ORCHIDS 12 – Military Matters 1 – The Unquiet
“War should be avoided at almost any cost: war would solve nothing; the whole of Europe and more besides would be reduced to ruin; the loss of life would be so large that whole populations would be decimated.”
When General Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien uttered these words in July 1914 to a gathering of several thousand public-school cadets at their summer camp, many, if not most, were appalled at such ‘unpatriotic’, even heretical sentiments. Four years later, nearly all could recognise how true they were. If Lord Kitchener had addressed them, as he was supposed to until unavoidably detained, one could imagine that the sentiments might have been rather different.
Barely a month later, as commander of II Corps of the British Expeditionary Force, Smith-Dorrien was responsible for directing the brave, if short-lived and costly, attempt at “a stopping blow” at Le Cateau. This, however briefly and controversially – in the eyes of the conflicted Commander-in-Chief, Sir John French, at least – held up the remorseless German advance sufficiently to allow the British and French armies to escape South and re-group after the Germans had crossed the Marne and brutally crushed the Allied armies at Mons.
Another generation of Bannermans is born - Jack, Aline and baby Alastair
This early battle of Le Cateau, on 26th August 1914, with the BEF exposed and ill-prepared for the onslaught from German artillery and machine-gun fire, was my grandfather, Jack Bannerman’s harrowing baptism in the First World War. A month later, alive and having recovered the ground lost earlier, he found himself in the trenches in the Ypres Salient where, as he wrote in his diary, in the “very jumpy work at night, we (the Germans and the British) sit and sort of look at each other quite close”. It was there that he received the news of the birth of his eldest son, my father, on 15th September.
‘The Hotel of the Universe is full’ starts my poem on the evening of 6th June 2009, as I sat writing in the bar of Hotel de l’Univers in Caen, at the heart of Normandy, where I had decided to go on a whim, exactly four months to the day after my father, Alastair Bannerman, died and exactly 65 years to the day since his landing in France on D-Day.
I sat with him during his last days at the beginning of February that year and kept a notebook of his remarks and my thoughts and observations. He ranged remarkably lucidly if randomly and sporadically across so many recollections in a collage of people, places, poems and plays, Shakespeare above all, which he could still quote extensively, right through until just before he died, at the grand old age of 94.
This included those key moments in his life – his childhood with his brother, David, early days in the theatre, his first years with Elisabeth, my mother, and D-Day, perhaps the most vivid of all his experiences – which it seemed he could almost see when he reached out and dabbled with his long fingers in the air, only for them to disappear almost as soon as they appeared, in his dream-like state.
On 5th February, before he died the following afternoon of 6th, he was awake most of the night, recognising and commenting on those he loved in pictures I showed him amongst the mass of his photographs and paintings that covered every inch of the walls of his small nursing-home room. In between, he would look compulsively at his watch, as if checking his time, like a long-distance runner, lap after lap. And it struck me, time and time again, how incredibly strong he was, despite an almost completely debilitated and exhausted state.
I attempted to capture something of this in a poem written over the course of that final night. It includes an evocation of his favourite Dorset hill, Gerrards, with its clump of beeches overlooking Beaminster where my mother and father were married in 1940, with my father in uniform, and came back to live in in the last 20 or so years of their long lives together.
One venerable old tree up on the hill celebrates the end of the Boer War in 1902 with an inscription carved into the bark that has stretched over time and which my parents misread in their courting days to read ‘Peace for Evermore’ :
Only the bones and bellows
Keeping the embers alight.
O the work of it! To hold
The dark from filling the night;
His thin hands holding each other,
Long fingers interlaced
In prayer and plain connection
A Dürer would have graced.
But still the will drives him,
Keeps the bellows pumping,
The blue-flame eyes ablaze,
The tired old engine thumping.
“Why?” he asks. “Why? Why?”
A flash within the cowl,
The question strangely echoing,
His consciousness a howl.
While Peace for Evermore remains
a distant dream on a distant hill
blurred into the bark of a beech
where time stands still
up on the hill
far, far out of reach.
Here and Now it’s War that reigns
On the line of Life and Death,
Tearing the old tree apart
With each as if-too-long-lost breath
From a still unbroken heart.
I woke up on the morning of 6th June in my, personally, war-free 57th year having dreamed, as I’m sure many do, that my old Dad had died that night, rather than four months before. But, shockingly, had then come back to life and looked at me with his pale blue eyes and a wistful smile of a gentle, yet infinite melancholy, as if to say, well, what was all that about then? All that struggle to survive in such a long, long life, against all the odds.
I was consumed by the dream. And as I washed and dressed it came to me what I needed to do. Go to France, there and then, on the 65th anniversary of the D-Day landings, to honour his memory and adventures and, while I was there, my grandfather’s too, from 95 years before.
The sun was shining and Biddy raring to go as we set out for Portsmouth. I’d managed to book a place on the ferry that morning, first thing, having asked Gill if she’d mind if I popped over to France for a couple of days, after my strange dream that night. Being a remarkably understanding person and respecting my reasons, despite coming out of the blue, she gave me her blessing and off we went.
I should explain before going further that Biddy is a car, if a rather special one. Born in 1958, she is a little ‘Island Blue’ Austin A35, to all surface appearance. Underneath, however, she has surprises in store which would come into their own many times over the years we travelled together, not least in France, towards which we forged on the outward bound ferry, past all the forlorn-looking battleships lined up in the Royal Naval Docks.
Much as it was, if with rather more ships, when Captain Alastair Bannerman, aged 29, an actor performing in The Devil to Pay at His Majesty’s Theatre until it ‘went dark’ when the war came along, had set off for France in the great flotilla of the D-Day landings.
“June 5” reads his diary “There is still a sharp wind blowing but soon after breakfast we raised anchor and sailed out of the harbour entrance. The chalk cliffs gleamed in the sunshine and hung like white curtains along the flat green coast. The white fleet of armoured landing craft and supporting boats with their silver balloons, and the motor torpedo boats which stirred up white foam, made a lovely picture in blue, white and silver. A part of England’s Armada: and it looked like a regatta.”
His diary, which had its own adventures, took the form of an extended letter to my mother, Elisabeth, who was to spend most of the following day, 6th June, praying on her knees in St. Mary’s Church, Beaminster, after she’d heard on the wireless at 6 o’clock that morning that D-Day had begun.
“A signal was given,” he continues: “ ‘Open Envelope 007!’ We opened it, the enterprise had begun. Operation Overlord begins tomorrow!”
Their destination had the code name ‘Sword Beach’, which they discovered on reading the detailed route plan had the real name of Lion-sur-Mer near Ouistreham on the Normandy coast and was to be the launching point for their assault on the city of Caen.
And thus the moment was upon them. The moment that they had trained and worked towards over the last year and a half or more in the anti-tank platoon with their tracked bren carriers towing their 6-pounder anti-tank guns my father commanded as part of 2nd Battalion of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment. “The play was on” as my actor-turned-soldier father had said in his diary and now the curtain was well and truly up.
I took Dad’s diary with me, and for similar reasons, his father’s, my grandfather Jack’s diary too, which also took the form of an extended letter to his wife, Aline, my grandmother. It starts a little later in the year than my father’s, on 4th August 1914, 30 years before my father’s diary, and tracks the course of his time in France and Flanders over the four years of the First World War.
He, Captain James Arthur Murray ‘Jack’ Bannerman, Adjutant with the 1st Battalion of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, set out on 22nd August 1914 as part of the British Expeditionary Force on the SS.Caledonia for “some place on the coast of France”. His next words eerily echo my father’s when he writes: ‘I am feeling very well and cheery, might be going for a cruise in the Mediterranean!’
The mood changed almost as soon as they’d disembarked when they found themselves embroiled in the ‘awful retreat’ from the German push into France.
As he describes in his diary a few days later: “We weren’t long over here before we got properly into it & fearful odds against us, but we held on as long as we could. I was alone for one night, lost the Regt, we were all split up but gradually got together again. At one period I found myself in a field with four Germans and hid behind a corn stook for a bit and then made up my mind to run for it and got away, not knowing in what direction I was going, but finally joined up with a few of our fellows’.
It was in the aftermath of the disastrous battles at Mons and Le Cateau, on 23rd and 26th August, that the whole British Expeditionary Force found themselves in desperate retreat with the French Fifth Army and Jack experienced a baptism not unlike my father’s, the day after D-Day.
They were thrown into the battle at Le Cateau, suffering nearly 8,000 casualties before fleeing for their lives. With no sleep or food to speak of and walking miles and miles in pitch darkness with the Germans “all around us”, they spent several terrifying days of utter chaos and confusion when, in his words: “the whole army was in retreat, and it was a Retreat”. Nevertheless, Jack survived to find himself by the end of September back up in Flanders in the infamous Ypres Salient in what they called ‘Alladin’s Cave’.
He describes it as being: “.. like so many rabbits that run when a shot is fired and come out after dark, but it is quite a good place really and getting used to it’.
Two days later, he got some special news.
“Sept.27th – You can imagine how I felt this morning when I got Winifred’s telegram at 6.30 & her letter a little later & two post cards, with the news of our Son. Win says he is like me. I heard from Ma, she is awfully pleased about her Grandson. I see it heads the list in The Times. We must call him Alastair. I’m going to try to get a bottle of port tonight and drink to you from ‘Aladdin’s Cave’.”
After “a very hard time the last few days, am now sitting in a trench & such a din going on, even makes my head ache a bit and we don’t get much peace until dark sets in and we don’t give them any either” – less than a month later comes the following news from Armentières
“You will have heard by now I got wounded., and I am coming home. I don’t think they will keep me long in hospital, as I am all right except for a cut on my head. I was very lucky to get out of it so easily, it was one of those horrid big shells they call ‘Black Marias’ and I got just a splinter & not the shell, thank heavens. It is a relief to feel away from all that din” (the First Battle of Ypres was raging) “it has been very trying the last few days & now it’s all peace here, am on board ship in a comfy birth & nice things to eat & nice clean-looking nurses. I am going to have a bath this evening. It’s ripping to feel I’m on my way home… Poor old Bentley was rather badly shot the same time as I, in the tummy, but I hope he will be all right.” (Sadly that was not the case) “There is a terrific battle going on from when I left & if we win (as we shall), I think it will be a great blow. We are just away from France for a bit, thank God.”
He remained in hospital at Osborne House, Queen Victoria’s old residence on the Isle of Wight, recovering from his serious head wound and, like so many others, suffering from shell-shock, or Post Traumatic Stress Disorder as we would call it these days. As he described it: “…my nerves are a wee bit groggy, don’t like doors banging, etc. None of us do here, quite. Funny, but I suppose it’s natural… I hear Pa has gone off to Wyastone for a quiet shoot, don’t think I could stand the sound of a gun!”
On 6th April 1915, Jack was on his way back to France in time to be gassed three weeks later in the Second Battle of Ypres when the Germans released Chlorine gas for the first time, drifting in lethal yellow-green clouds along the Allied lines. He was gassed more than once over the next few weeks, as he describes in his diary entry for 6th May:
“This last week has been quite beyond imagination, I wonder anyone has any nerves left, but I suppose it’s part of the show, & a few days’ rest will put everyone right. The gas was pretty bad, I haven’t quite got rid of it yet, makes one cough, tight on the lungs, but we have respirators now which are supposed to stop it, every man has one to put over his mouth. It comes in a great cloud, & they let it go when the wind is right, we shall soon have to do something in exchange.” And then he adds in a rare, but telling, critical comment: “There is one consolation, nothing could be worse than what we have just been through, & the Management! Enough said! Yes, the Lusitania is terrible but doesn’t compare with Y (Ypres). Don’t think I shall feel anything terrible again in that line after this big effort… I haven’t had my boots off for 10 days. Has Alastair any sign of a tooth yet? ”
95 years later, Biddy and I drove down the ramp, not into the water like my father, and with no gas but of our own making, onto dry land at Ouistreham and set off to follow as closely as possible the route taken by Alastair and his platoon in the Second Battalion of the Royal Warwicks that day 65 years before.
Those days in early June 1944 were perhaps the most terrifying, tumultuous and, as it turned out, miraculous three days of his life. Three days which were on his mind over the five days I sat with him before he died at five minutes past five on the afternoon of 6th February 2009 while, outside his window, the rooks gathered under a candescent Turner water-colour sky above the Dorset hills.
We drove, this little Austin A35 and I, up through Bénouville with orchids spilling down the banks by the roadside – Bee, Pyramidal, Lizard Orchids all intertwined in a Monet cascade of pink, yellow and purple splashes, just as they must have been back then, if unnoticed, as we approached the famous Pegasus Bridge.
This was where the first exchange of fire took place in the very early hours of D-Day, when six Horsa gliders with 181 men on board landed within yards of their objective under the command of Major John Howard and took the Germans completely by surprise. The bridge was captured, with the loss of two British soldiers, in 10 minutes and this, with its later reinforcements, helped to hamper German counter-attacks as the invasion continued.
Alastair describes, after his first experience of coming under fire and seeing dead bodies, German and English, for the first time, how: “Suddenly a whole regiment of airborne troops arrived, almost on top of us, crashing their gliders through the anti-landing poles. Really a magnificent sight and soon they unloaded and dashed off, linking with the maroon berets already holding Pegasus Bridge.”
WW2 map from the Caen area
That night, they decided to dig in near Bénouville, where “I rested in a ditch and got fearful cramp!” – but – “D-Day was over!” By which he meant, of course, the first of many, many days to come, in what became a much longer process of pushing the Germans back than Field Marshall Bernard Law Montgomery had originally envisaged or intended.
Despite his famously prickly and difficult character, ‘Monty’ was a personal friend of my grandfather, Jack’s, from before the First World War, when they were subalterns together in the Royal Warwicks. He wrote in his obituary, after Jack’s death in 1954 (when I was two), that the reason my Granpa hadn’t achieved the highest rank in his distinguished military career (he became Colonel of the Regiment and was awarded the DSO and numerous Mentions in Despatches during his time in the front line in Flanders) was because he was “too nice”.
So when we discovered, Biddy and I, that the Hotel de l’Univers in Caen was complet – apart from a gang of very friendly (and very drunk) young ‘Paras’ and somewhat less friendly Commandos, there for the anniversary commemoration – we decided to bed down in a ditch, out in the bocage somewhere. By doing this we hoped, at least in some small, inadequate part, to experience what it must have been like for my Dad and his companions, on their first night in France.
Before leaving the bar, one of a group of four young students thanked me on behalf of the French whom he felt he felt hadn’t done enough to acknowledge the role of the English in freeing them, at considerable cost to the citizens of Caen, mind you, from the yoke of the German Occupation.
But it was perhaps the tone of the Commando contingent, coupled with a grumpy patron, that prompted the following verses:
The Hotel of the Universe is full.
There is no room at the inn.
The soldiers are looking for war.
The war is about to begin.
The War of the Universe has begun.
My father and grandpa were in it.
My grandchildren and I are wondering
Whose idea it was to begin it.
And now we are all caught up in it,
This war of a thousand years.
There’s no escape but fight or flight;
Either way it will end in tears.
The Hotel of the Universe is at war.
The guests are eating each other.
There’s no-one on any old floor
Who wouldn’t smother their mother.
With these somewhat surreal thoughts and other more sober ones, prompted by the two diaries swirling around my head, I squeezed myself into the back seat of Biddy up the rough track we’d found halfway up a hill somewhere between Caen and Lion-sur-Mer, and ‘enjoyed’ a fitful night’s sleep.
To wake stiffly in the first light of 7th June and look around, imagining the “big day” ahead for Dad as he made his way to Blainville, where they washed and wolfed down some breakfast, giving the local children some chocolate, before preparing for the “frontal assault on the hill of Lebisey”.
I park the car in Biéville and prepare to walk the route Alastair and his fellow bren-carrier companions took, having been given the fateful order to “proceed down the road and up to the wood” which the battalion had supposedly “captured” earlier in the day. As I come round past an old stone wall, still pock-marked with the signs of sniper-fire and other ordnance from 65 years before, I see a grey cat perched further round, a chain attached to its collar.
As one does, I am drawn to say “bonjour, minou” in a French kind of way, foolishly not reading the potential significance of the chain. By the time I see the mad, fanatical light in its opaque green eyes, it is too late.
“It’s only a scratch” is the phrase the brave soldier uses when half his leg is shot away. In my case, it was, of course, a literal scratch. But it drew blood and made me think of those infantrymen from the 2nd Battallion who attempted to take the wood before my father received his fateful order.
An entire platoon of 37 men were killed or wounded at point-blank range by the waiting Germans in their attempt and were left, for the large part, lying where they fell for over a month until the wood was finally taken and secured.
Unknown at that point, was the fact that Field Marshall Erwin Rommel’s veteran 21st Panzer Division had moved into the wood with their Panzer Mk IV tanks overnight on 6th June, freshly re-manned and re-armed, and the brave young soldiers of the Royal Warwicks had no chance.
I, on the other hand, was free to ‘walk the gauntlet’ on this Sunday morning, as the following pages from my diary describe.
Alastair’s diary of the next few minutes tells a rather different story:
“We ran the gauntlet of one vicious burst of fire and waited with the most advanced Norfolk platoon, who reported that the Jerries were just down the road. Suddenly, the Brigadier dashed up up in a jeep, said the battalion had captured the wood, and I was to proceed to join them, as there were Jerry tanks about. So off I went, with one carrier and gun, ordering the other five to follow at about 100 yard intervals. This road was virgin territory to allied troops and suddenly all hell broke loose. The noise was fantastic, cracking and humming past us. Luckily the banks were high and I suppose we were too low for them. Somehow we weren’t hit and we pressed on up the hill. We couldn’t turn around and anyhow I felt to stop was fatal, so we accelerated madly and fired our Bren and our three Stens at either side of the road as we passed. Suddenly there appeared a low bridge, a mass of rubble and broken houses that had been the village of Lebisey. Worse still was the sight of scurrying Germans in their sickening greenish-grey, darting behind the houses as we careered forlornly into the middle of them. I found out later that all my other five carriers with their 6-pounder guns had been knocked out by mines or other means. We had been wonderfully lucky or had been allowed through the road ambushes deliberately, a favourite trick. Anyhow, we were bucketing over piles of rubble through the centre of this dire-looking village, hoping against hope to see our battalion. We passed a Panzer Mk.IV tank whose crew seemed almost as surprised to see us as we were surprised to see them. We couldn’t stop to say hello and tore on. At last we were out of the village and on a road between wide wheat-fields. It was the main road to Caen. I felt we couldn’t go on any further and attack Caen alone with one gun, so we stopped and baled out in a wild frenzy and I gave the one order I had always felt certain of never giving. ‘Action rear!’ To fire backwards! Our gun drill wasn’t bad, though I think the language was far from the drill book. The gun was soon firing and, joy, we hit and holed the tank which had poked out from a house after we had cascaded past. We got off about eight rounds of our lovely high velocity shells which we had loaded with such pride and excitement, while a German machine-gun sprayed the wheat around us, the bullets ricocheting off the road. I remember the loader, who couldn’t read or write, quite imperturbable, and another Birmingham lad firing the gun with a gleaming smile and a flood of obscenity.”
Almost immediately after this, their carrier was hit by a shell from a tank and they all had to run, or rather, crawl for it in the wheat-field. “Sauve qui peut!” as Alastair described it.
When they realised that, actually, the Germans, who were by now all round them, could see exactly where they were by the trails they left behind them in the corn, they knew the game was up. One by one, they stood up with their hands in the air.
However, one of them, my Dad as it happens, had a grenade in his hand. With the pin pulled out.
When he looked around, he could see that not only were his men already mostly rounded up with their hands on their heads, but that they were standing right beside the German soldiers, holding them all at gun-point.
He couldn’t throw the grenade without the risk of killing his own men.
So he held it up. Pointed to it, with the words “Grenade. Grenade!” in what he hoped was the right German accent. And before they could react, threw it behind him where he know none of his men were standing.
As it went off harmlessly in the wheat-field behind him, he stood there, waiting for the bullet that would surely come.
But it didn’t, and to his dying day, he still couldn’t understand how he escaped being shot then and there.
That wouldn’t be the first time over the next two days that he was within, literally, a hair’s breadth of his quietus.
After sharing a convivial trench with a German Corporal, in which each showed the other the photographs of their loved ones and both agreed that the war was madness and would soon be over – although they had differing ideas on how that would happen – he found himself being taken into Caen for interrogation, being the senior officer present, as a prisoner in a jeep. Importantly, when he was searched before boarding the jeep, his diary was taken off him and that was the last he saw of it. Until after the war…
As they approached Caen, there was a burst of firing rather too close for comfort. His driver in a panic crashed the jeep and fled, leaving Alastair in the front seat, unharmed, but with a German officer behind him, who he could see, half-turning his head, was raising his pistol to shoot him.
As the German fired, Alastair threw himself over the windscreen and lay there, not moving. It was, perhaps, the best ever piece of theatrical timing of his life.
Having lain there, again, miraculously unharmed, after what felt like hours but was probably minutes, he cautiously raised his head and instantly heard the sound he dreaded. This time it was an SS Corporal who marched up to him and pulled him from the jeep and threatened to put him up against the wall and shoot him then and there.
Summoning his best German, Alastair said, “Ich bin ein Hauptmann Englander” and insisted on being treated according to the Geneva Convention. Reluctantly, the SS officer decided against his first intention and took him back to his companions in the wood, yet again.
The following day, they were marched back off to Caen again passing devastation on the way and as they approached the centre, Allied planes came overhead on another bombing raid. Watching the bombs fall from the plane, their guards ran for cover and a group of 11 of the prisoners, led by my father, took their chance.
They ran off down a side street as a huge wall collapsed behind them and ran into a group of Gendarmes whom they asked to hide them. “Vite! Vite!” they said, and took them to a ditch in the public gardens where they were able to conceal themselves in the long grass and shrubbery.
Over the next few hours the Gendarmes returned with Cognac and Camembert, greatly appreciated by Alastair, if not so much by the others, and finally a man appeared with two civilian suits which he offered to Alastair and one other of his colleagues who also spoke French and suggested they should put them on and follow him to the cathedral crypt. But Alastair felt he couldn’t leave the rest to fend for themselves in such a vulnerable position, so they reluctantly refused, and when nightfall came, they all started to try to find a way back to eventually rejoining their battalion.
Inevitably, they were soon spotted and, weaponless, were rounded up, so mystifying and infuriating the German Corporal who arrested them by their unexplained presence in the city that he insisted they should all be shot. Again, it was Alastair’s show of rank, demanding that he be taken to see an officer, that stopped them being killed then and there.
And so began the long journey that ended in Offlag 79, their Prisoner-of-War Camp in Brunswick, were they remained until liberated by the American Seventh Army, very weak from near starvation but overjoyed at the thought of returning to their families, in April 1945, in the last few weeks of the war.
Meanwhile I had recovered from my encounter with the SS cat and had climbed the hill that Alastair had careered up in his bren carrier and reached the wood.
As I entered down a rough track, the air noticeably chilled. What was left of the wood, half of which was now a recreational area on the edge of the encroaching Industrial Park of Lebisey, was in a dejected-looking state despite the early Summer vegetation. Nevertheless I walked further and started to feel a sense of what was lying under the tangle of undergrowth, with its ditches and hollows not unlike the remnants of a trench here, a shell-hole there.
At one point, I felt a shiver run down through me as I sensed a terrible sadness somehow impregnated into the ground I walked on, with the ash and oak trees mostly of more recent growth, holding a history of decay and neglect. It felt unloved, uncared for and, unlike so many woods I knew elsewhere, ‘unquiet’.
I felt I needed to make my way back and went back to the track, which is when I noticed a gate further down with some kind of mobile home or caravan, parked behind it.
Out of curiosity I walked a little way towards it and, looking round, I saw two people coming up behind me down the track. There was a man and a boy, father and son, probably, I thought. I stopped and turned with a smile to say hello.
The man was called Israel Meyer with his 12 year old son, Logan, a very good-looking, tall young lad, both ‘gens du voyage’, or travelling people, whose caravan it was behind the gate. As we talked, the reserve with which he’d answered my initial greeting eased and we shared a few privileged minutes in which I learned something about him and his story.
“We live here,” he said, “because we are not wanted elsewhere, like the spirits in this wood. We are Jews,” he explained, “from Israel, like my name, but like all of our kind, us ‘gens du voyage’, we have been long estranged from our homeland. And even though Nazi Germany tried to wipe us out, France has not done much better. We have been spurned, neglected and forgotten – for who we are, despite what we’ve done, including fighting for France. For myself, I couldn’t kill another human-being just because I am told he is ‘the enemy’. To protect my family, I would do anything I had to do but not for a state which does not care about all its citizens. Like these sad, starving ones in the wood here, who I feel, I sense every day, who want to reach out to the living but are lost to us.”
I had said nothing of my feelings about the wood and my knowledge of what had happened 65 years before but now I shared the story about how my father had been captured and brought here to shelter in a trench with his captors as the shells from HMS Warspite off-shore thundered overhead like express trains. And how my father and the German soldier had shown each other the photographs of their loved ones and agreed that the war was madness. And how many soldiers had died here and been left too long. And how I too felt the ‘unquiet’ of the wood, as I called it.
And so I made my way back, having shaken Israel and Logan’s hands and wished them well.
Back down the hill I went and up to my little car, past the cat, to which I gave a wide berth and did not wish it so well, I’m afraid.
And yet, the madness that is war, the ruin, loss and appalling destruction of people, culture, and nature itself, for all its ‘unquiet’ that remains behind, also gave my father something that I will never have and, in almost every way, am grateful that I haven’t.
Although, like my grandfather, incredibly lucky to have survived when so many millions didn’t in Smith-Dorrien’s all too accurate prediction – no more so than now, nuclear age or not, as we have seen in Syria, the Yemen, Afghanistan, Iraq, and so many other places – Alastair never forgot, did not want to forget, the experience of those three days in France. I suspect my grandfather, Jack, wished that he could forget his four appalling years in France and Flanders. A note in his diary for August 29th 2016 reads, tersely:
“After the Somme Battle, in which our casualties were terrific, I wasn’t my best & had had about enough Regt. Soldiering.”
This from a career soldier, one of only two officers left from the original battalion that had arrived in France two years before, even in his typically understated way, it does not take much reading between the lines to see how sickened he was by the carnage after two years of unremitting hell.
Whereas Alastair probably played the best performance of his life in his three days of action. As Private Woodhall, who was in the same bren carrier going up that hill towards the wood with my father, wrote in a letter to him after the war:
“I had a day out yesterday with Corporal Hill and Sergeant White.. we had a few laughs, over a drink, at our past experiences, especially the way Sergeant White drove the carrier along that road, head well down, touching about 40 mph, and you sir sitting on the outside of the carrier with your sten gun blazing, it was just like a picture show!”
And maybe that’s how he did it. Overcame his fear in that moment when it all came together – the belief in the cause, the training, the stepping onto the world stage in the biggest part of the greatest play, and the moment of reckoning with his mortality, the giving of his fate into the hands of God and – just going for it.
In yet again, such an inadequate, even childish way, Biddy and I thought to ourselves – why don’t we try? So, warmed and ready, I engaged first gear on her special, close ratio, straight cut gearbox, revved her up to a chassis-shaking 5,000 revs and dropped the clutch. The SS cat disappeared in a cloud of burnt carbon and smoking rubber and we were gone. Up the hill. Towards the wood.
Lebisey Wood
Down the dip and as the road opens up
I floor the throttle and we go for it
just as Dad and Private Woodhall did
and the other two,
Corporal Hill and Lance Corporal White,
heads well down, just
going for it!
“And you sir sitting on the outside of the carrier
with your sten gun blazing,
it was just like a picture show!” he wrote,
as he, Woodhall, recalled that extraordinary blast,
with the 21st Panzers waiting in the wood,
as they careered on up the hill “touching 40 M.P.H”,
the noise – engine, tracks, wind, guns,
obliterating everything but noise
as I do, without the tracks, the guns
and the 21st Panzers waiting in the wood
but a sense, nonetheless, of what must have been
the sheer exhilaration of flying in the face of fear.
I never wanted to be a soldier, a military man, and my confrontations with fear have been limited to heights and school bullies and moments when I could so easily have stepped aside, given up, given in, and sometimes have. But I will never know what he confronted then and how that coloured his whole life thereafter – except through his diaries and the stories that he told. Unlike my grandfather who, I suspect, would have been one of those who never spoke of it.
106 years ago, now, I could well have been one of those public school cadets Smith-Dorrien addressed just before the outbreak of the First World War, if an accident of birth had so willed it. I am glad I wasn’t. But if I had been, would I have been strong and brave enough to go against the tide and refuse to fight, become a Conscientious Objector?
My father thought long and hard before he joined up in 1940, just after playing Oberon in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In a Prologue to a beautiful, tooled blue leather-bound book of his writing in the build up to the Second World War, when he was a working professional actor with John Gielgud’s Queen Theatre Company and others, he mused on the state of the world as it slid inexorably towards catastrophe and our entry into the war in September 1939.
“Dear Earth” he begins. “What a mess we are all in again! You must be very weary of us.” And continues with an overview of the disasters and aggression taking place already round the world in early 1939. He then explains how Hitler “has fanned a crushed Germany’s sense of injustice into a mystical nationalism that now refuses to see any limits to its dominion” and how the League of Nations has signally failed to confront Germany’s aggression and dependence on war to achieve its aims.
Hand-in-hand with the question of how to avoid “another recurrence” of the devastation of the First World War, comes, following a sense of inevitability of the coming global conflict, the absolute necessity of bringing “some form of federation or federal union into being after the war. For that is, I believe, the first step to lasting peace; it is really a question of federate or perish.”
In a time in which we have turned our backs on the European Union, here, now, in 2020, it is sobering to be reminded how and why Europe did come together, bit by bit, after the last war. How, the further away we are from the reality of that catastrophe, and the one before it, the easier it gets to slide back into exactly the kind of petty nationalism that allowed the autocrats and enemies of democracy to manipulate an economically depressed world into aggression and conflict. And if ever we were in a position of global, let alone European, vulnerability after COVID 19, it is now. As W.H. Auden says in his poem The Witnesses, quoted by my father:
The sky is darkening like a stain,
Something is going to fall like rain,
And it won’t be flowers.
He then, Alastair, talks about himself, his beliefs and his faith, with both the failings and strengths of Christianity as a force for good. And this leads into a muse on art and, above all, acting.
“In most arts, you can wait for the moment to arrive when you feel compelled to write or paint. But in acting, the spirit has to be ready at definite times and with other people depending on it, your fellow actors or the audience. To make an entrance onto a stage is eternally a moment of greatness. One world is left behind and a new dimension is achieved… It is here that an inner harmony and lack of tension is essential… The actor in rehearsal must wait and pray for the fire inside him to come, and when it does, he must ride on its wings and use its freedom-giving splendour to feel to the utmost the main line of his character… (and when this comes) it comes after an emptying of consciousness, it is unpremeditated and subconscious and personally I never know what may come from it, of what I am capable or what vistas of imagination and depths of feeling may not suddenly surge through me.”
He ends this section with the famous quote from Hamlet:
“If it be now, ‘tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all. Since no man has aught of what he leaves, what is’t to leave betimes? Let be.”
Then comes the dilemma between pacifism and fighting evil with the weapons of war. It is a struggle on which he dwells at some length, falling reluctantly but with commitment “in the face of the foul poison of Nazi doctrine” on the side of defending ‘by force…the relics of freedom left to the human mind and the values that we still maintain.”
But it is his description of what acting means to him that I believe gives the key to how he was able to “ride the wings” of his bren carrier, with Private Woodhall, Corporal Hill and Sergeant White, sten gun blazing in the face of unknown and overwhelming force. And how he rode the rôle right through being captured and the escapades of those three days until being taken, finally, prisoner in Germany.
So why ‘unquiet’?
I think because, for all the fortunate ones who came through, as did my grandfather and my father – without whom I would not have any existence, conscious or otherwise – war “solves nothing”, as Smith-Dorrien said and takes a toll beyond any acceptable, bearable cost, as anyone who has experienced war, let alone lost a son, daughter, brother, sister, father, mother amongst the millions that have, and continue to do, will tell you.
‘The Hotel of the Universe’ is full – of death. Millennia of death from the savagery of war in which God is strangely looking the other way.
Yes, Hitler had to be confronted but how many wars have been waged for the worst reasons with the inevitable toll to Smith-Dorrien’s“whole populations”? How much better, surely, to find any means “at almost any cost”, as he says, to avoid war in the first place. One core way being to come together rather than moving further apart. The opposite, if you like, of ‘America First’ and all it stands for. Or ‘Deutschland über Alles’. Or ‘Rule Britannia’.
Those spirits in Lebisey Wood, it feels, may never find quietus, in its archaic sense of peace, of release, of quiet. How different to the wood Gill and I found ‘somewhere in Chilterns’ in which one of our very rarest orchids grows.
It’s name? Orchis Militaris, the Military Orchid.
And in Part 2 of ‘Military Matters’, I will take you to see, smell, even taste this creature, if only metaphorically, lost for many years until rediscovered by a botanist. On a picnic. In the quiet. Without which, it surely would not grow.
Post-script
My father’s diary, taken off him by his captors in Lebisey Wood, had a curious after-story. It came back to him twice, once in 1948, and again in 1964, both times translated into German.
After being taken from him on 7th June 1944, the story goes, it was rushed off to be examined for any potential information of military value. This required translation and a certain Herr Hoyer, then with the 21st Panzer Division, had been in charge of collecting any papers of possible strategic value.
On reading the diary (which, incidentally, had no strategic value), Hoyer not only passed his translation up the line to where, allegedly it came into Field Marshal Rommel’s very own hands, he was so touched by the sentiments and style of my father’s writing in the form of an extended letter to my mother, that he, riskily, kept a personal copy.
Quite a while after the war had ended, he decided that, in all conscience, he should try to contact the probable widow of the British officer who had written it and so wrote to the Royal Warwickshire Regiment as follows:
“I beg you politely to help me in finding out and stating the name and present address of the British officer, or if he has been killed in action, the address of his wife. I believe the diary will be of great value for his wife, or for him, being the testimony of all the thoughts connecting him with his wife during those hard days before the great battle.”
The diary followed shortly afterwards and reached its destination, to the great surprise and delight of Mr and Mrs Bannerman and their two sons, Andrew, aged 6 and Richard aged 4, both born during the war.
My father had it translated back into English, amending and editing it to try to capture the feelings and words he originally used to describe his love for his wife and family, as well as the mission he was about to undertake.
Bizarrely, in a déjà vu moment, again out of the blue, a young German woman who had worked in a translation centre in France during the war, had come across it, perhaps made the first translation, and also made a personal copy of it, like Herr Hoyer. She then passed this after the war to her ‘Tante Lily’. And 1964, Tante Lily decided that she must see if she could return it before she died and it got lost, and by a similar means, tracked down my father in England.
It was then serialised in a Manchester newspaper and, for this reason, appears in many extracts used by historians of D-Day and the Second World War.
In 2014, my brothers and I – even though I was not a ‘war baby’ like them – were then invited to take part in an ITV programme called ‘If I don’t Come Home’, directed by Marion Milne, featuring four people caught up in D-Day, only two of whom came home. This is available in book form as an e-book published by ITV Ventures in 2014 with our father’s diary appearing under the title “If I Don’t Come Home – Letters from D-Day. The Bannerman Letter’.
Tim’s grandfather with Montgomery at Arras in 1917
Tim’s grandfather with “Monty” after World War Two
