We eventually had to hand over the cars we had taken as loot. Some officers came to arrangements with local farmers to keep and hide their cars until such a time as they could come and pick them up when they were out of the army.
There was still much to do with the huge number of German soldiers and officials who were keen to give themselves up — for the reason that they wanted to be fed, as well as not to fall into the hands of the Russians. From the crowds of these there had to be weeded out and interrogated those who had been Nazis in positions of responsibility who might now be prosecuted as war criminals. In the early stages of this process I was sometimes called on to act as an interpreter with my primitive German. This attempt was apt to dissolve into farce. But there were other situations that became tragically serious.
The Russian Cossack Corps that had been fighting for the Germans against what they saw as an alien Bolshevik Russia had succeeded in surrendering to the British; many had their families with them; they knew that if they were sent or taken back to Russia they would all almost certainly be shot. The Russians demanded that they should be handed over; the British prevaricated. But there had been an agreement between Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt at the Yalta Conference earlier in the year that all such prisoners should be returned to the country they originally came from. The Cossacks could claim that they had been turned out of their country by the Bolsheviks and thus they had no country, but this carried no weight with the Russians. Orders came down from London that the Cossacks and their families, who had been camping in fields, were to be put forcibly into railway trucks and handed to the Russians. By good fortune the Irish Brigade were not required to do this. But we heard of it; and worried. What would we have done? There was a story that heartened us of a commanding officer of the 6th Armoured Division who went to the assembled Cossacks in their field and told them of the orders he had received, and that as a dutiful soldier he would have to obey them; but he would not do so until morning, and in the meantime he would remove his soldiers who were guarding the field because they were tired. And so in the morning the Cossacks and their families had gone — to mingle presumably with the hordes of displaced and often unidentifiable persons throughout Europe.
There was a similar situation with the Croatians who had been hostile to Tito’s partisans and in some cases sided with the Germans. Tito was demanding that they should be handed over to him because he was now de facto ruler of Yugoslavia, but if this happened it was likely that they too would be shot. Tito gave assurances they would be treated according to conventions. They were handed over, but there is evidence that most of them were shot.
Could anything have been done to prevent this? The world of politicians and top military authorities is dependent on words and bits of paper: there have been such and such discussions and agreements; out of the boundless chaos of five years of war such people have to try to produce order. On the ground, individuals face a different kind of obligation; one should not be responsible for sending off persons to be needlessly murdered. Perhaps, indeed, the individual soldiers on the spot have a duty to try to save politicians from the sins of their terrible calling (this was a view voiced at the Nuremberg trials). The politicians may be faced with unavoidable choices of evils; soldiers may have to risk covering for them and suffering the cost.
But in the vast maelstrom that follows from the crackup of the ice floes of war, what can any individual do with certainty, whether soldier or politician? One hopes to do one’s best.
At the Ossiachersee I was made Battalion Sports Officer, whose job it was to provide occupation for those who had nothing much more militarily to do. I organised conventional games; I could pick myself for any team I liked. I had never been much good at cricket, but at this I could at least show off. Also at hockey, which I had never played before. But at football I had to deselect myself: almost anyone seemed better than me. I had been a good runner at school, so I entered myself for the 440 yards at the Army Games at Klagenfurt — and came in a long way behind the champion of the Jewish Brigade who was said to have run at the White City. After this I thought I should retire from organised sport. At Ossiachersee I watched with some admiration the flirtation games that one or two of my fellow young officers played with a very pretty young Austrian nurse at the orphanage.
It was during these days that in the course of conversation with Desmond Fay I let on that I had been to school at Eton. He had long since come to terms with me being the son of Oswald Mosley; he had said — ‘Oh well, he was a serious politician.’ But at the news that I was an Old Etonian he announced he was so upset that he was not sure if he could carry on with our friendship. This was not entirely a joke: it is part of Leninist theory that fascism is not the unequivocal enemy of communism — it can be a necessary stage in the collapse of capitalism. The clear-cut enemies of the communist proletariat have always been the upper classes.
I went on a week’s leave to Venice and stayed on the Lido, where I had stayed with my father and mother in the summer holidays of 1930. Then, my father had spent much time flirting with my future stepmother Diana, who at that time was married to Bryan Guinness. My sister and I, I remembered, had spent much time being outraged not at my father’s behaviour to my mother, which I suppose we either did not notice or took as normal upper-class behaviour, but because Randolph Churchill, one of my father’s and mother’s entourage, insisted on referring to us children as ‘brats’. Now, on leave in Venice, I wrote to my father that I did not want to do any more sightseeing; I wanted to come home. In continuation of the letters I had written from Ranby and Naples, still in pursuit of what now increasingly obsessed me — the question of how to look for what might be an alternative to humans’ propensity for war — I wrote –
I wonder if Neitzsche’s final madness was really the decadent desperation that people suppose — if it were not ‘tragic’ in the ultimate sense — the culmination of a tragedy in the true Greek style — and therefore something to be greeted and accepted with a ‘holy yea-saying’? Is anything much known of Nietzsche’s final madness? It is a theory that entrances me — that it is perhaps the culmination of all ‘great spirits’ that they should appear to be what the rest of the world calls mad: that perhaps this one form of madness — the Dionysian madness — is really an escape into the ‘eternity behind reality’: neither an advance nor a regression in life but just a sidestep into something that is always beside life. Or am I slightly mad?
It seems to me that the physicists have argued themselves out of their original premises and are floating blindly … if all our sense-perceptions, measures, observations etc. are unreliable, indeed misleading, when it comes to interpreting the ‘real’ world, why do they presume that any experiment they make has any bearing on reality at all? The only thing they can be certain about is that they can never be certain of anything …