What Did You Do During The War Daddy?

[MANICHAEAN]

Preface:

The reader of this disjointed and somewhat irregular narrative can be reasonably excused his or her confusion, if it is recognised at the very beginning that it was the product of the mind of one Captain Parravicini Mawhood of the Royal Regiment of Horse Guards, who unable to sleep in his Knightsbridge billet at 2.30 in the morning of late autumn 2010, was obliged to rise and purge his mental state.

His only excuse offered for its incoherent nature was a dinner the night before of chicken breasts stuffed with spinach and mozzarella cheese, washed down with Jameson’s whiskey.

Others more discerning would have said it was his conscience, the perverse offbeat product of a secular Jewish intellect and the imagination inherent in his Irish blood line.

Apologies are therefore necessary, if, in endeavouring to digest this dubious miscellany, you find your normally unaccustomed plodding strides obliged to undertake more nimble steps, more appropriate to that of a mountain goat on an Alpine peak.

Chapter 1. Introduction:

It was customary in those days across Europe; in fact it was almost obligatory as an aspect of social intercourse, to enquire of men of a certain age as to what kind of war they had had.

From a later perspective this might appear as somewhat perverse, but at the time, the conflict involved had been so encompassing and the stage upon which it had been played, so wide and exotic, that there were stories there from individual players that were both interesting to the listener & which established a defining period of life for the teller.

There was also a touch of a, “little do you know,” about the broad aspects of the drama. This was especially so when you considered that this conflict had attained such impressive titles as, “The Great War” and “The War to End All Wars.”

It had been however, but a prelude for a re-run in a later conflagration, which resulted in the whole thing being redefined in a collective, more drab way as “The First & Second World Wars.”

But that was later.

For the moment it was 1918 and to all extents and purposes, that particular war was just over.

And so the question “How was your war?” depended to a large degree upon who you spoke to and who was asking the question.

[MANICHAEAN]

Chapter 2: Germany:

In what was left of Germany, General von Hindenburg was in his family estate on this day and his main concern at this critical juncture of his life was “Eisbein” or “pork knuckle.” For it was when he was about to eat this, his favourite dish, back on the 22nd August 1914 that he had been immediately summoned out of retirement at the advanced age of sixty seven to confront Germany’s enemies on the Eastern Front, namely Russia.

For two days before, General Ivan Samsonov had decided that he was now in a position to make a rush into the heart, and feed upon the entrails of the German nation. Luckily Hindenburg had been given a young pair of legs in the form of General von Ludendorff as his Chief of Staff and together they had outmanoeuvred and beaten the Russians at Tannenburg.

But now the entire theatre of war was at an end and it was back to the unfinished business of the “Eisbein.” Thus the German general looked even more austere than his norm, whilst assiduously manhandling a pork hock knuckle to chew at, and sink his teeth into, under the overhang of a handlebar moustache of some prominence.

He would brook no questions on the war whilst he was engaged thereof.

Later that evening, suitably replete from his pagan appetites he was more prepared to attend the enquiries posed by an array of dinner guests, including those seated near to him, Countess Joanna zu Rassentlow and Annamaria von Prielau-Carolath affectionately known as “Mitchka.” The former was a handsome woman with warm, dark goldern skin and clear black eyebrows over her russet-brown eyes. The latter waved her hands around a lot and had a tendency to make wide scared eyes of wonder and sometimes of reproach and fear. The balance of the table guests comprised alert and attentive young men in dinner jackets and red cheeked frauleins with blue eyes of great depth, cleavages of even greater undefined depths and fresh healthy exposed shoulders.

General Hindenburg was in fact disconcerted with the amount of “Fleisch” on display! He was a carnivore by nature and following his assault on the pork hock, he realised that it was somewhat unhealthy at his age to be making such unusual emotive associations.

[MANICHAEAN]

Chapter 3:The Explanation.

So pulling himself together he explained to the attendant audience in his characteristic heavy manner, how in fact the whole war had been a bit of a charade and he posed the question as to who would have thought that one Serb in Sarajevo shooting one Austrian Archduke back in 1914 could have drawn into a 5 year conflict and a 12 million death count, the likes of half the world’s major powers.

It was all those bloody interlocking treaties he explained, each triggering off some new country to come to the aid of another until they were all in the same mess.

It was not helped, he further expounded by all the family connections of the main players. Wilhelm II of Germany, Nicholas II of Russia both cousins and both nephews of Edward VII of England. All descendents of Queen Victoria if the blame was to be placed anywhere. And family being family, once the bad blood started, then there was no end to it.

The Triple Alliance had got a bad press, Italy had changed sides in 1915 as was their custom, and everybody had become terribly anti-German. Why even in England, the Royal Family had been obliged to change their names from Saxe-Coberg to Windsor and Prince Louis of Battenburg had translated his name to make it Mountbatten.

And then there were those that even went around kicking sausage dogs or “dautschunds!”

“Mensch” Hindenburg exclaimed loudly in frustration.

“They had no experience of the beauty of the German culture and especially of the language, one of the most poetic euphonious and liberating languages in the world. It lay not just in the sound but in its very formulation, most significantly the word structure that demands a mixture of independent, off-the-leash creativity and thunderous literal-mindedness, captivating in itself.”

[MANICHAEAN]

Chapter 4: Britain.

Across the Channel in England, feelings on that day were more mixed.

General Allenby, also back in his country seat could not help but reflect that on the whole, he had had a pretty good war. But then he had been on the winning side. Albeit engaged in a totally different theatre from the trench war in Europe, in what was known as the Middle Eastern front of Egypt, Palestine and the western deserts of Arabia.

Conceited by nature, he felt that he must have struck quite a figure on that December day leading his white charger into Jerusalem instead of riding it in triumph. He felt a touch of humility was in order, although he was equally aware that he was the first Christian general to capture and enter the Holy City after 600 years of Moslem rule.

Elsewhere in the West Country, T.E.Lawrence, technically in the same theatre of war as Allenby, had a different perspective.

For a start there was no one to pose the question!

He had now deliberately chosen a life of solitude and obscurity in a small rural cottage, surrounded by woods to confront or suppress the devils within his sensitive soul.

He had lost his innocence in this war and had come a long way from being an Oxford graduate and a member of a mundane British archaeological team excavating Carchemish on the Euphrates.

Torn in this furnace of affliction between two sets of cultural values, elated by the action he had been so integral to, and oppressed by the betrayal he had tried so very hard to avert.

[MANICHAEAN]

Chapter 5: Conclusion.

There was therefore that day, in both Germany and England a sense of reflection for where one had been, where one was now & what lay ahead.

Such an individual was a demobilised non-descript Austrian soldier, his lungs still recovering from a gas attack in the trenches. He was still to have nightmares of “The killers in skirts” as he called them. Images and the sounds of that unnerving wailing as they had entered battle across no man’s land led by the unarmed piper. And those Scots, he was only too aware, never took prisoners!

In Chartwell in England, a former Navy First Lord sat gloomily in his study, his life and career to all extents and purposes over and an early morning whisky & soda stood on the table at his side.

Years later he was to write;

“After the end of the First World War there opened up in the life of the German people a tremendous void. And after a pause, there strode into that void, a maniac of ferocious genius, the repository & self expression of the most virulent hatred that has ever corroded the human breast. Corporal Hitler.”

But that was later and for the moment both men sat in their respective countries and brooded.