Free Time at War by Nicholas Mosley

have to wait till the end of this story.
    In these war years I could hardly remember my father as the person that I had indeed only caught glimpses of when I was a child – the ranting, belligerent, political figure in his black shirt or uniform; marching and strutting and roaring on platforms and on the tops of vans; what onearth was it that had got into him (rather, than, it seemed, what had he got into)? For the most part he had kept us children away from his politics. And then, in his letters to me from Holloway, he was so calm, patient, considerate. (I have published a selection of his letters to me in the second volume of my biography of him,
Beyond the Pale.)
There is one passage however that comes to my mind now when I look at the paradoxes of my father’s personal life and his politics. This was when we had been discussing the nature of what might be understood as ‘beyond good and evil’ when one was considering the horrors and yet the apparent necessity of war. He had written –
    We are therefore driven back towards a conception of suffering – of all the phenomena that are shortly called evil in the experience of man – as fulfilling some creative purpose in the design of existence: back in fact to the Faustian Riddle, usually stated with the utmost complexity but for once with curious crudity in the Prologue in Heaven [in Goethe’s
Faust]
when the Lord says to Mephistopheles – The activity of man can all too lightly slumber; therefore I give him a companion who stimulates and works and must, as Devil, create.’
Faust
is meant to cover the whole panorama of human experience; but I believe this to be, on the whole, the main thesis of its innumerable profundities.
    And indeed, from my father’s inveterate cheerfulness in the calamitous failures and destruction of his politics – in his evident serenity even in prison – it does seem to methat he sometimes saw himself (as indeed others saw him) as a sort of pantomime black devil who felt he had some God-given Mephistophelean role in putting over attitudes and points of view that were not otherwise being considered; alternative proposals to an all-too-easy traditional reliance on war; other forms of discipline and endeavour. And it also perhaps explains why my father could almost always laugh – at least with me – at the ridiculousness of much of worldly goings-on, even his own; and who would wish his biography to be written after his death by someone who had known and loved him not for his politics but for what had been the wit and liveliness of his seeing his Mephistophelean role.
    He hated war. His proposals to prevent it had involved, it is true, trying to turn the country into a sort of harmonious Boy Scout camp run by an impossibly benign elite. He at times even seemed to understand that this was not possible (indeed the so-called elite became very quickly malignant), though he thought it had to be tried. He used to tell the story of a conversation he had once had with Lord Beaverbrook, to whom he had said – ‘You are lucky in England to have got me as a fascist leader; you might have got someone far worse!’

6
    When I got back to the battalion they still had not moved, and it was now the first week in May; time was running out for the big push if there was to be any chance of it reaching the northern plain before winter. However, we were now told that it had been decided to attack direct across the Rapido river to the south and thus bypass the monastery and the town; and that the enemy’s powers of observation from these would be blocked out by smoke shells. One wondered why this had not been thought of before.
    We still had to wait while planes flew overhead and there was a huge artillery bombardment from guns just behind us such as there must have been, I imagined, in the First World War. Waiting with us were tanks with devices to clear mines and to bridge ditches; but the