I arranged a new nook for myself on the first floor of a hayloft; it was exposed to the shelling, but away from the attention of rats. I began to fantasise about how one might get out of this futile situation by a discreet self-inflicted accident: would this be more or less reprehensible now that I had got an MC? I imagined I might fall from my hayloft on to the concrete floor below with one leg tucked under the other in a yoga position: might this not give me a not too-badly broken leg which would get me back to hospital? But after a time luck was once more with me. I awoke one morning shivering and sweating with something other than fear; the Medical Officer confirmed I had a high temperature and diagnosed malaria. So off I went in an ambulance, bumping painfully over potholed roads, but how happy to be on a magical mystery tour again to — where? — Florence? Rome? Even Naples?
I wrote to my sister from Florence –
Jan 13th. I have malaria, or at least I am told I have by the learned doctors who prod my stomach. I maintain it is jaundice, and contest them every inch of the way, but they continue to pump me with quinine until I am stone deaf and sick every three minutes. I have not even the consolation of being unexpectedly out of the line — for just before I left had been offered a fearfully smart job for 2 months at the Div Training School, where I would have been a Captain and reasonably comfortable.
Jan 14th. I have triumphed over the forces of science. It is jaundice, which apparently is treated far more seriously, and I am to be evacuated back, and the further back the happier I shall be. I don’t know if I shall quite make Naples, but I should drift as far as Rome.
But I did go all the way to Naples, and then on to a convalescent home in Sorrento, which as it happened was next door to the hotel in which I had stayed with my father and sister and stepmother in 1936. In hospital and on my journeys down I had been thinking — If ever in later life I come to write about all this I must try to find a style in which to express the contradictions of war — the coincidence of luck and endurance; of farce and fear; of anarchy and meaning.
From Sorrento I wrote my sister a long letter in which I tried to say what I thought I had learned from war. The direction of my arrogance had somewhat changed, but did not seem to be done away with. I wrote –
I went into this war with certain pompous opinions about my virtues and capabilities but amongst them were absolutely no pretensions that I would make a good soldier. I thought that all business-minded men would be 100 times better at organisation than myself, and I thought that all the earnest hearties who seriously believed in the righteousness of this war would be 100 times more brave. After twelve months in Italy I realised that I was wrong: I did not underestimate my own abilities; I overestimated almost everyone else’s. And this startles me considerably; for I, as you know, consider this war a blasphemous stupidity, and yet in a spirit of unwilling desperation I have put more into the winning of it than most of those who say they consider it a holy crusade against the powers of the Devil.
I still do not think I have any pretensions about myself as a soldier. When things are not dangerously active I am intensely and professedly idle. Every minute I have to give to this war I grudge angrily. And when things are dangerously active I go about my business in a spirit of complete misery. And yet I have the reputation of being in action a model subaltern.
It is interesting to note that after 12 months of fighting I will forgive anyone the old failings — the boorishness, the stupidity, the dullness — if he does not possess the failings of a bad soldier. That boils down to the realisation that out here the only thing that matters tuppence in a man is his ability to be brave. That is the only standard by which one judges anyone. For if they are not brave, it is 10 to I that they are miserably hypocritical as well.
Now there are incredibly few people who do possess this virtue. Those who possess it least are those who preach most lustily about the holiness of the war crusade. Fortunately in my Battalion nearly everyone does possess it: they do not remain long if they don’t; and that is why I am able to get on very well with them, whereas before I would have been driven into my frenzy of petulance by their shortcomings. But this breeds tolerance for people who are fundamentally worthy. The war is a head-sweller to the few who fight it, but it produces a lofty, cynical, benign swollen head — which does not rant nor strut but maintains an almost reverent humility towards anyone who knows why and whereof it is swollen. So when you see me although you may find me complacent I hope it does not take too odious a form. On the whole I think the tolerance and humility with those who understand will be far more prominent than the other feelings. But you will find out!
I tried to explain to my sister the origins of my feeling an outsider. My sister and I had been very close as children: with both our parents so often away (my mother as well as my father had been for four years a Labour MP) we had come to depend on one another; we told each other fantasy stories in which we were literally orphans in a storm — marooned on a desert island or on a raft. My sister dealt with our situation with considerable boldness if not confidence; I was likely to get in desperate rages and try to hide myself away. Now my sister wrote to me that our brother Michael, aged twelve, was behaving in much the same way as I had done; and what should she do? In the same long letter in which I wrote to her about myself in the war, I wrote about what it seemed that such a child has to contend with –
The trouble begins when a child (or youth or what-have-you) has a constructively vivid imagination, an intolerant but quick mind, and a sensitive but intensely self-centred nature. Which is what I had and Mick has. So soon as such a child begins to think he will form certain ideas in his imagination which are made very strong and definite by the quickness and intolerance of his mind, and are very real to him owing to the virulence of his imagination. The most important of these ideas, owing to his self-centred nature, will be his ideas of himself and of how things and people ought to behave in relation to himself. Gradually as these ideas grow in clarity, and his sensitiveness and intolerance grow in intensity, he will have an increasing horror of anything that does not conform to these ideas, a horror which in some exaggerated cases becomes almost physical. Thus when he is faced with conditions which are antipathetic to his ideas, his revolt against them is spontaneous and unavoidable. In his revolt he can do one of two things. He can either try to change the conditions or he must run from them. But a child cannot change his conditions because he is neither strong enough nor has a definite enough idea what to change them to. So he sulks. He runs away. It is an almost physical reaction.
Does this explain my behaviour? I did not understand it at the time. All I knew was that in certain conditions I reacted in a way which I really could not control. I am not very clear even now as to what those conditions were, but you will remember the numerous examples as well as I. I think ‘artificiality’ and ‘unpleasantness’ were the chief characteristics of the conditions I abhorred. But these are vague terms, and it is fruitless to try to analyse them accurately. And the ‘artificiality’ or ‘unpleasantness’ was always relative only to me. Viewed dispassionately, there was very often nothing objectionable in the conditions at all. It was all a matter of how they acted on my frame of mind at the moment.
I wrote briefly and not analytically about my stammer –
On the surface I suppose it is a tragedy. Certainly without it I should have shone much more than I did at Eton. Even in the army it probably stops me from promotion. But the stammer forced me away from all superficial contacts, from all superficialities in fact. And although on the face of it this was unfortunate and forbade much material ‘success’, I am presumptuous enough to feel that it led to many developments in a more fundamental way. It taught me to think and to judge, to see things at more than their superficial values; to rely on more than affability to show my worth. If the stammer eventually goes, I am convinced it will have done me more good than harm. If it stays, at least it will have been of some advantage early in life, when I might so easily have become a vacant lout. I think myself it will go in time.