Unconditional surrender

WHEN
Guy Crouchback returned to his regiment in the autumn of 1941 his position was in many ways anomalous. He had been trained in the first batch of temporary officers, had commanded a company, had been detached for special duties, had been in action and acquitted himself with credit; he had twice put up captain’s stars and twice removed them; their scars were plainly visible on his shoulder straps. He had been invalided home on an order direct from GHQ ME and the medical authorities could find nothing wrong with him. There were rumours that he had ‘blotted his copybook’ in West Africa. When he was commissioned in 1939 his comparative old age had earned him the sobriquet of ‘uncle’. Now he was two years older and the second batch of officers in training were younger than those who had joined with him. To them he seemed a patriarch; to him they seemed a generation divided by an impassable barrier. Once he had made the transition, had thrown himself into the mêlée on the ante-room floor, had said ‘cheerioh’ when he drank with them, and had been accepted as one of themselves. He could not do it a second time. Nor were there any longer mêlées and guest nights, nor much drinking. The new young officers were conscripts who liked to spend their leisure listening to jazz on the wireless. The first battalion, his battalion, followed Ritchie-Hook biffing across the sands of North Africa. A draft of reinforcements were sent out to them. Guy was not posted with them. Hookforce, all save four, had been taken prisoner in Crete. He had no comrades in arms in England except Tommy Blackhouse who returned to raise another Special Service Force. They met Tommy in Bellamy’s and he offered him a post on his staff, but the shadow of Ivor Clare lay dark and long over Commandos, and Guy answered that he was content to soldier on with the Halberdiers.

This he did for two blank years. A Second Brigade was formed, and Guy followed its fortunes in training, with periodic changes of quarters from Penkirk in Scotland to Brook Park in Cornwall. Home Forces no longer experienced the shocks, counter-orders, and disorders of the first two years of war. The army in the Far East now suffered as they had done. In Europe the initiative was now with the allies. They were laboriously assembled and equipped and trained. Guy rose to be second-in-command of his battalion with the acting rank of major.

Then in August 1943 there fell on him the blow that had crushed Jumbo at Mugg: ‘I’m sorry, uncle, but I’m afraid we shan’t be taking you with us when we go to foreign parts. You’ve been invaluable in training. Don’t know what I should have done without you. But I can’t risk taking a chap of your age into action.’

‘Am I much older than you, colonel?’

‘Not much, I suppose, but I’ve spent my life in this job. If I get hit, the second-in-command will have to take over. Can’t risk it.’

‘I’d gladly come down in rank. Couldn’t I have a company? Or a platoon?’

‘Be your age, uncle. No can do. This is an order from brigade.’

The new brigadier, lately arrived from the Eighth Army, was the man to whom, briefly, Guy had been attached in West Africa when he encompassed the death of Apthorpe. On that occasion the brigadier had said: ‘I don’t want to see you again ever.’ He had fought long and hard since then and won a DSO, but throughout the dust of war he remembered Guy. Apthorpe, that brother-uncle, that ghost, laid, Guy had thought, on the island of Mugg, walked still in his porpoise boots to haunt him; the defeated lord of the thunder-box still worked his jungle magic. When a Halberdier said: ‘No can do’, it was final.

‘We shall need you for the embarkation, of course. When you’ve seen us off, take a spot of leave. After that you’re old enough to find yourself something to do. There’s always “barrack duties”, of course, or you might report to the War House to the pool of unemployed officers. There’s plenty of jobs going begging for chaps in your position.’

Guy took his leave and was at Matchet when Italy surrendered. News of the king’s flight came on the day the brigade landed at Salerno. It brought Guy some momentary exhilaration.

‘That looks like the end of the Piedmontese usurpation,’ he said to his father. ‘What a mistake the Lateran Treaty was. It seemed masterly at the time – how long? Fifteen years ago? What are fifteen years in the history of Rome? How much better it would have been if the Popes had sat it out and then emerged saying: “What was all that? Risorgimento? Garibaldi? Cavour? the House of Savoy? Mussolini? Just some hooligans from out of town causing a disturbance. Come to think of it wasn’t there once a poor little boy whom they called King of Rome?” That’s what the Pope ought to be saying today.’

Mr Crouchback regarded his son sadly. ‘My dear boy,’ he said, ‘you’re really talking the most terrible nonsense, you know. That isn’t at all what the Church is like. It isn’t what she’s
for
.’

They were walking along the cliffs returning at dusk to the Marine Hotel with Mr Crouchback’s retriever, ageing now, not gambolling as he used but loping behind them. Mr Crouchback had aged too, and for the first time showed concern with his own health. They fell silent, Guy disconcerted by his father’s rebuke, Mr Crouchback still, it seemed, pondering the question he had raised; for when at length he spoke it was to say: ‘Of course it’s reasonable for a soldier to rejoice in victory.’

‘I don’t think I’m interested in victory now,’ said Guy.

‘Then you’ve no business to be a soldier.’

‘Oh, I want to stay in the war. I should like to do some fighting. But it doesn’t seem to matter now who wins. When we declared war on Finland …’

He left the sentence unfinished, and his father said: ‘That sort of question isn’t for soldiers.’

As they came into sight of the hotel, he added: ‘I suppose I’m getting like a schoolmaster. Forgive me. We mustn’t quarrel. I used often to get angry with poor Ivo; and with Angela. She was rather a tiresome girl the year she came out. But I don’t think I’ve ever been angry with you.’

Matchet had changed in the last two years. The army unit for whom Monte Rosa had been cleared, had gone as quickly as they came, leaving the boarding-house empty. Its blank windows and carpetless floors stood as a symbol of the little town’s brief popularity. Refugees from bombing returned to their former homes. Mrs Tickeridge moved to be near a school for Jennifer. The days when the Cuthberts could ‘let every room twice over’ were ended and they reluctantly found themselves obliged to be agreeable. It was not literally true, as Miss Vavasour claimed, that they ‘went down on their knees’ to keep their residents, but they did offer Mr Crouchback his former sitting room at its former price.

‘No, thank you very much,’ he had said. ‘You’ll remember I promised to take it again
after
the war, and unless things change very much for the worse I shall do that. Meanwhile my few sticks are in store and I don’t feel like getting them out again.’

‘Oh, we will furnish it for you, Mr Crouchback.’

‘It wouldn’t be quite the same. You make me very comfortable as I am.’

His former rent was now being paid as a weekly allowance to an unfrocked priest.

The Cuthberts were glad enough to accommodate parents visiting their sons at Our Lady of Victories and obscurely supposed that if they antagonized Mr Crouchback, he would somehow stop their coming.

Guy left next day and reported to the Halberdier barracks. He had little appetite for leave now.

Three days later a letter came from his father:

Marine Hotel
Matchet
20 September 1943

My Dear Guy,

I haven’t been happy about our conversation on your last evening. I said too much or too little. Now I must say more.

Of course in the 1870s and 80s every decent Roman disliked the Piedmontese, just as the decent French now hate the Germans. They had been invaded. And, of course, most of the Romans we know kept it up, sulking. But that isn’t the Church. The Mystical Body doesn’t strike attitudes and stand on its dignity. It accepts suffering and injustice. It is ready to forgive at the first hint of compunction.

When you spoke of the Lateran Treaty did you consider how many souls may have been reconciled and have died at peace as the result of it? How many children may have been brought up in the faith who might have lived in ignorance? Quantitative judgements don’t apply. If only one soul was saved that is full compensation for any amount of loss of ‘face’.

I write like this because I am worried about you and I gather I may not live very much longer. I saw the doctor yesterday and he seemed to think I have something pretty bad the matter.

As I say, I’m worried about you. You seemed so much enlivened when you first joined the army. I know you are cut up at being left behind in England. But you mustn’t sulk.

It was not a good thing living alone and abroad. Have you thought at all about what you will do after the war? There’s the house at Broome the village calls ‘Little Hall’ – quite incorrectly. All the records refer to it simply as the ‘Lesser House’. You’ll have to live somewhere and I doubt if you’ll want to go back to the Castello even if it survives, which doesn’t seem likely the way they are bombing everything in Italy.

You see I am thinking a lot about death at the moment. Well that’s quite suitable at my age and condition.

Ever your affec. father,
G. Crouchback