Time at War (3 page)

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 exertions 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.

I have become involved in a correspondence upon the Church with Aunty Nina. She was rather sensible about my fierce attack on the C of E, but one of her East End priests to whom she sent on my letter wrote me the
most absurdly half-witted reply which only aggravated the grievance. I really do believe that these men do not understand what they say – which perhaps is best, for it is happier for them to be charged with ignorance and stupidity than with gross perversion and distortion. I'm afraid Nina thinks I have become over-influenced by Nietzsche. Which is untrue, for as I have said, with N's ethical values I have no sympathy.

Later, however, I learned that my anti-C of E diatribe had been sent by my other aunt, my mother's younger sister Baba, to her own favourite priest who happened to be a Father Talbot, Superior of the Anglican Community of the Resurrection – which, as things turned out, was to play such a large and vital part in my life years later. I wrote to my father –

Baba's priest was a very good find – far less bogus than Nina's, and very tolerant of my rather wild and woolly criticism. I seem to spend most of my spare time writing long and intricate religious letters; which does not help very much. Like GBS I ask the most searching questions, attempt far too vaguely to answer them, and finish in much the same muddle as I began. But it does keep one's mind feebly ticking over, when one might, in the circumstances, so easily be mentally dead.

In August I wrote to my aunt to say that at the end of the month I would be coming on embarkation leave before being sent abroad to heaven knows where. My aunt and
my sister Vivien and my brother Michael and our old Nanny, who was now housekeeper and cook, would be staying in a small holiday house on the north Cornwall coast, and I said I would join them there. I wrote – ‘Eventually one will have to look at the world objectively and to decide what is to be one's relation to it; whether to fight the horror or run from it; to search for perfection in the solitude of one's own beliefs, or in the greater struggle for external fulfilment. At the moment however everything is unkindly settled for me, and thus all I can do is sulk or giggle'

In Cornwall we swam and surfed and picnicked and climbed about on the rocks; we played cards in the evening; we had a good time. I was among people with whom I had spent the best part of my life and whom I loved. But it seemed that we did not quite know what to say to each other about my going off to war: what can one say? My aunt wrote in her diary that I was defensive about my father and was ‘shatteringly crude and offensive about Christ'. Perhaps it was not possible for me after all just to sulk or giggle.

One of the last things I did before embarking on the troopship at Liverpool was to go with my grandmother to the Home Office and put in a request to a high-up official that my father should be released from prison; he could surely, we argued, no longer be considered a security risk. And he had phlebitis, which was getting worse, and his doctor had said that without a reasonable chance of exercise he might die. Watching the Home Office official, I felt I could see the levers of his mind clicking this way
and that; but whether to the unlocking of prison doors or not I could not tell. My grandmother said, ‘This is his son who is going off to war.' I wondered— Could it make any difference, my going off to war?