Free Dearest Jane... by Roger Mortimer

after five years of this unreal life, one’s powers of resistance to any shock are practically nil and all the terror and tragedy of the morning has hit me deeply. Luckily we are to spend the night here and march off at dusk tomorrow evening, only moving at night. This will give us all a chance to regain our balance. I thank God that all my own friends are safe and sound . . . It is depressing to think that, before the day of our liberation, the line of battle will have to pass over us and that today’s horrors may only be a foretaste of things to come.
    There would be further darkness before the dawn. Their final camp, Moosberg, was a living hell to be endured before Roger and his surviving comrades would become free men. Their next destination was home – at last
.
    Years later, my father would reflect back on his life. On 5 May, the anniversary of VE Day, he wrote to me describing his own situation on the day that Europe was liberated
.
The Gloomings
5 May [1970s]
    Dearest Jane
    VE Day. I spent it in 1945 on an airfield in Bavaria waiting for a Dakota to take me part of the way home. Having been in robust health for the entire time in prison, I now contracted diarrhoea. The US Dakota pilots were as drunk as an Irish priest on St Patrick’s Day and flew the whole way at just above ground level. Every Frenchman with a gun fired at us. We had been released some days before by General Patton’s Army. Patton was a howling cad but a dashing soldier. He hated the English. We were in Moosburg which really was anus mundi. There were 50,000 half-starved Russians in the camp. When these individuals got at the booze and began rounding up German women between the ages of six and ninety-six, there were some very unpleasant scenes I have done my best to forget. We were all confined to the camp by the Yanks but I took no notice of that and went for a walk with Charlie Rome and Peter Black, my first stroll as a free man since May 1940. It was not very romantic as the Russkis and others crapped everywhere! A lot of the Yanks were unattractive and seemed to regard spitting as normal behaviour. I made friends at merry Moosburg with Peregrine Worsthorne’s brother, a jolly little fellow who taught medieval music at Worcester College, Oxford. We are quite chummy to this day though he is an RC. His stepfather Montagu Norman was a v. bad Governor of the Bank of England.
    Love to all,
    xx D
    Another letter is a reminder that my father was old enough to recall the impact of the First World War on his schooldays. As a younger boy, he had wondered at half the women in London appearing in black mourning dress, notably during the Battle of the Somme. After the waste and loss of life on such a scale, it was unimaginable that similar sacrifice could be demanded just twenty years later. His anger is palpable; his memories of German war criminals fascinating
.
Hypothermia House
11 November [1980s]
    My Dearest Jane
    Armistice Day. When I was a boy, Armistice Day was taken very seriously. To make the faintest squeak of noise during the two minutes of silence rated a crime only slightly less deserving of dire punishment than murder. At Eton the whole school assembled in School Yard for the Two Minutes Silence and when the big clock finished striking eleven, silence was absolute. A fair number of my contemporaries had lost a father or a brother in the war. Some of the older masters were visibly moved, remembering the many boys of high promise they had taught and who had given their lives. Over 1,300 Etonians were killed in World War I (we then called it ‘The Great War’). My own house had won the football cup in 1914. The photograph in the dining room showed that six out of the eleven members of the team had been killed. The possibility of another European war would at that time (1922) have been considered too improbable for serious consideration. It was not, I think, until 1936 that I fully appreciated that we were doomed. When I think of some really