Time at War Read Online Free PDF

after dark because it was feared we might overconfidently light cigarettes which, we were assured, could be spotted by a U-boat miles away. Down in the stiflingly hot lower decks the mass of other ranks swayed and sweated in hammocks, and were sick. On a slightly higher level, in four-berth cabins, members of the old
Juke Box
clientele lay in comatose but still decorous states of undress. Then after a few days the weather cleared, and we thought we recognised the Rock of Gibraltar on our left.
    I wondered – Would we be like Aeneas who, on his way to Rome from Troy, had stopped off at Carthage, near Tunis, and had had a fine time making love to Dido? Butthen he had abandoned her to carry on with war, and she had committed suicide.
    It turned out that the
Vollendam
was heading for Philippeville, indeed somewhere halfway between Algiers and the old Carthage. I had arranged a code with my sister whereby I might be able to tell her in letters, without too obviously breaking the censorship regulations, where we landed up. My sister’s and my mythology was less Greek or Roman than 1930s films; so from Algeria I wrote to her, ‘We might be able to visit Jean Gabin or Charles Boyer.
    But how little had the style of mythology changed from the time of the ancient Greeks! They had loved stories of suffering and war: we now in films loved stories of sacrifice and grief. Why were there no myths of people getting on sensibly with peace?
    Near Philippeville we stayed for two months in a camp, four officers to a tent, among sand dunes. We bathed in a dangerous sea; we drank red wine and played poker and bridge. For a while we enjoyed the holiday atmosphere. I wrote to my sister – ‘Yesterday we played football in a temperature equivalent to the melting-point of flesh: ten effete and flabby young officers beat eleven horny old Scotsmen who have sulked most ungraciously ever since.’
    But then it seems we got homesick because I and some others volunteered for the parachute regiment. We understood that to succeed in this would get us back to England for a while; but when tested I was judged to be too tall and too myopic. We were sent on manoeuvres with armoured cars in the desert; during one scrimmage with the ‘enemy’ I reported to my father – ‘I captured an enormous Captainin a hush-hush job whose face seemed vaguely familiar. Unfortunately I treated him with respect, for it turned out to be Randolph Churchill. If I had known earlier I would have thrown him into a dungeon.’ When I was a child Randolph Churchill had been a good friend of my father’s; now he was so no longer.
    I began to have renewed fantasies about how, if or when I did eventually get into the fighting, it might indeed be sensible to be taken prisoner. What was this human lust for war? I had paid my respects to it, but I did not need to remain part of it for ever. And in prison camp I might be able to spend the rest of the war profitably studying and practising writing. This was to a large extent a joke – yet not totally. The war really did seem to be as good as won; and what was the point of being killed in what seemed to be everyone’s insistence on unconditional surrender or destruction? And surely my father was right when he said that the only real winners would be the Russians and Americans? I wrote to my sister – ‘The whole thing is so obviously absurd, so tremendously ridiculous.’
    My sister became my chief correspondent when I was abroad; I had no regular girlfriend. My sister and I had always been close as children, like orphans in a storm. As I grew older I felt allegiance to my small circle of school friends, but my sister was never excluded from the style and substance of this. From Philippeville I wrote to her –
    Last week I was whirled away darkly at dead of night to guard some Italian prisoners, which I found most agreeable, the Italians waiting on me hand and foot, and meeating