Time at War

by Nicholas Mosley

  Does this explain my behaviour? I did not understand it at the time. All I knew was that in certain conditions I reacted in a way which I really could not control. I am not very clear even now as to what those conditions were, but you will remember the numerous examples as well as I. I think ‘artificiality’ and ‘unpleasantness’ were the chief characteristics of the conditions I abhorred. But these are vague terms, and it is fruitless to try to analyse them accurately. And the ‘artificiality’ or ‘unpleasantness’ was always relative only to me. Viewed dispassionately, there was very often nothing objectionable in the conditions at all. It was all a matter of how they acted on my frame of mind at the moment.

  I wrote briefly and not analytically about my stammer –

  On the surface I suppose it is a tragedy. Certainly without it I should have shone much more than I did at Eton. Even in the army it probably stops me from promotion. But the stammer forced me away from all superficial contacts, from all superficialities in fact. And although on the face of it this was unfortunate and forbade much material ‘success’, I am presumptuous enough to feel that it led to many developments in a more fundamental way. It taught me to think and to judge, to see things at more than their superficial values; to rely on more than affability to show my worth. If the stammer eventually goes, I am convinced it will have done me more good than harm. If it stays, at least it will have been of some advantage early in life, when I might so easily have become a vacant lout. I think myself it will go in time.

  After Sorrento I found myself once more in what I described to my sister as ‘the full gaiety of the Naples winter season’. When I had reported back this time to the transit camp to learn what arrangements would be made to get me back to the battalion they told me that they had no papers about me and would be able to do nothing with me until they had. This seemed to have something to do with the uncertainty about my being classified as either London Irish Rifles or Rifle Brigade, or neither. This situation, of course, I felt suited me very well – not just now, in Naples, but in my feeling that I was by nature an outsider – not tied to any group. So I was encouraged by the authorities again to go off on my own, with this time no indication about when I should come back. It was too cold and wet to go to Ischia or Capri, so I set about looking for a room in the old part of Naples, by the harbour, where from tall buildings washing like flags was hung across narrow streets. This was the haunt of touts who would offer soldiers their ‘virgin’ sisters in return for cigarettes. I soon found a man who said he could find me a splendid apartment in return for very little money. So I was taken to a high unprepossessing building and up bleak flights of stairs to the home of an elderly and kind couple who showed me two beautifully furnished rooms, which they said I could rent. I moved in with my meagre kitbag, and sat on an antique sofa beneath an ornate gilded mirror, and I thought – This is the first place truly of my own that I have ever had; it gives rise to a form of ecstasy.

  I took up again my correspondence with my father that seemed to represent a sanity-seeking journey in contrast to that of war –

  Have just read the most enthralling little book called The Mysterious Universe by James Jeans. It appears that the physicists have indeed done away with the old theories of matter and energy, and have arrived by scientific means at much the same conclusions that Berkeley and Co hazarded in the 18th century. The point I find fascinating is the scientific conclusion that the universe as we know it cannot be composed of ultimate matter and energy, but only the reflections of ultimate reality in some Universal Mind. And we are only able to see these reflections as reflections again in our own mind. Now this is a very acceptable conclusion when it is come by scientifically, for although the Universal Mind seems to be the mind of a Pure Mathematician, and thus for ever somewhat beyond our comprehension, it does at least suggest that the Universal Mind has some affinity with our own feeble minds, thus giving us enormous significance in the universe when before it seemed as if we were of no account at all.

  And later –

  Before I came into contact with the physicists I had embarked on a rather dangerous heresy reasoning as follows: although we admit the hypothetical existence of God and Ultimate Reality, it appears that both are so irrevocably incomprehensible to us that there is no way by which man can approach them: Ultimate Reality is eternally indiscernible, and there is no reason to suppose that the will, intelligence or purpose of God is anywhere manifested upon earth, either in mankind or ‘nature’. Why do we suppose that we have in us that which is also in God?

  Reasoning thus, without the evidence of the physicists, I evolved a ‘man for man’s sake’ religion, the only ethics of which were those imposed by the conscience of the individual – a religion close to that of the terrible Frederick [Nietzsche]! Without the physicists’ evidence I think that was a reasonable view; but after my introduction to Jeans, I saw that there were very good grounds for the belief that ‘we have in us that which is also in God’; also that the natural world is in some way a reflection of eternal reality. However, in either philosophy our attitude to life can be much the same – the aim being always the perfecting of man and a possible creation of a higher type of man. Whether this is the end in itself – as it was with N – or merely the means whereby we may ultimately come in contact with Reality or Godhead, does not greatly matter. We shall doubtless know when the time comes. In the meantime to the sane man there can be only one attitude to life – to find a harmony between his consciousness and his instinct by a study of the world about him and the world that has gone before him, and an honest appreciation of the evidence thereby attained – and then to live in accordance with this harmony, always with the further purpose of increasing its range and imparting it to others. If ever a fairly universal harmony is obtained, a higher type of man will emerge. So long as the ignorant and prejudiced are in the vast majority, the harmonious man has to devote most of his energy to shielding himself from the insane clamour of the multitude; but if ever sanity is able to extend itself from the individual to society, then indeed I think there will be hope of higher creation.

  This particular would-be harmonious man continued on his way through a Naples winter. My old friend Anthony, back in Italy after having been treated for his wound in England, sought me out in the convalescent home and later came to stay with me in my flat. We went to the opera – Carmen, La Bohème, Faust, Turandot, La Traviata. Gigli and Maria Caniglia were said to be expected from Rome. We visited Herculaneum and Pompeii; we climbed Vesuvius. In the Officers’ Club we got drunk and belted out Neapolitan songs to the accompaniment of a rousing band, or swayed to sentimental yearnings about Santa Lucia or a return to Sorrento. Occasionally there were a few nurses at the club, and I remember going with one for a moonlit walk by the sea. But as I had found in Cairo, sex did not seem to have much point in war – unless, that is, one had something of the nature of a rapist.

  My friend from Ranby days, Raleigh Trevelyan, who had been badly wounded at Anzio, was now working for the Military Mission to the Italian Army in Rome, where the social life was more glamorous, and he suggested I should join him. He wrote, ‘I exchange pleasantries with Marchesas and dance on polished floors to the gramophone with Ambassadors’ daughters; every Friday I partake of tea and scones with the Princess Doria … the Vestal Virgins are preparing a bullock, snow white, to sacrifice in your honour; the priests of Dionysus are already weaving garlands to adorn the pillars of the temple.’ This was the old Ranby style of which I had been so fond and which I had got out of the way of with the London Irish Rifles. Later Raleigh wrote – ‘How unfashionable you are supporting Gigli! You’ll be a social failure in Rome.’

  I still had nostalgia for the Rifle Brigade style, although I had not wanted to go back to it. When Mervyn had been convalescing in Sorrento earlier in the year and I was still laid up in Florence, he had bumped into Anthony and they had got on so well together that they had hatched a plot for Anthony to join the LIR. So when Mervyn got back to the battali
on at the end of January 1945 – just as I arrived in Naples – he had spoken of this plan to our commanding officer, who had welcomed the idea, and had had a word with so-and-so who had had a word … and so on – and everything seemed to be in train for Anthony to join us until the Rifle Brigade got fed up and scotched the idea. In the meantime, however, Mervyn seemed to have become imbued with something of the old Ranby style and we wrote to each other about forming, with or without Anthony, a society of like-minded refugees from the earnest gung-ho spirit of war, to be known as the SDA or the Society of Decadent Anarchists. My two or three great friends and I already saw ourselves as forming what we referred to as a clique which felt itself aloof from conventional society; which made jokes about our current predicaments, and talked seriously about the meaning of life and God.

  But now, owing to the non-existence of papers about me, there seemed some doubt about my getting back into the war at all. I cannot remember the details of this: it seems so unlikely. I gather what I can from Mervyn’s letters. It appears that I really might have been free to go on doing as I wished – even to stay on indefinitely in my Naples flat. But then, might I not seriously be in some limbo for ever? A sort of non-person unable to get home? Mervyn wrote from the battalion who were now on the edge of the northern plain – ‘What I really want you to know is that you will not be sailing up the creek if you come here under your own steam.’ That is, the battalion would then sort things out. Mervyn spoke of huge St Patrick’s Day parties being planned. I thought – Surely there is no point in being an outsider unless one also has the choice of being an insider?

  So I set off on my own to rejoin the 2nd LIR towards the end of March. I bypassed Raleigh in Rome. I arrived at Forli on the edge of the plain, where the battalion were getting ready to celebrate a postponed St Patrick’s Day because on the proper day, 17 March, they had still been in the line. The winter breakthrough had never quite been achieved, but I was regaled with hair-raising stories of the latest battles on the banks of the canals and rivers that criss-crossed the eastern end of the Po valley.

  I was glad to be back in the battalion; to be with people with whom I had been through so much already. I wrote to my father –

  I still wonder at my good fortune at having found my way to this battalion. The Rifle Brigade was all very jolly in the insouciant days of Winchester and York, but out here I think I would have been stifled by their so carefully posed artificiality of decency. Here the atmosphere is almost Dionysian.

  When I went away in January I left behind my little translation of Zarathustra, with earnest instructions to one and all that they should read it before I came back. I find that they have followed my instructions to such good effect that the talk that floats around the mess at dinner time is not of obscenities or military pomposities to which one might have become resigned, but is full of erudite allusions to Will to Power, Superman, Feast of the Ass, etc.; which, although no one knows very well what he is talking about, I find most comforting. It is surely unique to find the Mess of an infantry battalion that discusses Zarathustra?

  On the postponed St Patrick’s Day we all got uproariously drunk. Anthony visited us briefly on his way to joining a battalion of the King’s Royal Rifle Corps. The London Irish were due to set off in a day or two on what at last could reasonably be hoped to be the final battle of the Italian campaign. We were all lined up for inspection before setting off when my batman, the one who had invited me to shoot him for refusing to obey an order, was seen to be swaying alarmingly. The Brigadier stopped in front of him and said, What’s wrong with you, my good man?’ My batman said, ‘Sir, I’m drunk.’

  11

  This was now the second week in April 1945. For the advance across the promised land of the Po valley and the northern plain we were for the first time since Cassino a year ago going to work with tanks and the support of heavy artillery; also now there would be fighter-bombers overhead ready to be called up to deal with opposition if it became serious. The tank regiment we were going to work with was the fashionable 9th Lancers, with two or three of whose officers I had been at school. We eyed one another warily: what on earth was I doing with the London Irish Rifles? Once I would have thought – But I’m not ‘with’ anyone. Now I was rather pleased to be seen as being allied to something unfashionable.

  The Irish Brigade was set to advance through something called the Argenta Gap – a stretch of artificially drained land at the eastern end of the Po valley, which lay between areas that had been flooded. The Fusiliers and Inniskillings were to make the initial breakthrough across the Senio and Santerno rivers; then the London Irish were to exploit this, working in teams with tanks – one troop of tanks to each platoon. The infantry were to be carried in armoured personnel carriers known as Kangaroos – three to a platoon – consisting of the bodies of tanks or self-propelled guns with the turrets or armaments removed. When the going was straightforward the tanks would go ahead and be in charge; when they came across anti-tank opposition they would stop and give covering fire while the infantry dismounted and took charge and did a textbook attack on foot. With luck, we were told, the enemy would surrender.

  This was my first experience of what might be called the heroic aspect of war – the sort of thing Germans must have experienced in Poland and France in 1939 and 1940 and in the earliest days of the Russian campaign: tanks rolling across flat country and people emerging with their hands up and what little opposition there was being dive-bombed while those in tanks could watch as if at an air show. Here in Italy people came out from villages and farmsteads with flowers and bottles of wine and the offer of kisses. In the fields there was the occasional German tank now burning and with a body perhaps hanging like a rag doll from the turret.

  It was not, of course, always like this. Once a neighbouring Kangaroo was hit by an anti-tank shell and the people in my carrier were showered with bits of blood and bone. Then there were the times when we were on foot again and doing our training-ground attacks – ‘One and two sections round on the right, three section give covering fire!’ But more often than not, yes, when we got to our objective the enemy had disappeared. With us gaining in confidence I could even try out a more democratic form of leadership, about the feasibility of which I had wondered. Once, when the tanks had been held up by some anti-tank fire from a farmstead and I had ordered – ‘Dismount! We’ll go round by that ditch’, a voice from my platoon piped up – ‘Sir, wouldn’t it be better if we went round in the carriers as far as that clump of trees and then dismounted?’ And I saw the sense of this, so I shouted – ‘You’re absolutely right! Everyone back in the carriers!’ And by the time we eventually got to our objective the enemy was indeed pulling out. My platoon seemed to appreciate this readiness to change one’s mind, though it would probably only have worked in a war as good as won.

  There was a constant problem with prisoners. As we advanced from Argenta towards Ferrara, more and more Germans were waiting for us with their hands up. We could not easily spare the men to escort them back, yet the time had not come when we could leave them to their own devices. On the second or third day of our advance the tank major who was nominally in command of our infantry platoon told us, when given out his daily orders, that we were taking too many prisoners. He repeated – Did we understand? We were taking too many prisoners. One of us, probably Desmond Fay, quietly spat on the ground. And we went on taking too many prisoners.

  In Richard Doherty’s History of the Irish Brigade the story of this advance is one of strategies and deployments of forces: this many regiments of field artillery here; that number of specially equipped tanks for crossing ditches and clearing mines there; such and such squadrons of planes on call overhead in what was called a ‘cab-rank’. The plans and orders were precise; also what could be said to have succeeded and what could not. But there was not much need to talk of failure. Instead, there were statistics: the Irish Brigade had taken prisoner ‘twenty-two officers and 2,000 other ranks’; casualties inflicted had be
en ‘far greater’; ‘seven mark IV German tanks were knocked out by the 9th Lancers for the loss of only one of their own’. From what I could see I did not think that there were many casualties on either side: certainly not on ours, apart from those in the carrier that had been hit. But what stays in my memory, as at Cassino, was the impression that no individual could know much of what was going on; one had to wait and see when it was over. But here it could indeed be felt that things were going well, and I began to think I understood something of what those ghastly Nazi armies must have felt as they bludgeoned their way smiling across Poland, France, Russia; until nemesis caught up with them and the homes they had left behind were utterly flattened, and there was no heroic ideology for them to come back to. I wrote to my father –

  It is a happier form of warfare than any we have done before, but I find it exhibits the most unfortunate characteristics of one’s nature. I actually find this conquest and pursuit faintly enjoyable – and at last understand the fatal temptation of aggression. But nevertheless it is for the most part tedious, and I am irked by the feeling that the end ever remains the same distance from us even as we advance.