Time at War

by Nicholas Mosley

  TIME

  AT WAR

  Nicholas Mosley

  To

  Mervyn Davies

  Contents

  Foreword

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  A Note on the Author

  Foreword

  When I got home from the Second World War in the autumn of 1945 I knew I wanted to be a writer but I did not know how to write about war. The books about the First World War that I had admired had been about endurance amid the horror and senselessness of war. This could be written about unequivocally. But I had come to realise that the war I had been engaged in was not senseless: it had to be fought, though the horror and impression of futility were there. So in what style could one write about something that was both necessary and futile?

  In the 1980s I wrote briefly about my participation in war in my books about my father, Oswald Mosley, who spent most of the war as a security risk in jail. But these accounts were in relation to the peculiar situation of my father. It is only recently in my old age that I have felt at ease in writing fully about my experiences of war.

  War is both senseless and necessary, squalid and fulfilling, terrifying and sometimes jolly. This is like life. Humans are at home in war (though they seldom admit this). They feel they know what they have to do.

  It is in peace that humans for the most part feel lost: they have to find out what it is they have to do. For reassurance they find themselves dragged back to conflict and to stories of conflict. But this should be shown as unnecessary by a true story of war.

  1

  The Second World War got under way on 3 September 1939 when I was sixteen and staying at my father’s house in Derbyshire. I heard the Prime Minister, Mr Chamberlain, announce the declaration of war; then I went out and kicked a football about on the lawn in front of the house. My old Nanny, who was at that time looking after my young brother Michael, leaned out of a window and asked if I had heard the news, and was I not concerned? I said that I did not think the declaration of war meant very much: there was something called the Maginot Line in eastern France that the Germans could not get through, and something called the Siegfried Line in western Germany that the British and French could not get through; so the politicians would just play their war games for a while, and then the whole thing would fizzle out. Surely the politicians were not mad enough for anything else to happen? My old Nanny did not seem to be impressed, and withdrew.

  For most of that autumn and winter my forecast appeared to be coming true. Nothing much was happening between Germany and France. Then in May 1940 the German army went round the northern end of the Maginot Line through Belgium and Holland: apparently no one confronting the issue had paid attention to the fact that the Maginot Line did not stretch along the frontier with Belgium. I had not taken into account the possibility that politicians and generals could indeed be so mad.

  In June 1940 my father, Oswald Mosley, at that time the leader of the British Union of Fascists, was arrested as a security risk and taken to Brixton Prison to be held without charge for an indefinite period under the hurriedly cobbled-up Regulation 18B(1a), which gave the Home Secretary power to detain any member of an organisation whose leaders ‘have or have had associations with persons concerned in the government, or sympathetic with the system of government, of any power with which His Majesty is at war. My father had been touring the country making speeches saying that the war was a grievous mistake and should be stopped: if we left Hitler alone he would attack Russia and leave us alone, which was what he had been saying he wanted to do. At this time I thought that my father was a politician less lunatic than most.

  On the night of his arrest my housemaster came into my room at school (at Eton boys had rooms on their own) and told me that he had been telephoned by my stepmother who had asked him to break the news to me of my father’s arrest. I thanked him; but he hung about as if there was something more to be said. I could not think what this might be. Then he murmured something like – Did I think there was anything to it? I realised he was asking me if I thought my father might be considered a traitor. I said – Oh no, he just thinks this war is a mistake. My housemaster seemed dubious, but left it at that.

  I realised that things might be difficult, however, when I went out to attend an early morning class: a frequent anxiety had been what there might be about my father in the papers. But one of the virtues of Eton is, or was, that many boys come from families used to the ways of maverick politicians – some of whom indeed in the past might have spent time in jail on matters of principle. So in the morning there were glances, but not much was said.

  It did not strike me that I myself should do anything other than volunteer to join the army before I would be due to be called up on my nineteenth birthday in June 1942. I saw what my father meant about the war being a mistake, but this did not seem to be relevant to me. Most Etonians who had not got family connections with the other services or with cavalry regiments opted to go into one of the Guards regiments; or if they wished to be slightly less conventional, into the Rifle Brigade or the Kings Royal Rifle Corps. Myself and my contemporary friends planned to apply to join the Rifle Brigade, in the hope of becoming officers.

  There were two grave impediments to my being accepted as a potential officer. The first was my father, who was still in jail, although now in Holloway with my stepmother (after more than a year as ordinary prisoners they had been allowed to share a double cell here at the insistence of Winston Churchill, who had once been a friend of both). But hostility against them in the country was still strong. The second snag was that from the age of about seven I had a bad stammer. Of course some kind of war work would be available to me – but an infantry officer? Lives might depend on the ability of an officer to give rapid orders.

  The difficulty about my father was somewhat balanced by the influence of my formidable aunt, Irene Ravensdale, my dead mother’s older sister, and a Baroness in her own right. She was acquainted with the Colonel-in-Chief of the Rifle Brigade: these were the days of the old-boy net, when people supposedly of influence could be expected to know one another. So my aunt had a word with the Colonel and explained – I have no idea what she explained, but by the time a Rifle Brigade recruiting team came down to Eton to hold interviews with potential officers, I was told that I would be accepted as a trainee, although this did not guarantee that I would graduate.

  So in April 1942 I travelled with a group of mostly other ex-public schoolboys to the Rifle Brigade depot at Winchester, where for three months we were to be treated no differently from the rest of the newly recruited other ranks. I wrote to my sister of our arrival at Winchester Station –

  At once of course we split up into our school cliques –Etonians rather aloof and bored and hands in pockets: the rest alternating between Rugby raucousity and grammar-school timidity. We walked crocodile-wise, Etonians at least 100 yards in the rear, until we arrived at a place which reminded me of Brixton … We were herded to our quarters which were like the basement of a morgue, with rows of beds constructed of steel bars, many vertical, and a few bent horizontal and arranged neatly so that the bars coincided with one’s hips and the gaps with one’s head and waist.

  My sister, two years older than me, was at this time doing war work in London, making bits and pieces for armaments.

  It was the style of Etonians to be flippant or condescending about things that might be unpleasant; thus one had managed to get through much of school life. It did not seem that the army would
be very different.

  A week or two later I was writing to my father –

  The routine is as intense as expected; non-stop from 6.30 to 6 and very often extra fatigue after that. But there is barely time to stay depressed, and the evenings are made happy by the mere fact that we can get outside the barrack gates. We are all mixed up with the conscripts – men of 35–40 – better than younger ones who might be more aggressively hostile to us future (we hope) officers. But these are bad enough. They fuss around swearing (always the same drab monosyllable) spitting and interfering with everyone with hoarse belches of amusement. The sergeants are wonderful men, who give us hell on the parade ground, calling us such names as make us laugh and wonder at their power to conceive such obscenities. Off duty they do quite a lot to help us.

  My sister and I had visited my father two or three times when he had been in Brixton Prison. We had been under supervision in an austere visiting room and had been amazed at our father’s cheerfulness. He said he was making profitable use of his time by being taught German by some of the internees; and he then hoped to embark on a course of reading European literature and philosophy. It was as if, having made his public protests about the war, he was not outraged that he should be in prison.

  At Winchester the ex-public schoolboys on the whole seemed better than others at having to shave and wash and wash up in cold water, for instance; the conscripts were better at the ritual of setting out in meticulous geometrical order their bedding and equipment ready for inspection every morning. What I remember now about the depot at Winchester is the strange mixture of bonhomie and misery – the former mostly to do with drinking beer in the evenings and making jokes; the latter often to do with my stammer. We potential officers would be taken out of our squad one by one on the parade ground and put in charge of the drill. It sometimes seemed that I, standing with my mouth open silently like an Aunt Sally at a fairground, might unwittingly become like the Emperor Christophe of Haiti who used for his amusement to march his crack troops over a cliff. Once, when my squad was proceeding at the fast trot that was the customary style of the Rifle Brigade straight towards the doorway that led from the parade ground to the NAAFI canteen, I thought there might occur some happy outcome to my predicament. But the sergeant-instructor beside me, sensing a plot, bellowed in time ‘About turn! Left turn! Right turn! Knees up! At the double!’ with appropriate expletives. The insults that the sergeants were accustomed to hurl at us were enjoyable, though they were usually gentle with me. I had a friend called Pollock who became something of the squad butt. When we were standing to attention the sergeant would stand very close to him and yell – ‘Pollock! Spell it with a P, do you? You sack of shit!’

  From Winchester I was given leave to go up to London once a week to see a stammer specialist. This was Dr Lionel Logue, who had been treating the King. I had been going to him during my last year at Eton, and I did not think he was doing me much good. I desperately wanted to get rid of my stammer, but he tried to get me speaking in lilting rhythmical cadences like a ham actor or a politician or a clergyman. While I was with him I could do this quite well; then when I got away it seemed I would rather stammer than sound like an actor or a politician or a clergyman. No one made much sense of my stammer until I was sent by the army after the war to another quite different type of specialist. He said – But has it ever struck you that you may not really want to get rid of your stammer? I was for a moment outraged: me not want to get rid of the stammer that caused me such misery? He explained how a stammer might be a form of self-protection. But the understanding of this belongs to a later part of the story.

  Some of our squad had been at school at Winchester just down the hill, and they would go down on Saturdays to visit the boys they had perhaps been in love with at school. Then on Sundays we would line up for Church Parade and march to the stunningly beautiful Winchester Cathedral where one of the popular hymns was to the tune of the German national anthem, and we would try to remember the German words. Then on our way back through the streets, proudly led by the regimental band playing the Rifle Brigade march, we would sing its time-honoured words–

  Oh the Rifle Brigade has gone away

  And they’ve left all the girls in the family way

  The KRRs who are coming behind

  Will have seven-and-six a week to find

  –seven shillings and sixpence being the cost, in those days, of the upkeep of a child.

  No one at the depot seemed much interested in my father; and I was not thinking much about the sense or ethics of the war. It seemed we were all involved in some gigantic juggernaut of fate or the grim workings of evolution. Our task was just to keep going, with as much good humour as possible. By this time both Russia and America were in the war against Hitler, so there was the sense that in the end, so long as one stayed alive, things would turn out all right.

  From Winchester our group of mainly ex-public schoolboys went briefly to Tidworth on Salisbury Plain, where we did training with transport. The speciality of the Rifle Brigade and the King’s Royal Rifle Corps was to form motorised battalions ready for quick deployment in war. Then from Tidworth we moved to an Officer Cadet Training Unit in York. Here we were treated more specifically as potential officers: we did tactical training at platoon and company level. But we still had to go regularly on long half-jogging marches covering ten miles in two hours, carrying heavy packs and weapons; we were tested for the dexterity with which we could take various weapons to bits and put them together again. We learned to drive trucks; we were taking on cross-country motorbike rides by a former hill-climbing champion, during which he led us up almost vertical slopes and we laughed when our machines tipped over backwards and chased us down the hill. We were lectured on current affairs and regimental history. We also felt free to indulge in some of the more traditional pastimes of officers.

  I had asked my father if I could borrow his shotgun. I wrote to him from Fulford Barracks, York –

  Many happy returns of the day.

  Your lawyer has managed to rescue your guns from the Home Office, and they are now safely up here with me. The trouble is cartridges, which are practically unobtainable, but perhaps some of my sporting friends in the OCTU will be able to wheedle me some from their family dealers. I will be able to get in a fairly regular shoot on Saturday afternoons, and we are now being encouraged to take a gun when we go on manoeuvres on the moors. The authorities are very reasonable about all this; and if one gives a pheasant or two to the officers’ mess they will let you take a gun almost anywhere.

  We have now finished our mechanic’s course, from which I passed as a 1st class driver-mechanic, which was really very bogus, and was granted only through systematic flattering of the instructor. Also our wireless course, which was not so successful, as I was rather overconfident and idle, spending most of the time listening to the BBC and trying to wreck the wireless schemes by sending false messages. Which displeased people, and I fear I may have got a low mark.

  But we are embarking upon the most important part of our training now – endless tactics and toughening courses, horrible 5-day manoeuvres in Northumberland, sleeping open-air with one blanket and being harassed by live ammunition and artillery barrages. Then on December 18 we pass out complete with natty suiting and prominent chest and are allowed to show off to our families for a week or so. I will come and see you then just before Christmas.

  The times that it seems meant most to me while I was stationed at York were those when I could get away at weekends to the home of an old school friend, Timmy, some five or six miles away, here a group of us continued enthusiastically to play the games we had played as children – a chasing-and-capture-and-escaping game called Lions; acting games; pencil-and-paper games. Then occasionally at weekends, I and others would be able to get down to London where my sister shared a flat with two girlfriends also working in her small-arms factory. We would land up in a favourite nightclub called The Nut House where we drank and sang communal songs lik
e The Sheik of Araby (to which the antiphon was With no pants on); or Bell-bottom trousers coats of navy blue (antiphon: He’ll climb the rigging like his father used to do). These chants have stuck in my mind like strange mantras. The lady who ran The Nut House told me she had known my father, and did I know how attractive my stammer was? I said – No. This might have been a life-giving moment for me.

  When the time came for me and my colleagues either to become officers or to have failed, I was interviewed by the young captain who had largely been responsible for our training and he told me that they did not usually commission cadets with a stammer as bad as mine, but … but I don’t remember him quite being able to finish this sentence. But anyway, there I was, turning up in London for Christmas 1942 resplendent in my new Second-Lieutenant’s uniform. And the battle of Alamein had by this time been won, the battle of Stalingrad was going all right, was it not? And the war seemed as distant as ancient mythology.

  One of the consequences of my having become an officer was that I got permission from the Home Office to spend the best part of a day with my father and stepmother in Holloway Jail. So in the New Year I dropped in at Fortnum and Mason on the way and arrived with the inside of my huge army overcoat hung with a ham and a bottle of brandy, and under my arm a Wagner record for Diana’s wind-up gramophone with a giant horn. We had a fine day – this was the first time I felt old enough to talk on anything like equal terms with my father – we did not say much about the war; we talked about ideas and books. Then towards the end of the day there was a knock on the door of the bleak cell-like room where my father and stepmother and I were sampling the brandy; my father said, ‘Who is it?’ and a voice said, ‘The Governor.’ My father said, ‘Oh do come in!’ and made a half-hearted attempt to hide the bottle under the table. The Governor was a pleasant man and he stayed and chatted with us for a while. Then my father said, ‘Would you like a glass of brandy?’ The Governor said, Thank you!’ My stepmother went off to wash a tooth-glass. The Governor said, ‘Ah, you don’t often find brandy like this nowadays!’