Anthony Burgess at War
In this unpublished essay from the archive, the writer remembers his service during the Second World War.
This week marks the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings in Normandy in 1944. Anthony Burgess did not take part in this campaign, but his wife Lynne was involved in planning the construction of floating harbours for D-Day, as part of her work at the Ministry of War Transport in London.
In this essay from the Anthony Burgess Foundation’s archive, written in 1990 and apparently never published, Burgess reflects on his experience of the Second World War. Conscripted into the British Army in 1940, he joined the Royal Army Medical Corps, stationed at Newbattle Abbey, near Edinburgh, and was later transferred into the Royal Army Educational Corps, who posted him to Gibraltar in 1943. This short memoir gives a strong flavour of what it was like to be an ordinary soldier during the 1939-1945 war, although the perspective is a personal one.
Anthony Burgess at War
June was a glorious month in England in 1940. The sun shone daily — an unusual phenomenon in our cool and cloudy country. I wrote a poem about the barrage balloons ‘soaring silver in silver ether,’ the colliding lips of lovers ‘sliding on sweat,’ and the pen ‘slithering in the examinee’s fingers.’ I myself had just finished being an examinee. I had been taking the final papers for the degree in English Language and Literature at the University of Manchester. Answering questions about Anglo-Saxon morphology and the phonology of Middle English sometimes seemed irrelevant to the great disasters happening in the world, but at other times it seemed closer to reality than the shocking events one read of in the daily newspapers or heard of on the BBC’s nine o’clock news. After all, scholarship was of eternal value, while wars were stupid and transitory. I should, by rights, already be in army uniform, being evacuated from Dunkirk in the British Expeditionary Force’s inglorious retreat. This evacuation began on 27 May, when the paper on the phonetics of the English of King Alfred the Great (849-899) had to be answered, and it ended on 4 June, when I underwent a severe viva voce examination from, strangely, visiting professors with names like Goldschmidt and Apfelbaum. I was reminded that the English language was a member of the great Germanic family, now split into two hostile segments.
Why was I not in that ragged army that was being ferried across the English Channel from disaster to the shameful safety of home? I was of the right age and had been pronounced healthy. But, with unwonted concern for the continuity of scholarship, the British Government had decided that we university students should be permitted to complete our degree courses before being inducted into the forces. Thus I spent the whole summer and some of the autumn of 1940 as a civilian with a degree but no employment, a ‘dangling man’ (the term is Saul Bellow’s: it is the title of a book he wrote about an American in my own situation). Being called up into the Royal Army Medical Corps on 17 October 1940 was something of a relief. At last I had employment, but, so inefficient was our War Office, it was several months before I was issued with a uniform. I drilled in the garb of a university student — flannel trousers, sports jacket, a shirt that literally fell off my back in rags. But I had boots and a steel helmet.
It was, then, as a civilian living in gorgeous summer weather that I experienced the main events of that year. 299 British warships and 420 other vessels — fishing smacks, pleasure steamers, private yachts — evacuated 335,490 officers and men from Dunkirk under constant German bombardment. I saw many of these men in the buses, drinking their cigarettes, dazed, unsure where they were. The day after the completion of the evacuation, Hitler proclaimed a war of total annihilation against his enemies. On 8 June, German armoured forces penetrated French defences near Rouen. On 14 June, Paris was taken. On 15 June, Soviet troops occupied Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. On 22 June, French delegates accepted the terms of an armistice. The war in Europe was over, although the obstinate and foolish British refused to admit it.
I have, of course, omitted one date from the above woeful chronology. On 10 June, Italy declared war on Britain and France, or rather Mussolini did. The response of Winston Churchill to Mussolini’s declaration was defiant, insulting and rhetorical. Hitler’s jackal, frisking at the feet of his master, had, in a mixed metaphor, stabbed the British in the back. But the British people nursed no resentment against the Italian people. Italy was a loved country, in which fascism seemed to be an attribute of comic opera. Rome was Rome, and Venice was Venice. Italy was still Dante, Michelangelo, Leonardo. Germany had ceased to be Beethoven and Goethe. There was nothing operettish about Nazism, There was, until Japan struck, only one enemy.
All through that summer, we expected an invasion from the Germans, who had only a narrow Channel to cross. Their first act was to devastate the British airfields and stifle any hope of our aerial defence. Stories of a very fantastical nature circulated. The Germans were on British soil already, disguised as nuns. When the invasion began, the church bells, otherwise silent for the duration of the war, would loudly peal. A Home Guard was formed, armed with broom handles and home-made Molotov cocktails. Nobody thought of the Italians, except Churchill, who rounded up all the British Italian families — most of whom were more British than he was (he was half-American, after all) — and put them in ships to be sunk by German U-boats. There was no time to think of the Italians on 10 July, when the Battle of Britain began.
This continued until 15 September, when, with 1733 Luftwaffe losses and 916 of the Royal Air Force, the British may be said to have won the battle. London was the chief target, but Londoners proved difficult to demoralise. Luftwaffe bombs on Manchester’s Trafford Park, a great industrial centre, did not reach the headlines of the London newspapers. The Luftwaffe continued a more sporadic attempt at destroying provincial morale. On 14 November, Coventry was attacked and the cathedral totally wrecked. Then, on 29 December, the Luftwaffe dropped incendiary bombs on the City of London, destroying the Guildhall and eight priceless churches built by Sir Christopher Wren.
Meanwhile Italy had come into the war. The Duce found it impossible to resist the declaration of war on two countries brought, as he thought, to their knees. He did not think that Britain would fight on. In October 1940 he launched his attack on Greece. This did not go well. This went, indeed, so badly that a popular song was soon to be sung throughout Britain:
Oh, what a surprise for the Duce, the Duce —
He can’t put it over the Greeks.
Oh, what a surprise for the Duce. They do say
He’s had no spaghetti for weeks.
When, in 1943, I was posted to Gibraltar, I saw that Britain’s place in the Mediterranean — which we called the Med — related to imperial strategy. World War II was an imperialist war. In Gibraltar also I made my first contact with Italians. They were prisoners of war free to wander a rock that was itself a prison. They were hard to think of as the Enemy. Once a week, I was instructed to climb Windmill Hill and lecture to the Italians on the meaning of democracy. They knew no English, I knew no Italian. Still, orders were orders. I thought it was best to hand round cigarettes (against the rules) and have them read Dante to me. I learned some Italian that way. Naturally I was severely reprimanded.
But this was yet to come. In October 1940 I travelled on a one-way ticket to Scotland, there to be inducted into His Majesty’s Forces. The welcome we received from His Majesty’s deputies was not reassuring. There were no uniforms, and the sole latrine was up a slippery slope known as Hill Sixty. Fit men grew sick with enforced constipation. The lifelong dyspepsia which has afflicted my generation was initiated here: army cookery was an ill-taught trade. In the winter dawn we coughed out our hearts as we ran up and down and played grim leapfrog in thin shorts and vests. A branch of the British Army devoted to the health of the soldier seemed determined to kill its recruits before the enemy could get to them.
What did the war mean to us ill-fed, dirty and constipated recruits? We had, it was assumed, gone to war to defend the rights of Poland. But not one British brigade had made its way to Eastern Europe, and the whole of Europe, anyway, was now locked into the Nazi embrace. The war was proceeding in the Balkans, which had nothing to do with Poland, and the British Empire was being attacked. What did we care about the British Empire? Very little. It was remote, exotic, and, we presumed, only there to enrich commercial nabobs. What the war was about, we began to think, was the British class system. The troops, who represented the working class, learned to hate the ruling class which, at that time, was encased in officer’s uniform. Nobody hated the Germans or the Italians — they were too far away. We assumed that the Italian and the German troops had an equal hatred of their own officer class. Our sympathies were with any soldiers who had been herded into what seemed a pointless war. We knew nothing of the Nazi death camps, the Gestapo, the SS. If we were fighting at all, it was to ensure that post-war Britain would be rather different from the pre-war mess.
Of course, the British revolution was only a soldier’s dream. But the chance to articulate social rebellion was soon kindly handed to us on a plate by the War Office, who set up the Army Bureau of Current Affairs, designed, through pamphlets and weekly lectures, to instruct the troops on what we were fighting for. We were fighting for democracy, we were told. Soon, I was one of those instructors. I made it clear that there was a lot of destruction ahead of us, and that a democratic system meant the death of the Old Guard, which meant chiefly Winston Churchill. Our great war leader, as he was called, was to be given no chance to rule the peace. In 1945 we kicked him out and installed socialism.
Socialism meant, among other things, the end of the British Empire. The very thing we were defending was liquidated at the stroke of a pen. But this was some time off. By Christmas 1940 I had begun to look like a soldier and even dress like one. At Christmas dinner, the Commanding Officer of the Training Centre, whom we had never seen before, emerged from the machicolations of Newbattle Abbey (an ancient castle where ghosts walked) and said he loved us as a father loved his sons. Then he went back to his shadows, never to be seen again.
What nobody can know who did not live through that war is the smell of it. The smell of sulphuretted hydrogen in the railway stations as the steam engines puffed in. The smell of khaki serge in the rain. The brilliantine smell of the leathery inside of a steel helmet. The smell of unwashed bodies that were due to be marched into the weekly bath-house. The smell of corned beef and mashed potatoes and beetroot in vinegar, the regular Saturday dinner. The smell of cheap cigarettes. The smell of the perfume of our girlfriends, when, on leave, we were permitted to see them again. But the real smell of the war — the putrefaction of the death camps — was denied to us. It is still something that defies the olfactory imagination.
Find out more
A Vision of Battlements, Anthony Burgess’s novel inspired by his wartime experiences in Gibraltar.
Little Wilson and Big God by Anthony Burgess, in which he gives a more detailed account of his wartime service (affiliate link).