Time at War (7 page)

Assaults by the New Zealand Division and the 4th Indian Division were planned for February, but before one of the divisional commanders would commit his troops he insisted that the monastery should be heavily bombed. This was agreed by higher command; so the huge and beautiful eleventh-century monastery was needlessly flattened by repeated waves of heavy bombers, and the Germans, who in accordance with an agreement with the Vatican had not been within it, were now able to occupy the rubble and construct defensive positions better than
any that would have been available to them before. So that when the New Zealanders and Indians did attack in February, both assaults were a complete and calamitous failure.

The London Irish, standing by in Capua ready to exploit any breakthrough, heard rumours of all this; and were ready to believe, yes, that those in command could be so stupid. And then, in March, there was renewed heavy bombing: statistics later stated that 1,100 tons of bombs were dropped by 450 heavy bombers on and around the monastery and town of Cassino for three and a half hours – after which attacks went in with as little success as ever. The bombing this time had made it impossible for Allied tanks to get over the rubble on the approaches to the town and the Rapido river.

General Fuller was later to write that the winter battle for Monte Cassino in 1943-4 was ‘tactically the most absurd and strategically the most senseless of the whole war.'

The London Irish had been moved to a forward position by the river; we wondered if we were about to become the next wave of sacrificial victims. But there we stayed, because the tanks that were supposed to accompany us were stuck. Some time during this period I went back for a few days to a casualty clearing station for treatment for a bad attack of piles. This seemed symbolic. From the CCS I wrote to my old prep-school friend –

I am in hospital, or rather I am clinging to a collapsible bed and 3 thick blankets while a tempest of wind and
rain fritters about me. We are supposed to be sheltered by the tent, but that gave up trying after the first icy blast, and it is now a matter between the elements and the individual.

There is one lonely figure here who has no boots. He was carried in on a stretcher weeks, months, perhaps years ago; but they carried him in with no boots. He was better within a very few days, but he had no boots, so he could not get out of bed to go away, and no one would lend him any boots. So he stays in bed and every morning the doctor comes round and says, ‘What is the matter with you?' And the lonely figure says, ‘I have no boots.' And the doctor clicks his tongue and takes the l.f.'s temperature and feels his pulse, and wanders sadly away. The Man With No Boots lies in bed and dreams of enormous galoshes and waders and wooden clogs, but they will never let him out because he has No Boots.

The impertinent fools who are in authority in this place have seen fit to place me on what they call a Light Diet – an amount of food so indescribably paltry as would not satisfy one of the worms that operate in my stomach. But la! Once more is the Philistine confounded, for on either side of me are men suffering most horribly from malaria, who vomit food up as fast as they put it down, and I have, by a simple process of logic, explained to them how much more satisfactory it would be if I put their food down where it will stay and feed my worms, while they will be eased of the necessity to vomit. And thus I eat 2 men's rations and my worms are surfeited (but my pile too for that
matter). Unfortunately the men continue to vomit, but on an empty stomach, which is much worse, but I really can't be bothered to explain any more to them; although I am afraid that one day they may vomit themselves right away, and then I will not be able to eat their food, about which I shall be very sorry.

I recovered. I rejoined the battalion who were still waiting by the banks of the Rapido river because the tanks were still stuck. So we were sent into the mountains to the north-west of the monastery to relieve a Free French battalion who in the winter had outflanked the monastery from this side and had got as far as Monte Castellone, a rocky ridge even higher (2,500 feet) than the monastery hill and halfway round its back. But there the French had had to stop because the other attacks had failed. The higher command wanted to hold on to Castellone because from there one could look down on the monastery; but the Germans were on even higher ground beyond, so they could look down on Castellone, and any movement on it or to it could only take place at night. And even then the Germans were shelling the ridge and the approaches to it in the valley with great accuracy. And after we had crossed the valley there was a four-hour climb with mules to carry the heaviest equipment up a steep and rocky track. The shells continued but went whooshing over our heads on to the headquarters area below; but on the slippery track – it seemed always to be raining – mules were likely to slip and fall into a chasm, and if injured they had to be left with just the equipment being rescued.
When we reached the summit of Castellone the shelling intensified and the French were, understandably, in a hurry to get out. This was the chance for a usual English grumble about French volatility.

It was too rocky to dig trenches on top of Castellone, so just on the near slope the French had constructed shelters with stones known as sangers – about five foot by four by four foot high. Within each of these during daylight hours at least two men were entombed; any movement visible from outside brought on the shelling. Most of the shells hit the ridge just short of the top, sending up showers of stones, or went screeching over into the valley below. But once, I was convinced, one ricocheted horizontally off the roof of the sanger where my sergeant and I were huddled; bits of our roof collapsed, but there was no explosion.

Rations could only be distributed at night, so during the day my sergeant and I would face each other eating stew out of a tin and at some point – there was nothing else for it – we would use an empty tin to shit in. There were the inevitable jokes: Can you tell the difference?

My sergeant and I would stretch and flex our muscles, and sometimes offer our opinions about our present predicament and the meaning of life. From the small opening of our sanger we could see the destroyed monastery above which even now dive-bombers circled like lazy wasps, then swooped down for the sting. My sergeant and I agreed that it was a terrible crime to have bombed the monastery; but if we were in command of attacking forces and we thought that bombing was going to save the lives of our men including ourselves then, possibly, yes, we would
order it. I had carried a vastly heavy book up the mountain in my pack – I think it was
The Brothers Karamazov.
I read its convolutions with my body contorted to catch the scarce light.

At night we had to go on night patrols, which did not seem to make sense because we could not go more than a few yards over the top of the ridge without danger of slithering into a chasm. The army had an obsession about night patrols, believing that they kept troops on their toes – which, in our cramped daytime conditions, was possibly true. So we would creep out a short distance over the ridge and find a suitable stone to sit on (I once found my ‘stone' was a frozen corpse) and from there watch the firework display of tracer bullets and flares going on in the area of the town and the monastery. Then every four day's we would go back down into the valley for a days rest and sleep – though the long climb down and back up the rocky path seemed to make the short break hardly worthwhile. After a month on Castellone we were relieved by a Polish regiment (with whom we professed to communicate better than with the French) and we returned to the area where we had been waiting before behind the Rapido river, where still nothing much seemed to be happening. But we were told that we could take turns to go on a few days' leave and I chose to go to Maiori, on the southern side of the Sorrento peninsula.

I had stopped writing my diary by this time; almost my last entry was about when I had been taken prisoner at Montenero. Then I had written – ‘It seems that this chronicle of an Unsentimental Journey has had its day.'
So I remember almost nothing about my days at Maiori, except that the place was beautiful, and that it was somewhere that my father and sister and stepmother and I had visited eight years earlier. So what did I think now might be a sentimental journey? Perhaps after Montenero I should try to make some reappraisal of my relationship with my father?

In my correspondence with my father about Christianity and Nietzsche when I had been at Ranby, I had written –

I see everything as a possibility, and have not the conviction to decide what is Truth and what is Right. I do not see how one can ever have this conviction, and even if one has it, why should one presume that one's convictions are right? My reason tells me what theories are the most possible, the most likely, the most desirable; but it needs more than Reason to put any theory across; it needs a great Faith. And my Reason tells me that it is dangerous to trust in Faith, for how does one know that one's Faith is Right? And so I am stuck; and am likely to remain so, I feel, until I am old and wise enough to have Faith in my Reason.

When I had reached Italy and had learned of my father's release from prison I had felt it vital that I should make my home with him after the war. But then, after I had been taken prisoner by the Germans and escaped, I felt that this in a sense was my liberation from my father; but also, strangely, that I was now able to express my gratitude to him – for having given me my taste and love for ideas;
also given me, perhaps by appreciating my outpourings, the confidence to be free of him. A few days after my experience at Montenero I had written him a letter in which I referred obliquely to the incident, then ended with a declaration so extravagantly sentimental that perhaps it could only be a farewell to what I was getting away from –

I had been wandering like Shaw's Caesar ‘seeking the lost regions whence I came from which my birth into this world exiled me'. It is true that I have found many islands – immortal islands with the greatest friends that a man ever had – but I was always without home within the ocean of this spirit-world until one day I went to Holloway to visit a stranger – and then I knew that I had found the lost regions'; that my home was always where it had been destined to be, and that I was not alone among the waters of eternity. And now I do not believe that I can ever be entirely unhappy again: destiny has taken us thus far; it cannot be that such great promise is not to be fulfilled.

Such a feeling of gratitude can perhaps be instilled by parental approval? But what on earth its fulfilment might be will have to wait till the end of this story.

In these war years I could hardly remember my father as the person that I had indeed only caught glimpses of when I was a child – the ranting, belligerent, political figure in his black shirt or uniform; marching and strutting and roaring on platforms and on the tops of vans; what on
earth was it that had got into him (rather, than, it seemed, what had he got into)? For the most part he had kept us children away from his politics. And then, in his letters to me from Holloway, he was so calm, patient, considerate. (I have published a selection of his letters to me in the second volume of my biography of him,
Beyond the Pale.)
There is one passage however that comes to my mind now when I look at the paradoxes of my father's personal life and his politics. This was when we had been discussing the nature of what might be understood as ‘beyond good and evil' when one was considering the horrors and yet the apparent necessity of war. He had written –

We are therefore driven back towards a conception of suffering – of all the phenomena that are shortly called evil in the experience of man – as fulfilling some creative purpose in the design of existence: back in fact to the Faustian Riddle, usually stated with the utmost complexity but for once with curious crudity in the Prologue in Heaven [in Goethe's
Faust]
when the Lord says to Mephistopheles – The activity of man can all too lightly slumber; therefore I give him a companion who stimulates and works and must, as Devil, create.'
Faust
is meant to cover the whole panorama of human experience; but I believe this to be, on the whole, the main thesis of its innumerable profundities.

And indeed, from my father's inveterate cheerfulness in the calamitous failures and destruction of his politics – in his evident serenity even in prison – it does seem to me
that he sometimes saw himself (as indeed others saw him) as a sort of pantomime black devil who felt he had some God-given Mephistophelean role in putting over attitudes and points of view that were not otherwise being considered; alternative proposals to an all-too-easy traditional reliance on war; other forms of discipline and endeavour. And it also perhaps explains why my father could almost always laugh – at least with me – at the ridiculousness of much of worldly goings-on, even his own; and who would wish his biography to be written after his death by someone who had known and loved him not for his politics but for what had been the wit and liveliness of his seeing his Mephistophelean role.

He hated war. His proposals to prevent it had involved, it is true, trying to turn the country into a sort of harmonious Boy Scout camp run by an impossibly benign elite. He at times even seemed to understand that this was not possible (indeed the so-called elite became very quickly malignant), though he thought it had to be tried. He used to tell the story of a conversation he had once had with Lord Beaverbrook, to whom he had said – ‘You are lucky in England to have got me as a fascist leader; you might have got someone far worse!'

When I got back to the battalion they still had not moved, and it was now the first week in May; time was running out for the big push if there was to be any chance of it reaching the northern plain before winter. However, we were now told that it had been decided to attack direct across the Rapido river to the south and thus bypass the monastery and the town; and that the enemy's powers of observation from these would be blocked out by smoke shells. One wondered why this had not been thought of before.