All Valiant Dust E-Book

Peter Ross

• Herausgeber: The Lilliput Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 1992

Beschreibung

For many of its participants, the Second World War was the most intense period of their lives - with horizons widened by grief, strangeness and excitement. Peter Ross, graduated from Trinity College, Dublin, to become a troop commander in Montgomery's Eighth Army. He took ship to Egypt and was active in the Western Desert campaign, concluding with El Alamein, a memorable and historic battle which marked the turning-point of the war. Hospitalized and awarded the Military Cross, Ross returned to take part in the D-Day landings, the liberation of Brussels and the advance on the Rhine .All Valiant Dust is a young Irishman's experience of war, vividly recounted with compassion and humour. Its painfully realized remembrance of the din and tempo of desert conflict, and much besides, documents extraordinary times.

Leseprobe

ALL VALIANT DUST

AN IRISHMAN ABROAD

PETER ROSS

THE LILLIPUT PRESS

All valiant dust that builds on dust,

And guarding, calls not thee to guard,

For frantic boast and foolish word –

Thy mercy on thy People, Lord!

‘Recessional’

Rudyard Kipling

CONTENTS

Title PageEpigraphFOREWORDPREFACEINTRODUCTIONONETWOTHREEFOURFIVESIXSEVENCopyright

FOREWORD

In 1953 Jack Sweetman, who played rugby for Old Wesley and had had a final trial for Ireland, asked me to coach boxing in Brook House School. As I got out of the Law Library shortly after four, it would be great if I could come along and put the mites through their paces. Jack was soon to move on to Headfort School, where he became a legendary figure. After he left I continued to coach at Brook House, which was how I came to know Peter Ross, the headmaster there. Peter was a small man, well below average height, and it seemed incredible to me that he should have been a first-class soccer player at Repton and awarded the Military Cross at El Alamein. A born schoolmaster, he inspired boys to fulfil their physical and mental potential. At football matches he would run up and down the sidelines like a terrier, yelling with the enthusiasm of a thirteen-year-old, ‘Come on, Brook House!’ Once he discovered that the oval ball game was the only one played in Irish prep schools, he became as knowledgeable and fanatical about it as he had been about soccer.

A condition under which I had agreed to coach boxing at Brook House was that I should not be paid a salary. I would like to think that this scruple was born out of a strict loyalty to the Corinthian code, but there may have been at the back of my mind the fear that an insolent jack-in-office would at some future date demand the return of the sports trophies I had won, on the grounds that I forfeited my amateur status by coaching for financial reward. However, though I received neither silver nor gold for my efforts, I was rewarded in kind.

One of the teachers at the school was the writer Monk Gibbon, and it was through Peter that I began a thirty-year friendship with Monk, or Bill, as he was known to his friends. Peter had a genuine love of literature and was an admirer of Gibbon’s work, and conversations over tea, after I had taught the boys the value of a straight left and, more importantly, how to avoid that of their opponents, would be stimulating, as talk of books and poetry flowed back and forth. Bill, like Peter, was an excellent sportsman, a six handicap at golf, and a crack hockey player. The other prep schools in Dublin at that time, Aravon and Castle Park, were long established, and it took an enormous amount of energy and organization on Peter’s part to keep Brook House going. But it grew rapidly, after ten years moving from Clonskeagh to Ashtown Park in Monkstown, and then to Bray. The school was founded in 1952, by 1955 there were fifty boys, and at its height numbers rose to 190.

In mid-career Peter had a serious cardiac illness which would have meant retirement for most. But it didn’t seem to take a feather out of him; he even increased his work-load. Fortunately he had an ideal partner to assist him – his wife, Paddy. When I first came to Brook House I was dazzled, as was everyone else, by this lovely-looking girl – the perfect English Rose, who rivalled in looks the current stars of the British screen revival, Deborah Kerr, Glynis Johns and Greer Garson. Sunny-tempered and full of laughter, Paddy seemed to do everything: run the house-keeping, supervise the dining-room, help with the accounts, remaining through it all a seraphic figure who represented in this all-male school the female psyche which was part of the boys’ lives at home.

Peter was born during a bridging period in the evolution of Irish society, when Ireland was part of the United Kingdom, but was to spend most of his life in a country which had become self-governing. It was an era when the Anglo-Irish exerted themselves in establishing an identity: Yeats, AE, Lady Gregory, Synge and Douglas Hyde had probed the imagination of their class, and striven to recognize the Irish side of their personalities. Those who came after them were helped by that great creative burst at the turn of the century further to pursue and explore the nature of the identity of their class as Irishmen. We get a glimpse of this in the Introduction to AllValiantDust when Peter recalls an argument with a bullying history master at Repton who had vilified Ireland. Even when he was thousands of miles away, memories of home were always flitting through his mind. In the desert the night before the battle of El Alamein he would remember sailing in Donegal Bay with a friend the day war was declared. The desert in winter, ‘in that moment of semi-darkness when the sun sank behind the horizon’, induced in him nostalgic memories of an Irish bog.

I think one episode here shows as tellingly as anything I have ever read the identity that can be forged between Irishmen of different backgrounds when they are outside their own country. The Catholic chaplain in his battalion, who he calls Father Joyce, was from the West of Ireland. The other officers knew that Father Joyce had a weakness – he cheated at cards. These officers would make Peter furious by adding condescendingly, ‘You see, he’s Irish.’

Then one day there was a German air attack and Peter lay flat on the ground with his company unable to rescue a nearby anti-aircraft gun crew who had been bombed and some of whom were seriously injured.

Suddenly, as another wave of bombers manoeuvred into the sun, a staff car moved out towards the stricken gun crew.

‘Get back, you idiot!’ someone shouted.

The car lurched and stopped, a jagged hole torn in its side. Out of it stepped a man, very deliberately, as though nothing extraordinary were happening. It was Father Joyce, the sleeves of his white shirt rolled above his elbows. He walked purposefully towards the wounded men. Bombs were bursting all around him, and bullets splintering the shale. But on he went. He bound up wounds; he gave spiritual comfort where he could not otherwise help. He never faltered, never even ducked when the bombs landed near him.

Later on I saw him, armed with a spade and a pick, digging graves through that ungiving surface.

That evening he arrived late for the game of cards, because he was writing letters to the relatives of the dead and wounded.

Bravery in battle is sometimes a matter of impulse caused by fear, an adrenalin-driven act to hide a greater fear, a fear of death through inaction, or even the fear of being thought afraid.

But Father Joyce’s actions were not a matter of impulse. They were deliberate, they were continuous, aimed at helping men in mortal danger. There were no heroics for Father Joyce, no ‘going over the top’, rifle in hand, inspired by the thrill of combat. Had there been no war, and had I known him only in peace-time, I would probably have written him off as a petty buffoon. How many acts of courage and devotion are curtained off behind apparently uneventful lives?

Which was the real Father Joyce – the man who cheated at cards to win a few pence, or the man who risked his life so fearlessly to help those soldiers? It is an imponderable question, since it suggests that the complexity of human motives and feelings can be expressed in terms of black and white. I know that Father Joyce didn’t cheat for the money, which could mean nothing to him. It may have been an act, a ‘playing Irish’ to amuse his fellow officers, or even a fling of contempt and defiance at their assumption of superiority.

Peter Ross’s war started when he joined the 3rd Battalion of the Royal Tank Regiment as a second lieutenant under the command of the much-decorated General Robert Crisp, the famous South African Test cricketer.

Some time later, on 23 October 1942, Peter found himself pitched into the battle of El Alamein, where he was badly wounded during a rescue operation from a burning tank. Even in its reserved military prose, the citation describing the action – for which he was awarded the MC and promoted to captain – conveys his exceptional courage.

On 29th October, 1942, a Crusader Tank was knocked out by anti-tank gunfire. Three members of the crew were badly burnt.

2/Lt. Ross unhesitatingly took up his Scout Car to the burning tank which was within a few hundred yards of enemy M.G. and anti-tank gun positions. In his Scout Car he ferried the wounded men back to a second Crusader under heavy M.G. and a tk fire.

2/Lt. Ross then travelled with the wounded men on the back of the second Crusader until it was hit and set alight. The clothes of all the men on the back and in the Crusader caught fire.

2/Lt. Ross beat out the flames with his bare hands and helped the wounded to the safety of slit trenches nearby.

All this time the party was under very heavy M.G. and a tk gunfire.

2/Lt. Ross did not rest or attempt to protect himself until the last wounded man was safely evacuated. He suffered severe burns and shock. His very gallant action saved many valuable lives.

Peter wrote to his parents:

For some mysterious reason I have been awarded a decoration. Can’t think why. I’m happy about it for one reason – it is for helping to save lives, not to take them.

One might think of this as false modesty. But I don’t think it is. He remained throughout the war and, indeed, throughout his life, puzzled by the whole strange business of killing, and sceptical about the value of war: ‘The result was glorious but the actual battle wasn’t. Like all battles, it was hideous.’

Some of the best insights into the nature of war have come from writers depicting it from the point of view of non-combatants and peripheral dodgers, like O’Casey in JunoandthePaycock and Shakespeare with Pistol Bardolph and the Fat Knight in the Henrys. In AllValiantDust the writer is a participant, but writing with an imaginative eye in finely balanced prose, he manages to involve us in the mayhem of the battlefield and yet retain something of the detachment of the commentator. Perhaps he was in a position to do this because of the ambivalent element in the Anglo-Irish personality. Like Denis Johnston, another Irishman involved in the El Alamein preparations, Peter Ross could stand apart, not indulging himself in a hatred of the enemy understandable in the English and French, who had already faced the Germans in a ferocious war, and still held the memory of the slaughtered dead.

Peter was then lucky to find a niche with another hero of his, General ‘Pete’ Pyman DSO, who had commanded at El Alamein and was now chief of staff on the 30 Corps. As his ‘Personal Assistant’, Peter was present at the planning headquarters for the D-Day landings. He was involved in the first day of the invasion at Gold Beach and the subsequent breakout from Normandy. After the liberation of Brussels, the corps headquarters set up in a nunnery near Nijmegen, where they remained during the disastrous Arnhem landings. Later, as an instructor at Sandhurst, Peter was commissioned to write a history of the academy during the war.

It was a coincidence that the only battle of which I have any knowledge whatsoever should be El Alamein. This unlikely mental baggage was taken aboard when I was retained to act as counsel for General Auchinleck’s chief of staff, General Eric Dorman-Smith, in a libel action involving the conduct of the Alamein campaign. It required me to undertake a detailed study of the position of the two armies and the strategic plans which led to the final victory. Carrying out prolonged interviews with Captain Basil Liddell Hart, the well-known strategist (said to be the inventor of modern tank warfare), Corelli Barnett and others, as well as my own documentary research, I constructed a mental picture of the major events. The battle of Alam Halfa in July 1942 was generally referred to as ‘First Alamein’ and the one beginning on 23 October, commanded by General Bernard Montgomery, as ‘Second Alamein’. Peter Ross regarded the latter, which resulted in the rout of Rommel’s forces, as the real battle of El Alamein. We had much genial debate on the subject and I was pleased to see that Peter pays generous tribute here to General Auchinleck (and, implicitly, to Dorman-Smith) for the holding operation at the Alamein redoubt, which prepared the ground for Montgomery’s success.

Peter did not live to see his memoir appear in print. Talking to him a few days before he died, I told him how delighted I was to learn that it was to be published in the near future, and thought I detected a note of schoolboy glee in his voice before he put down the receiver. He’d brought it off again. A few days later I learnt that his heart had finally given in, and that we would talk no more.

Ulick O’Connor

Dublin,May1992

PREFACE

My memories of the war years are mostly of moments of drama, excitement, humour, fear and pain. Rejected are the times between battles and leaves, times that were grey with the desolation of years lost, and the drab anticipation that war would never end.

Those six years, 1939 to 1945, were the richest in the lives of many who survived. Whatever damage was done to mind or body by the frustrations of service life, or in battle or in air raid, we lived with an intensity quickened by the expectation of death. We came out of the war feeling spuriously heroic, a little hysterical, a little self-conscious in our well-worn uniforms decorated with ribbons, missing the thrills, the drama, the camaraderie. And in the following years of civilian life we tended to forget that we had once been different, resigned – if not dedicated – to destroying an evil that defiled all Europe and beyond.

Nevertheless I often wondered why men allow themselves to be committed to battle, knowing they face the likelihood of immediate death or an excruciating wound. Where is that natural fear which protects us from physical hurt? What possible ideal can give death precedence over life?

My late friend, the poet and writer Monk Gibbon, asked a similar question in IngloriousSoldier:

The more we reverence life the harder it becomes to accept fortuitous and unnecessary death. And yet millions of men do so without complaint. Is it because they feel themselves to have been caught in a web of destiny from which there is no escape? Or have they surrendered to a collective madness which has taken possession of almost all, and which makes them willing victims? Or do they undervalue life and so cast it the more easily aside? Or have they no choice? I am amazed at the unprotesting acceptance of the inevitable by these attitudes.

Before El Alamein, my first battle, I suffered devastating fear, but once it started I was consumed by that ‘collective madness’. I seemed to be taken over by a force deriving from the battle itself, its mesmerizing din and majestic violence. There was a compulsion, an ecstasy, a kind of religious fervour, and an arrogant conviction of immunity from death or wounds. And that collective madness became a sense of community, of sharing an unfamiliar, outrageous, inescapable danger.

INTRODUCTION

Beginnings – AnAnglo-IrishChildhood

India during the Great War was no place for white babies. I was born of Irish parents in the hills of what is now Pakistan at the end of July 1914.

My father worked in the Public Works Department, which provided, among other benefits, the canals that even today bring life to many arid areas of the subcontinent.

At the time, infants were brought ‘home’ as soon as possible because of the adverse effects of Indian food and climate. In my case, however, and in that of my younger brother Frank, this was impossible because all civilian shipping had been requisitioned. I was five days old when the Great War started.

Although still almost a baby when at last we left India, I have some misty memories: the river flowing past our bungalow at Jhelum, silver-grey, with a constant whispering sound; the jackals howling at night, and my mother coming to clasp me in case I was frightened, which of course I pretended to be so she would stay, her warmth comforting as I snuggled against her breast; the tall bearer, Aziz, who moved so silently that he could be standing behind you for some time before you knew he was there, and whose perpetually sorrowful expression earned him the nickname ‘Joy-and-Laughter’; and Abdul, the cook, who made such wonderful chapattis, and who never forgot, even when I was at Repton, to make a cake for my birthday. This used to arrive in a tall grey tin, soldered at the edges, and when it was opened there escaped a rich fruit-laden smell. Alcohol was used as a preservative, and my friends and I liked to think it made us drunk.

There was one strange association which remained latent until I was twenty-one. My father had arranged for me to miss the summer term at Trinity College, Dublin so that I could visit him in India. As we motored northwards from Bombay I became aware of a strange, pungent, not unpleasant smell.

‘Are we anywhere near Jhelum?’

‘About a quarter of a mile. Why on earth do you ask?’

‘Because of that smell. It reminds me of when I was a baby. Is it the timber drying out on the bank of the river?’

And into my mind came a vision of the grey beams that had been floated down from the mountains, shaped into railway sleepers and then piled in neat squares on the bank.

When the war ended we ‘came home’ by the famous P&O line to England, and then on to Ireland. My parents returned to India for another three-year stint before their next leave, and my brother and I lived with our paternal grandparents in Fitzwilliam Street in Dublin. The vicious civil war which was to tear Ireland apart was not far in the future. Being six years old I had no idea of the issues at stake. There were, though, moments of excitement, such as when our grandfather, known as Grampy, came into the bedroom and moved our beds so that we could not be hit by random snipers. And there was one evening of sheer terror. We had been put to bed when Grampy came up to say goodnight, adding that we were not to be frightened; some soldiers were searching the houses in the area for weapons and would be coming upstairs in a few minutes.

Now, my passion at that time was Meccano. By screwing together some of the longer pieces of metal I had produced a rather fine outline of a rifle. What was I to do? If the soldiers found it what would they do? Imprison me? Or worse, shoot me? In terror I jumped out of bed, seized the terrible piece, pushed it under the blanket and lay down on top of it.

The door opened and two soldiers in green uniform came in. They were very polite to our nurse.

‘I don’t suppose these little soldiers have any guns hidden away!’

Soldiers! For a moment of horror I thought they were going to start a search, but with a cheerful goodnight they left. Next morning I hastily unscrewed that fearsome weapon.

One night we were wakened by a series of tremendous explosions. Our nursery was on the top floor and we could see, across the roofe of the houses opposite, the sky lit up by an angry blood-red blaze. It was early morning, before dawn, on 28 June 1922. Free State forces using field guns borrowed from the British had bombarded the Four Courts and set them on fire.

In time I was sent to a kindergarten in Mespil Road, run by a stern but lovable lady called Miss Morse. My nurse used to accompany me along the few hundred yards between the school and Fitzwilliam Street. One day as we crossed Baggot Street Bridge a lorry filled with troops swerved in front of us and proceeded up Wilton Terrace at speed. There was an explosion and we saw it rise crazily into the air, blown sideways and upwards by the blast of the mine. My nurse dragged me into a doorway, where we stayed until she was sure it was safe to go on.

When I was nine I was sent to a small preparatory school in Kent. It was customary in those days that people of our background and tradition should be educated in England rather than in Ireland. This particular school was renowned for its discipline, which was probably why my father chose it. He admired the headmaster, Major Peters, who had been decorated for gallantry in Flanders, and who ran his school on regimental lines. Right was right, wrong was wrong, orders were orders, and there was no such thing as a mitigating circumstance. For every crime there was an appropriate punishment.

‘You, boy, why aren’t you writing?’

‘Please, Sir, my pencil needs sharpening.’

‘Your pencil needs sharpening, does it? It is your duty to be prepared for class. What do you suppose would happen to a soldier going into battle with no ammunition for his rifle, eh? He’d be shot. He’d be shot. Hold out your hand.’ Excruciating pain.

Another scene. I can hear again the indignant treble voices.

‘It was your fault anyway.’

‘No it wasn’t, you started talking –’

‘No I didn’t, I only laughed.’

‘Why should we all be kept in just because you and Jimmy were –’

‘Shut up! – the Hun’s coming!’

Twenty heads bend over twenty sheets of paper. Twenty cramped hands push pens or pencils along the faint blue lines: I must not talk after lights out I must not talk after lights out I must not …

‘Who vos talkink now?’

No answer. Some look up, some go on writing.

‘Who vos talkink now, I say!’

Blond, blue-eyed, athletic. The dimple-cleft chin slightly raised, rectangular brow marble-white; alert suspicious eyes flickering snake-like along the desks, the head not moving. Why did the Major have a German on his staff? He’d been shooting Germans not so long ago himself and everyone knew why, because of the dreadful atrocities they committed …

On Parents’ Day Müller had flashed his smile at my mother.

‘What a handsome young man,’ she said, ‘he must be very nice, he looks so kind. What’s his name?’

‘The Hun and he’s a bully.’

‘I can’t believe it. Another ice, dear?’

If only she could see him now!

‘Veil! so nobody vos talkink! I vos hearing vot vos not there, nein? You, you, you – und you – go down to the gym.’

‘But, Sir –’

The words die on my tongue as I see the flickering at the corner of his eyes, the sudden tightening of the lips.

‘– Yes, Sir.’

‘You vill change to games togs first. You haf thirty seconds.’

Now he stands in the open doorway of the gym. We are lined up, the four of us, a few yards away, facing him.

‘About turn! Hips firm – on der toes rise – double-knee bend – arms bend – arms upvard stretch. Now you vill stay still, you vill not move till I come back.’

One minute, two minutes. Pain creeps up from my shoulders to my arms. I cannot keep them up any longer. They are quivering now. And my legs have gone to sleep and I’m beginning to fall.

‘Jimmy,’ I whisper to my friend.

‘It’s all right,’ says Jimmy, ‘the swine’s forgotten us.’

Thankfully I let my arms flop down, and my legs give way. As I fall I hear a thump and a cry beside me. Jimmy lurches forward, the Hun propelling him with vicious kicks across the floor.

I scream at him.

‘Shut up, you German bully, leave him alone!’

I scream again as he turns and strides towards me, his hands clenched and his lips drawn back, showing his teeth. I know he wants nothing but to hurt me with all his strength. I cover my eyes and cower to the floor, waiting for the blow.

It doesn’t come. Suddenly there is silence. Müller is drawn up, rigid and white, staring past us. The muscles in his cheek are twitching. Cautiously I look round. The Major is standing in the door. He says nothing but looks at Müller through half-closed eyes. For a while they stare at each other. I forget the pain in my limbs as I wonder if Müller is going to hit him. What will happen if he does? It’s unthinkable; headmasters are all-powerful, untouchable, unhittable. But Müller is stronger, younger and bigger.

Suddenly Müller moves. We hold our breath as he steps forward with a wooden action like a soldier on parade and marches, looking straight ahead, past the Major and out through the door. The Major is motionless, even when Müller seemed to start towards him. I knew now how brave the Major was, and he became an even stronger symbol in my mind of authority, aloof, fearless, calmly certain of instant obedience.

As for Müller, we never saw him again, and he was never spoken of. This was a relief, of course, but I could never forget that scene of victory and defeat. Sometimes I would identify myself with Müller, the bully humiliated, and sometimes with the Major, cold, ruthless, power personified.

My respect for the Major was now totally unquestioning, an ingenuous hero-worship. Later on I realized that this was based on fear, for he conditioned us into complete acceptance. Whatever Authority decreed, however absurd it might seem to our immature minds, must have some good purpose behind it. Rebellion, therefore, would be silly, leading to all sorts of evil which we were not old enough to understand, nor even to know of.

This submission to his will and personality, though wrapping me in a comfortable security at the time, resulted later in a shattering destruction of my self-esteem. It never occurred to me to rebel against his system because I could conceive of none other, but high spirits occasionally led me into trouble. After some schoolboy escapade he said to me, ‘Of course, Ross, I should have expected nothing else, you’re such a weak character.’

Because of my belief in his godlike omniscience the judgment stayed with me for many years, and I grew from an uninhibited bouncy child into a hesitating, self-doubting adolescent. Many years later when I became a headmaster myself I remembered the effect of this casually demoralizing remark and tried never to humiliate even the most repulsive of pupils; so perhaps a little good came of it.

When my parents returned on leave from India there was inevitably a gulf between us. Each thought of the other as they had been three years before. When I was twelve my mother tended to treat me according to the picture stored in her mind of the little nine-year-old she had last seen; and to me she was alien, not aware of the things that had happened to me since, suspicious of the development that separated me from her. At first I would resent being treated like a baby; and she, I think, felt that the infant whom she had loved and who had been so dependent on her no longer existed, but was replaced by a self-assertive creature with a life of its own, a life she could not possibly intrude on, nor even imagine.

As time went on, however, a new understanding would grow up between us. We shared jokes again; she could applaud my little successes, and comfort me in my failures. But just when this reached its fulfilment she would have to sail for India.

For another three years, my brother and I suffered makeshift holidays, sometimes spent in a hotel or guest-house near the school, sometimes with our grandparents in Ireland. They had moved out to De Vesci Terrace in Dún Laoghaire, or Kingstown as it was then called.

My grandfather, despite his small stature, was impressive in appearance. White-haired, with neatly cut moustache and imperial beard, and laughter-lines below his temples, he seemed to embody dignity and success. A partner in an engineering firm called Kaye Parry Ross, he did not, apparently, handle his financial affairs very ably. Furthermore, he was humiliatingly dominated by his second wife, Jane, a strait-laced symbol of all that was most tedious in the Victorian way of life. No mention was ever allowed of his first wife.

He was said to have been a gifted mathematician both at school at Merchiston Castle in Scotland, and at university. When I was twelve he gave me the prize he had won at school for Maths, a magnificent leather-bound volume of Shakespeare’s plays. I remember being surprised at the inscription: ‘Presented to George Murray Ross, Second Prize for Mathematics, Class VI, Session 1869-70.’ Second Prize? Why not First if he was so … Also in my possession is a beautiful tiny little shield which looks like gold but isn’t. This was a trophy of the Rifle Association of the Edinburgh Schools and was awarded to G.M. Ross in 1870.

I know that he went to France in May 1917 because I have the cigarette-case he was given ‘By a Few Friends on his Departure’, but I never discovered what part he played; he was certainly too old for a fighting role. The cigarette-case was an apt choice: he was a chain-smoker and in the end smoked himself to death, the saying in those days being that every cigarette was a nail in your coffin. One hopes his friends were unaware of the dangers their gift would add to those he was about to incur. His favourite was Wills ‘Gold Flake’. In 1927 when the news of his death was given to me at school I suffered both emotional and physical torments, because I wanted to cry when I went to bed but couldn’t as it would keep the other boys awake and I would be jeered at as a crybaby, so strong was the stiff-upper-lip syndrome, even among children.