Inferno - Max Hastings [213]
Most men under fire focused upon immediacies and loyalties towards one another. Their hopes and fears became elemental, as described by a British lieutenant, Norman Craig, in the desert: “Life was so free of all its complexities. What a clarity and a simplicity it really had! To stay alive, to lead once more a normal existence, to know again warmth, comfort and safety—what else could one conceivably demand? I would never chide circumstance again, never question fate, never feel bored, unhappy or dissatisfied. To be allowed to continue to live—nothing else mattered.” Comradeship was fundamental: “Nobody has the courage to act in accordance with his natural cowardice with the whole company looking on,” said a Luftwaffe NCO named Walter Schneider, pleased with his own paradox.
The intimacy forged by even a few weeks of shared battle experience caused some units to behave with cynical ruthlessness towards newcomers—outsiders. A veteran American staff sergeant said about Anzio, where his unit had eight replacements killed within twenty-four hours of their arrival: “We weren’t going to send our own guys out on point in a damnfool situation like that. We had been together since Africa, and Sicily, and Salerno. We sent the replacements out ahead.” It was the same in every army: “The company was the heimat,” said SS lieutenant Helmut Gunther, “the people you wanted to be with. What mattered about being wounded was separation from your unit. You had a completely different feeling towards those who had been with you a long time as distinct from those who hadn’t. A few months are an eternity for a soldier in war.” Some Scottish soldiers of the 51st Highland Division mutinied at Salerno in September 1943, rather than accept posting to another formation.
Only a small number of warriors articulated hopes more ambitious than those for personal survival. One of these was a British officer who wrote to his parents before being killed in his first North African battle: “I should like you to know what it is I died for … There is, I feel, both in England and America a tremendous surge of feeling, a feeling which, for want of a better word, I shall call ‘goodness.’ It is not expressed by the politicians or the newspapers, for it is far too deep for them. It is the heartfelt longing of all the ‘middling folk’ for something better—a world more worthy of their children, a world more simple in its beliefs, nearer to earth and to God. I have heard it so often among soldiers in England and America, in trains, in factories in Chicago and in clubs in London, sometimes so poorly expressed that one can hardly recognize it, but underlying it all there is that craving for a new life.”
All this was true. While Winston Churchill saw himself conducting a struggle to preserve the greatness of the British Empire, most of his fellow countrymen yearned instead for domestic change, most vividly anticipated in the Beveridge Report, published in November 1942, which laid the foundations of Britain’s postwar welfare state. The Spectator editorialised: “The report has almost eclipsed the war itself as a subject of discussion in the country; it has been keenly debated by British troops overseas.” Capt. David Elliott wrote to his sister, after hearing a discussion among his guardsmen about Beveridge: “If it is not accepted in toto I feel there will be a revolution.” Independent Labour MP Aneurin Bevan told