James Delingpole
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So how do you cope with such horror? The answer, according to this splendidly readable new collection of Daily Telegraph military obituaries, is that you don’t, you pretend it’s not happening. Either you deflect it, as that London cabbie did, with the blackest of black humour. Or you do what the Americans sometimes criticised our officers for doing, but which was probably a very useful defence mechanism, and treat it as a jolly game.
Time and again, the quality that shines through the brief lives of these amazing men (some with VCs, most with MCs, one with no fewer than three of them — something only 24 men achieved) is an indomitable puckishness. Death might be a near inevitability, but in the meantime these boys were going to have a bloody good laugh.
Major Count Juan Salazar’s idea of fun was to challenge his brother officers to a game where they all set their hair on fire. First to douse the flames by pouring a pint over his head was the chicken. Sounds as if he might have been a slightly trying fellow, but, then, these were the qualities that helped him win his MC with the Chindits in Burma when he crawled past a Japanese guard post and single-handedly destroyed their petrol dump.
Some of the tales here are so extra- ordinary they beggar belief. Can it really be that Major Richard Harden managed to land ‘without any previous experience, an aircraft whose pilot had been shot dead at the controls’? What sublime sense of destiny can have possessed Major D’Arcy Mander, captured with the Green Howards in the Western Desert, to learn Italian in his PoW camp, escape to Rome and spend six months spying on the Germans, helping escaped PoWs, and twice being taken by the Gestapo?
Those of us who weren’t there sometimes ask ourselves how we would have measured up. ‘Oh you’d have done exactly the same as we did,’ most veterans sweetly say. But would we? Captured by the Chinese at the Imjin River and forced to stand on parade and listen all morning to lectures on Western imperialism, would we have done, as Warrant Officer ‘Muscles’ Strong did, and court solitary confinement by yelling out that it was ‘a load of bollocks’?
Or suppose we’d had our right arm blown off by a booby trap on the North-West Frontier. Would we, as Lt-Col Peter Sanders did, cheerfully accept an invitation to tikala (lunch) from the Waziri tribesman who had laid the trap? ‘An apology was offered and accepted, in the tradition of border warfare.’ It’s just this sort of terse, matter-of-fact phrasing (e.g. also ‘they were dealt with in short order’) which makes the Telegraph’s military obits such a particular joy.
And now these magnificent old boys are dropping like flies. If only it were not so. We need these chaps to show us the way. Our world will be the poorer for their departure.
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