Memoirs of a Private Man Read Online Free PDF Page A

preserve an independent judgement anyhow.
    Saturday the 8th of August 1914 was a warm summery day, but towards noon the sky clouded over and it was beginning to rain, as it sometimes does in Manchester.
    I had wandered in from outside; my mother was in the kitchen with the maid, so I went into the drawing room. This was unoccupied – only the piano looked tempting; but I went back into the hall and thence to the dining room. My father, sober and grave, was standing on one side of the fireplace and my brother, rosy cheeks and eyes glinting, was on the other. They were discussing an event which had occurred the previous Tuesday; Britain, in defence of Belgium, had declared war on Germany.
    I remember exactly what my brother excitedly said as I came in. ‘It’ll be a regular flare up!’ My father gravely shook his head. But neither of them dreamed that my brother would eventually grow to be old enough to be drawn in. When he was, in late 1917, he was drafted into the South Wales Borderers and began his training at Kinmel Park, North Wales. It was known locally as Kill’em Park, because of the dozens of young men who died there from pneumonia and allied diseases before they got anywhere near a German. I remember going to see him once, trailing with my mother across what seemed like miles to a great flat camp where he appeared abruptly at the door of a wooden hut, pale and suddenly thin and with an appalling cough.
    Later he was transferred to Newmarket, and in the early spring of 1918 was sent to France. People said to my mother, ‘Oh, they won’t put him in the firing line – they’ll keep him in the rear, he’s far too young.’ In fact he went straight in and was in the thick of the great Ludendorff Offensive that sent the Allies reeling and prompted Haig’s famous ‘Backs to the Wall’ message. One day my mother got a telegram from the War Office. With terrified fingers she fumbled it open to see that her lance corporal son had been ‘wounded but remained on duty’. In fact a shell splinter had cut his face just below the eye. Had it been an inch higher it would probably have killed him and so altered not only his destiny but mine and that of scores of other people, since without his pressure we might not have moved to Cornwall. So all one’s destiny is controlled and decided by the direction of a flying splinter.
    In September 1918, to his family’s profound relief, he was sent home to train for a commission. It was to be in the Machine Gun Corps, which was known in the army as the Suicide Club; but before he could go back to France the Armistice came.
    It must all have been a shattering experience for a boy just out of school, a genteel boy who had never been away from home. I remember the maid picking the lice off his shirt when he came home. He was so inured to maiming and death that during a ninehour German bombardment at the beginning of the Ludendorff Offensive, he sat all the time on a box of Mills bombs in a mudfilled trench listening to a solitary British gun, an eighteen-pounder, persisting with its lonely reply. His only company was two members of his platoon, and they were dead.
    Yet when he himself lay dying nearly seventy years later I sat by his bed and somehow the question of the war came up, and he said: ‘I wouldn’t have missed it for anything.’ Such is the oddity of human nature.
    By the end of the war he was just twenty and his natural destination in a dishevelled civilian world would have been a position with his father at D. Mawdsley & Co. But the objections of my uncle, who had four sons coming on, blocked this, so he took a position with a firm of cotton shippers called Jones, London & Garrard, who shortly offered him a post as their chief representative in Hong Kong. It was a brilliant opportunity, with high pay and fine prospects, but he turned it down; his nine months in France had convinced him that he wanted no