Time at War by Nicholas Mosley

Time at War Reviews

• 
  Jeff Bursey

  From my Midwest Book Review -- available here:
  http://www.midwestbookreview.com/rbw/...
  
  Time At War
  Nicholas Mosley
  Dalkey Archive Press
  University of Illinois
  1805 S. Wright Street, MC-011, Champaign, IL 61820
  9781564784568 $12.95
  http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/ 217/244-5700
  
  Nicholas Mosley was born in 1923, and his latest novel, Look At the Dark, came out in the UK in 2005. He is the son of Sir Oswald Mosley who was imprisoned for his fascist beliefs during the Second World War. While his son fought those pressed into service by Mussolini and Hitler, he and his father maintained a correspondence that is drawn on in this war memoir. Mosley has spent much of his life repudiating his father, and in these pages we are urged to see a young man sympathetically engaged, out of love, with his father's troubling, and troublesome, philosophy. The letters are a precursor of the break that came later.
  
  Time At War (2006) tells of Mosley's Italian war experience - limited partly due to the time he entered the army, and partly due to injuries and illness suffered during his service - and at one point he writes:
  
  "I ended my letter [to his sister] by saying 'I find it hard to believe it was I that did all those peculiar things!' and then as if in an attempt at explanation - 'I have yet to meet a man who fought well because he believes in the cause for which he is fighting… it is always pride that incites and succeeds in war.'"
  
  War tales have become increasingly popular since the mass media has both created and reflected an aging populace's opinion that veterans, the best generation, fought solely to defend what's called 'our way of life.' Apart from leaving out what civilians endure during wartime, such talk leaves out the bulk of a soldier's training: to remain alive while killing other people - be they enemy combatants or civilians. There's nothing noble or high-minded about that.
  
  Given a gun and trained to be victorious in warfare, Mosley manages to avoid most of the harder lessons until, on a disastrous day against the enemy, he "discovered shame… But would not one day some act of restitution be demanded of me?" Not as soon as he anticipated, or that would enliven this book. We get pages about opera and Italian art, or Mosley telling liberated Italians who praise him that, actually, he's in favour of Mussolini (a humourous remark that echoes his father). He and a friend sneak into the Vatican and enjoy "Michelangelo's ceiling before the Swiss Guards arrived to escort [them] out." As he says, "One of the main attractions of war is surely that it offers chances to try out one's own brand of anarchy - protected from the social disapproval and penalties that would be incurred in peace." Of course. One thinks of Abu Ghraib almost immediately.
  
  Certainly another positive factor of war is the bonding that occurs during training. "I had a friend called Pollock who became something of the squad butt. When we were standing to attention the sergeant would stand very close to him and yell - 'Pollock! Spell it with a P do you? You sack of shit!'" Good-natured ribbing like that improves morale, but better yet are the times when the men "played records on a wind-up gramophone; we danced ballroom or exotic dances; some of us got hold of women's clothes. There is a tradition in armies for this sort of thing on the fringes of war - presumably as a reaction or counterbalance to the brutally macho business of killing; perhaps psychologically as a form of bonding." This leads into a letter to a friend: "And we have riotous games of football during recreational training, when it is their sole objective to trip me up [Mosley is a commanding officer] and sit on me whether I have the ball or not. Which I enjoy because some of them are rather attrac. [Mosley's abbreviation]"
  
  Anarchy, pride, and a love for one's fellow soldiers, are some of the reasons Mosley offers for enjoying the military life. Fighting for democracy doesn't enter into it. Generally, and unless forced, people join the military because they can't find employment, they have a taste for violence, or they see themselves as patriotic; their conduct when they reach the front lines can stem from ignorance, xenophobia, and a desire to find discipline and purpose by blindly following morally and ethically bankrupt orders. ("If any question why we died/ Tell them, because our fathers lied," runs a Kipling epigraph that's popular once again.) These spurs to prick the sides of a soldier's intent don't interest Mosley, off as he is on a boys-will-be-cross-dressed-boys adventure, though he's ready to expound on mankind's abiding regard for war. "Humans are at home in war (though they seldom admit this). They feel they know what they have to do."
  
  For the ones who survived, it's at least true that they knew enough to get through; whether they're better after coming through is a messier issue Mosley can't be bothered to discuss here.
  
  On the stylistic level, Time At War stumbles. Mosley has the annoying habit of ending paragraphs with questions, and this comes across not as investigative but as rhetorical. War engenders enough rhetoric without him adding to it; more importantly, rhetoric is an enemy of creative thought. In an interview available at Dalkey's site, he says about one of his novels:
  
  "But the feeling was - if I was going to try to write something different from the old narrative tragic/romantic novel… not only the form of the book, but the form of each sentence had to be in a different style… So the sentences, yes, had to be a model of the whole, and what the whole was trying to do."
  
  If that is uniformly true of the mature writer's style, then a reader is shown no mercy with sentences like: "The 2nd Battalion of the London Irish Rifles was part of The Irish Brigade, along with the 1st Royal Irish Fusiliers and the 6th Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers." There's no improving that sort of dire sentence, and nothing memorable in descriptions of troop movements.
  
  When Mosley speaks of his father's incarceration, he refers to Oswald being held "without charge for an indefinite period under the hurriedly cobbled-up Regulation 18B(1a)," where he is soon joined by Mosley's stepmother, Diana (nee Mitford). The December-January 2008 issue of"Bookforum carried a review of correspondence between the Mitford sisters, with this reference to Diana and Oswald: "They married secretly at Goebbels's apartment in Munich in 1936, with Hitler in attendance. So devoted to him and fanatic about his cause was she that she was interned (at the request of Nancy [Mitford], who described her as a danger to society)" under the same general regulation as her husband "for the duration of the war." There is a constant struggle between son and father. The view military men had of the elder Mosley forced Nicholas to confront that. "But would not one day some act of restitution be demanded of me?" he had asked. That day did come, and he handled himself well, according to the account given here. However, that's not an adequate reason to read Time At War, and definitely not worth writing it. This egocentric celebration of war's impulses and actions is another insufferable veteran's tale that's barely livened up by family scandal and garnished by meagre philosophical musings.
• 
  Kathy Piselli

  I was curious about Mosley's war service and many things about this book fulfilled stereotypes of mine: the Eton education (even a critique of the culture of homosexuality lurking beneath its surface) which propelled a stammering, inexperienced youth to manage a platoon of seasoned soldiers in wartime, even the preoccupation with literature and philosophy, his childhood toys. I did not expect the antiwar sentiment from an Englishman whose country lay in the line of fire nor his embrace of war. The writing is intelligent and flowing, funny at times, dramatic during the war scenes, always frankly expressed, and you can see hints of his novels here. The letters to his sister are poignant and those from company commander Mervyn Davies are superb (both men won a Military Cross for a well-told incident described in Time at War).
  
  His persistent theme is how comfortable humans are with war. "the ancient Greeks...had loved stories of suffering and war...Why were there no myths of people getting on sensibly with peace?" he asks. Perhaps humans prefer war because of something Mosley writes to his sister: "after 12 months of fighting I will forgive anyone the old failings - the boorishness, the stupidity, the dullness - if he does not possess the failings of a bad soldier." After all, that is survival. So at war, when we are at our worst, may be when we tolerate one another the best.
• 
  Paul Pryce

  I really enjoyed this book - I was nervous when I started but I came away with a strong sense that I’d get on with Nicolas Mosley, or at least I’d enjoy meeting him even if he seems a bit intellectually deep and thoughtful for my mind :-)
• 
  Emma Richler

  Percipient and stimulating, bitter and very funny, and altogether thoroughly enjoyable.
• 
  ErnstG

  After Hopeful Monsters, what a disappointment . . .