Mervyn had been carried off to hospital after Spinello. I had a letter from him from Arezzo –
Dear Nick, I have been thinking a great deal about you lately, which goes without saying. I was so glad to see Mann the signaller chap who said you were safe enough and coming out of the line for a bit. I hope it is for a long time. This letter is really to get you to write some account of what happened after I left. I will not hold forth in a long and boring screed myself because I cannot write very well my left arm being in a sling. I am well enough and I suppose will be in bed for about a fortnight. Your performance at Casa Spinello was great. I told the CO and the rough draft of a recommendation I sent from the hospital is with this letter. I was very fed up with myself at the Casa. I reckon myself pretty good in battle, but my performance there was the worst ever. It was certainly your greatest ever but anyway we had better not begin such a discussion by post. Pray write. Love to Fitz, Desmond and Co. Yours, Mervyn.
It had not seemed to anyone else that Mervyn’s performance at Spinello had not been great. He too had been put up for an award, as had Desmond; and Corporals Tomkinson and McClarnon on my recommendation. Because the battle of Spinello had been such an important one for the whole division, it had been watched by the brigadier and the 78th Division general through binoculars from a vantage point on a distant hill. So its fame had spread.
We were not out of the line for as long as Mervyn had hoped; then there were night patrols again — and these were not always now an uneventful game. There was one position where we were separated from the Germans by a shallow valley along which a road ran between us and them; halfway along this road there was a bridge over a small river. It was not feasible for either us or the Germans to occupy this bridge during the day, but for some military reason it was considered crucial by both sides to be in possession of it at night. So every evening at dusk there was a race to see who would get to the bridge first: if we started too early we got shot up by the Germans in the light; if we started too late we got shot up in the dark by Germans who had got there first. At regular intervals it came to be the turn of my platoon to do this race. This was the sort of nerve-racking routine that made people break down during this long and wearying winter. There were, in fact, one or two officers who said they could not go on. This was understood by higher authority; they were not persecuted as they would have been in the First World War; they were sent back to jobs at the base. Any fear of this leading to a spate of such occurrences did not materialise. If one had not had pride, one would not have been in the front line anyway.
From one of our positions I wrote to my father –
I have constructed for myself a pleasantly secluded little dungeon in the rubble of a ruined house, about 7ft by 5ft and 3ft high, in which I hibernate for 24 hours a day, passing the time happily in communing with the less lofty Muses, concocting grotesque dishes of tinned food to fry over a tiny petrol fire, and beating off the savage assaults of many rats who share my compartment. For a limited period I am strangely content to exist thus. Unfortunately the higher Muses cannot be invoked because one has not yet achieved the degree of detachment whereby the inquiring mind can free itself from bodily squalor.
But then from the luxury of a tent in the valley –
Have been reading quite a lot of Shakespeare and Ibsen — food for interesting comparison. But it seems to me that the greatness of both as artists depends on the fact that they are neither of them profound or ardent philosophers. Thus they produce art for art’s sake; even Ibsen, who is careful in his plays never to solve the problems he presents; or if he does, to contradict his first solution in a later play, thus using social, moral and spiritual problems merely as a framework for his art. This leads me to wonder if philosophy and perfect art can ever be reconciled. In Goethe, perhaps you would say? But that is a subject I know little about.
I was still dreaming about possibilities for life after the war. For so long even before the war the family had been split — with my father, my stepmother and my half-brothers in their beautiful house in Derbyshire; my sister, brother and Nanny in my mother’s old home at Denham, Bucks, under the eye of my Aunt Irene; and myself happy to move between the two. Then, at the start of the war the Derbyshire house had been relinquished, the house at Denham had been requisitioned by some hush-hush scientific establishment, and my brother Micky and Nanny had gone to stay with my other aunt, Baba, in Gloucestershire. Now my father and Diana were settled into a new house and — and what? It seemed that only I thought it feasible that we should all get together again. Eventually I wrote to my sister — ‘If Daddy does not want to accept the Micky guardianship of course it puts everything in a different light. I totally agree with you that we must not forget the old Aunt Nina — Nanny ties, and if, as you say, we cannot combine them with the Daddy ties, they must be kept separate but intact.’
And as if to assure each other of the sanctity of old childhood ties, when I came to give my sister a first intimation of the battle of Casa Spinello, in order to divert the attention of the censor I described it as if it had been one of our children’s games –
I have been playing the Cornwall game with a bunch of the most energetic Germans, who defended their base with distressing determination. However, it was the long run round the kitchen garden that did it in the end, and the crafty lurk on top of the garden wall; and then we were into the swimming-pool area, too close for sight, and the poor dears are not very good when it comes to touch. But serioso, the lionesque games are an excellent training for this sort of life. We had a little skirmish around a farmhouse, the success of which I attribute very largely to my ability to leap over staircases, vanish into lavatories, and come crashing through the plaster of a roof.
Then, when we got to the place where there was the race each night to the bridge over the river –
I find that lions in the open with the Germans is not nearly so exhilarating as lions in the house. In fact it is pure hell. I am at the moment horribly war-weary and longing for a little wound in the arm again.
I was granted four days’ leave in Florence. I remember little of this, my first visit to Florence, except that the museums and galleries were closed with their works of art in crates in the cellars. So the beautiful buildings had more than ever the air of fortresses, of a town fashioned by war, the home of the Medicis and Savonarola. But then, was it not true that great art had been produced in time of war when people had been in daily confrontation with danger and death, with extremes of evil and sanctity? In my memory the statues of Michelangelo’s David and Cellini’s Perseus were still on show in the square. Or must these have been copies? I remember absurdly bribing my way into the locked Bargello Museum and in the basement staring at a crate that was said to contain Donatello’s David.
I had another letter from Mervyn, who was now in hospital in Rome. He was distressed to hear that the reinforcements he had asked to be sent up to Spinello had walked into the minefield, and that their company commander, Ronnie Boyd, had been killed.
Dear Nick, I feel in a frantic letter-writing mood so I am going to set about you. I have been lying in bed (in many hospitals, in many places) and saying to myself every day — now you must do something more than reading Esquire and get on to reading something intense like Nietzsche; and writing copious notebooks which no one will ever read except yourself. But every day has been just the same, and I still stare weakly at Esquire, different copies of which appear from I don’t know where.