course, were being naïve and misguided. My guess is that he envisioned a gradual process of handing more and more powe
rs to the Indians until the British Raj became redundant, a process that could still take a long time. It was a common dream in the last stages of many empires, a harmonious confluence of Asians and Europeans who would produce the best of both worlds, a perfect merger of East and West. This notion was not limited to the European masters; some Asians, educated in Western schools and military academies, believed in it too. It was, as we now know, an illusion, not an ignoble one, but an impossible dream nonetheless.

  Bernard gives a fine description of it, unwittingly, since he did not recognize it as an illusion, at least as far as the politics of the future were concerned. He is on his way by train to Benares on June 11, and two “grand fellows” join him in his compartment. They are a young British lieutenant colonel of an Indian regiment and his subedar major, the highest rank available to Indian officers. They had just come back from Rangoon. The Indian officer had served for thirty years in the British Indian forces and fought in both world wars. Bernard listens to the lieutenant colonel praising the prowess of the common Indian sepoy: “‘Give us the specialists & ancillary services & the Indian Army can beat the Jap hands down; we can do without your British line regiments,’ he said.”

  Bernard’s reaction, typically: “I was envious of the tales of their battles & felt acutely how much I belonged to the chair born division.”

  But at least he had had the satisfaction of a promotion in rank. On Win’s letter of February 28, he is still addressed as colonel. On March 7, he is Brigadier B. E. Schlesinger. This, like so much else about Bernard, became something of a family joke. I was always told that it took him some time to come down to earth in postwar civilian life. On one occasion, taking a Sunday walk near Kintbury with his children, he was stopped by a local farmer who made it quite clear that they were trespassing on private land. “Don’t you know who I am?” Bernard is supposed to have barked at the farmer. “Brigadier Schlesinger!” Whereupon the farmer replied, “I don’t care if you’re the king of England, you’re still on my land.”