Time at War

by Nicholas Mosley

  My father still seemed extraordinarily serene in prison; it was as if prison were evidence of his disapproval of war. Then, on a later visit when we were alone together for a while, he did speak briefly of the war. He said that when I went abroad to fight, if ever it happened that I were taken prisoner, I should remember some password that he would give me in case he were able to get in touch with me. I thought this odd: surely my father could have no contacts now with Germany? He had never, unlike my stepmother, been on close personal terms with high-up Nazis. I thought – This is just a way of implying that he might still have a finger in the world of intrigue. But I did perhaps begin to wonder – Well it might not be such a bad thing after all to be taken prisoner and so survive a war which before long, surely, would be as good as won. But what a time it might still take to finish it off – for armies to slog to and fro across North Africa, and all the way back across Russia to Berlin.

  2

  Newly commissioned officers waiting to be sent overseas went to the Rifle Brigade Holding Battalion at Ranby, in Nottinghamshire, a rather bleak encampment of huts either side of the Retford-Worksop road. But here everything became different.

  We felt ourselves liberated from institutional subservience; from the need to ingratiate and dissemble. We could begin to be what we felt we were: but most of us were only nineteen.

  We were each to be in charge of the training of a platoon of thirty to thirty-five men, most of them much older than ourselves. I wrote to my Aunt Irene –

  At the moment I have a platoon of 35 men all to myself who are only just starting their training, and who are ignorant and stupid beyond belief. So I have a hard and anxious job, but I believe when some of the other officers come back off leave I may have someone to help me. Unfortunately I was given the platoon which had the reputation of being the scruffiest in the Company, and now it is up to me I suppose to descruff them. They never wash, lose all their equipment and come out half dressed; but are incredibly keen when out training in the country, and good fun if you treat them right. They are so shabby and slack about their appearance and their barrack room, and yet they are so pleasant and good-natured when one chats to them. I try to be both pleasant and firm, but it is tricky.

  The time is taken up with Weapon Training, which I leave to the NCOs, who are efficient, and can do that sort of thing much better than us: unending lectures on Gas, Map Reading, Tactics, and even First Aid and Topical Interest, which I give, rather shakily at first, but I am getting used to it now, and am becoming reasonably good. My sergeant is very helpful. I really do take my hat off to these old NCOs, some of whom have been in the army for years. They all play up to us junior officers, and there is no question of the jealousy which I believe you get in some regiments.

  To my old school friend, Timmy, who was following in my footsteps a few months behind me and who had written asking for hints from which he could learn, I wrote –

  So long as you tell your sergeant just what you want done and leave him to do it in his own way, the house on fire burns merrily. It is only when you butt in on the sergeant’s pitch, and quibble with him in front of the men, that the trouble starts. When you want to take over the platoon he will step into the background and help without pestering suggestions.

  With the men I have so far got on well, and we have been able to laugh together and they do have respect. I have only had to deliver one personal rocket when I saw a man chewing gum on parade. I told him to spit it out, to which he answered that he was unable because it had stuck to the roof of his palate. I then waxed vicious and said that he either got his gum unstuck or I would get him so stuck himself that he would not be able to extricate self for weeks, at which he accordingly expectorated (is this the word?) and so we went on.

  Later. Christ, am I weary this evening. My platoon is really too bloody keen for words. They led me slap through a river today, and I had to follow with pretence of enjoyment. But they are fun, and so much more worthwhile than the old sweats I was with at Winch.

  When we went out on manoeuvres we were able to go to the beautiful Peak District of Derbyshire, where it seemed to make sense to do tactical training in the style of stalking-and-catching-and-rescuing games which my friends and I had played ever since childhood. My friend and colleague during these exercises was Raleigh Trevelyan, who later was to write one of the best books about fighting in the Second World War, The Fortress, about his experiences at the landing at Anzio. In the Peak District we would pit our platoons against each other like Cowboys and Indians; in the evenings we would all sit around campfires and sing songs under the stars. We junior officers often felt more at home with our men than we did in the officers’ mess at Ranby. I wrote to my sister –

  I really think that the usual life of an officer is even more narrowing and binding than that of a man. In the ranks one was admittedly restricted physically by petty regulations, but as an officer one is up against the appalling tyranny of etiquette and good manners. The mess is stuffy and staid like a Victorian clubroom; and there is no escape. One cannot even roll out and wallow in a pub. One is always under the eye of a keen and critical audience.

  It seems that I was beginning to realise that in describing my men as scruffy and unruly, and yet also in important ways the salt of the earth, there was indeed a tradition in which these were likely to be aspects of the same thing.

  And before long we junior officers were creating our own manner of anarchic protest by turning one of our rooms (we had rooms which two of us shared in a large hut on its own) into a fantasy nightclub which we called The Juke Box. Here, away from the officers’ mess, we played records on a wind-up gramophone; we danced ballroom or exotic dances; some of us got hold of women’s clothes. There is a tradition in armies for this sort of thing on the fringes of war – presumably as a reaction or counterbalance to the brutally macho business of killing; perhaps psychologically as a form of bonding. I do not know how many of us were at that time, or remained, in fact gay: there was no evidence then of anything overtly sexual. We had nearly all come from public schools where it seemed naturally the fashion to behave in a gay style; what better could one do with no girls in sight? I myself had been no exception to this. The word ‘gay’ had not been applied to homosexuality yet, but one can see how this use of it arose. Homosexuals were seen as paragons of wit and fantasy; such qualities were life-giving in wartime. In 1942 at Ranby the emphasis was on gaiety in the old sense.

  Many of the denizens of The Juke Box went on to be killed or wounded in Italy – Timmy Lloyd, one of the occupants of The Juke Box room, was shot at point-blank range when leading a patrol; Charlie Morpeth had a leg blown off in a minefield. Bunny Roger, who had been famous as a fashionable milliner before the war and was old enough not to be required to do any fighting, became renowned once more in Italy for the story that he, having become impatient with his regulation officer’s pistol, had seized a rifle from one of his men and, after a brief reminder from his corporal as to how it worked, had shot a German at an almost impossible range. Raleigh Trevelyan, my companion in the cavortings in the Peak District, was grievously wounded in the hand-to-hand fighting at Anzio. Once, when he and I were out with our platoons playing our catching-and-rescuing games, I came across him in the early morning looking pleased and I said to him, ‘Raleigh, you’re looking very starry-eyed!’ and he said ‘I’ve been seduced by my sergeant.’

  I wrote to my friend Timmy, who was following my path through the army a few months behind me –

  My darling platoon is now very much to my liking. They spend most of their time on training either killing chickens or stealing eggs, of which they give me a goodly portion, so I pretend very hard not to notice, though they would steal just the same if I did. And we have riotous games of football during recreational training, when it is their sole objective to trip me up and sit on me whether I have the ball or not. Which I enjoy because some of them are rather attrac.

  And later –

  My flesh is being torn
from my bones by the icy gales which come whipping over these bloody hills.

  We were sent off to a colliery in our trucks to pick up cinders to mend a road. The colliery had cinders in plenty, but also a considerable amount of unwanted coal. The first truckload of cinders was a failure, so we were told – no more cinders. Yes but plenty more coal, we bellowed, and rushed off to load up. The platoon took the coal hopefully round to their barrack room. ‘That’s a good joke!’ I said, and had them take it round to my room in the mess. Which they did in bulk, and filled the place with the filthy stuff. Later, of course, I found that it wasn’t coal at all but slate, and would by no means burn. Thus my room is filled to overflowing with rank black rock and no hope of getting rid of it. It has also irretrievably blocked the stove in its refusal to burn. So the laugh was on me; but my platoon love me all the same.

  This was the gay style. I reported to my sister that to my platoon I was known as ‘Mad Mr Mosley’.

  I had told my aunt that I was becoming ‘reasonably good’ at delivering lectures in spite of my stammer, but I do not remember this being so. What I have vivid memories of is my gallant platoon being hard pressed not to roll about in the aisles while I gagged and contorted, and my sergeant being driven eventually to bang on a table with his stick and shout – ‘Don’t laugh at the officer!’

  In fact, perhaps my stammer was even a help to me in what is called bonding with my men, who must have dreaded the style of a gung-ho disciplinarian. The way in which a junior officer was supposed to deal with an offender was by what was called ‘putting him on a charge’. This meant that he was taken up in front of a senior officer for punishment. I found I had great reluctance to put anyone on a charge: reproof could be left to the verbal pyrotechnics of the sergeants, from whom, as I had learned when in the ranks, this sort of thing was easy to accept. It seemed to suit the men if they could see their officer in some sort of predicament equivalent to their own; then they might feel some responsibility for him as well as vice versa. This was a lesson I learned that was most valuable later in the war.

  The other ranks whom the junior officers came in most personal contact with were the batmen who did the chores in the officers’ quarters; and they indeed seemed naturally to treat those who were nominally in charge of them like nannies with children. At the end of my time at Ranby, when I was away on some course before going on embarkation leave, my faithful batman Rifleman Baxter wrote to me –

  Dear Sir, thank you for your interesting letter on life at Cawthorne, it sounds an awful place, but I am not at all surprised because it is Yorks, and you can expect something of that sort from the cold wind prevailing, which leaves its unsunny mark on the countenance of the inhabitants. At a place like that you really need a good old soldier to make you comfortable, as they can always find ways and means. I hope that you are more fortunate than many others in having a decent chap who would also have to be a B-scrounger considering the wartime scarcity of certain necessities.

  One of the slightly more senior officers I remember with admiration and affection from Ranby was the Signals Officer Laurence Whistler, who would soon become famous for his beautiful engravings on glass. One of Laurence’s tasks was to teach us the Morse Code. He would tap out the passages from his favourite poems, and we had to unscramble these and write them down: it was a help if one had some prior knowledge of the particular piece. Laurence was also a memorable wit. Once, when we were having dinner in the mess and a more than usually unpalatable dish was placed in front of us, someone said, ‘What on earth is this?’ And Laurence said, ‘I think it’s the Piece of Cod that passeth all understanding.’

  In counterpoint to both the gaiety and the drudgery of life at Ranby, I carried on an earnest correspondence on the subject of religion with both my aunt and my father. My aunt was a fervent Christian; my father was not. My argument with my aunt had come about because she had become anxious that I was spending too many weekends perhaps pursuing ‘gaiety’ in London or at the homes of my friends rather than sticking to duty and commitment. I wrote –

  Somebody must have been whispering some very wicked things into your ear. The idea that a Rifle Brigade officer is not allowed to venture more than 5 miles from camp is so much precious nonsense. And to take Saturday night off – well, agreed it is against the rules, but similarly it is forbidden to wear anything except army underwear, and you will not find many level-headed men, let alone an officer, keeping within the bounds of that law. Seriously, even if anyone of any importance should know – and I cannot see that they should – they would care really very little. They might make it an excuse upon which to start a row if they were dissatisfied with my work, but otherwise, Lord, they don’t mind.

  And the old red herring about shouldn’t I suffer as my men – well really, that is a question that I settled to my own satisfaction a long time ago. Do my men mind? Heavens no. They ask me fondly after London every Monday morning. I show them that I can plunge around with them during the week, and do a great deal more work than they do too, and they judge me on my ability to handle them, and not on the amount of self-suffering I can impose upon myself when off duty. Surely this ‘moan moan and let’s all be miserable together’ idea is horribly wrong. And thank God I truly believe that the men realise it is too.

  And I had such an enjoyable weekend! A very good party on Saturday night …

  And then later, after my aunt had sent me a copy of a speech she had made to an assemblage of bishops –

  Of course I agree entirely that there is no hope for the world and the progress of our civilisation if we move and live guided merely by political or economic considerations. Thus you say that belief in religion and in a Church is essential. But you are anxious to centre this necessary Faith in the doctrine of Christianity as it is interpreted by the Church of England today, and in this I find it impossible to follow you.

  Doctrine as interpreted by the C of E seems to me to be this – whether one takes the doctrine of Original Sin literally or metaphorically, it appears that God created man with a proclivity to sin, so man sinned, and continued to wallow in his sin for many gloomy centuries. Then at a given moment God sends his son down to earth in human form, and by his voluntary death the Son of God takes the sins of the world upon his shoulders, and the world is left free from sin. Thus has the ultimate purpose of the world been fulfilled by the life and death of Christ? If so, what is there here upon which we can build a faith for the future? What can we do except sit gloomily and ruminate upon the past, and wait until in the pangs of the aftermath of fulfilment we finally destroy ourselves? The early Christians clearly believed that the purpose of the world had been fulfilled in Jesus, and they hourly expected the end of the world. We were made sinful: all we can do is to pray that Christ will come a second time more swiftly to consummate us.

  You will notice that all the way through this argument I have tried to use the phrases ‘the doctrine of the C of E’, or ‘Christianity as interpreted by the Church’. I have never condemned Christianity itself, for I too believe that in the story of Christ’s life and teaching there may lie the foundation of our necessary Faith.

  What are the facts of Christ’s life as far as we are able to ascertain them? He came into the world as a human man born of a human woman. By his personality and teaching he won a great and devoted following and performed many so-called miracles. Through his own intellectual exertions and his emotional experiences he raised his human personality to such a state of perfection that he realised that he himself might be called God. It was the agony in Gethsemane which showed him this, and it was then that he realised that if in becoming perfect man he had become God, and that it was time for him to die and to become God in form as well as in reality. Those are the facts of Christ’s life. The rest is either mythical or incidental.

  Now here is the foundation for a faith for the future, a hope for man as an individual. This is the message of Jesus – he shows that in man is the seed of God, and that it is through the exer
tions and understanding of the individual that the state of perfection can be reached. Make yourself perfect first, and then with the love that you would thereby acquire you would be able to make others perfect. He was always a supreme individualist, and the idea of absolute servility of mind to a mystical and dogmatic Church seems entirely against his nature.

  These are the impressions that a somewhat irregular Church attendance and a little reading here and there have given me. My mind is not made up, and I hope it will never be, for one should never settle one’s opinions, but always be seeking and searching for the Truth.

  These ruminations were an attempt to escape from the wearisome routine of everyday reality. A determined effort to find a system of truth beyond the meaninglessness of anarchy. My father professed an interest in religion: he had the idea of a synthesis between Christianity and some sort of Nietzschean elitism. He had introduced me to Nietzsche when he had been reading his work in Holloway, but from the beginning of my own reading of Nietzsche I had the impression that my father was misunderstanding him; as well as, more expectedly, Christianity.

  I wrote to my father from Ranby –

  I believe that Christ recognises his elect just as much as Nietzsche would like us to recognise his. N’s contention that the Übermenschen were ‘beyond good and evil’ is of far greater significance than ‘above morality’. To be above morality is merely to be sufficiently civilised to be able to do without a conventional code of behaviour. To be ‘beyond good and evil’ is to see that such values (both ethical and religious) can be based on entirely different standards.

  With Nietzsche’s values I have very little sympathy. ‘Heiterkeit’ (serenity) – yes, that is perhaps the most desirable quality that any mortal can possess. But ‘Härte – why always the emphasis in domination and power through hardness? There is no beauty, and I would say very little nobility, in‘Härte’. But I have wandered from the point. When I began to talk about ‘beyond good and evil’ I meant to go on to suggest that God is ‘beyond G and E’, in the sense that it is obvious that his values are based upon entirely different standards to our own. And might not this be the answer to the problem of suffering to which we are so faintly now trying to find a solution? All our ethical systems and philosophies on earth are involved so entirely within the necessary limits of our own assessments of good and evil that I do not think that we, in such an elementary state of mental development, can have any close comprehension of God’s conceptions and values. The jump from ‘within G and E’ to ‘beyond G and E’ is so great that at the moment I believe it is beyond the powers of our understanding to see what lies upon the other side. When man has developed sufficiently to take this step he will be superman indeed, and close to God; but it seems that we are extremely (though not infinitely) far from it now.