Deserter: The Last Untold Story of the Second World War. Charles Glass
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in Eccles, Lancashire, for two years. Then, in 1931, when John was nine, the family moved together to that ‘dream of rural sweetness and light’, Aylesbury. Living in a dingy flat above the photo studio in Market Square was, in Bain’s own account, anything but sweet. Their father continued to beat the boys, once knocking twelve-year-old John flat with a punch to the head. Their mother, whose hard-drinking husband was brazenly unfaithful to her, took refuge in her conversion to what John called ‘that quasi-religion called Christian Science’.
While life with their father in Aylesbury was hardly ‘sweetness and light’, the Bain brothers retreated into a world of books and music that was. Kenneth taught himself to play his mother’s piano, and John borrowed a wide range of books from the library – Dickens, T. S. Eliot, John Buchan and the lowbrow crime novels of Edgar Wallace. The boys wandered together into the meadows with armfuls of works by their favourite poets. Literature gave Bain his ‘only distraction from the fairly grim present’. From the age of fourteen, he wrote poems that he did not show to anyone. The boys bought a gramophone, but they waited until their father was out of the house before playing Liszt, Debussy, Schubert and the great mezzo-soprano Marian Anderson. James Bain, detesting his sons’ ‘sissy’ interest in music and books, enrolled them in the Aylesbury and District Boxing Club. Within two years, John made the final round of the British Schoolboy Championship.
James Bain told his sons he had enlisted in the army at fourteen and been wounded at Mons. His endless stories of Great War escapades, in which he invariably played a heroic role, made John suspicious: ‘I began to wonder about their historical veracity, until his boasting became something of a secret joke between Kenneth and me.’ To avoid a thrashing, they kept that joke to themselves. Yet his childhood was awash with reverence for a war he knew only through hearsay. John later told an interviewer, ‘I also remember very vividly Armistice Days when I was a child, because I actually wore my father’s medals. He got his medals out, and I would have them on my jersey, my jacket, whatever I was wearing.’ He would turn out in the town square, while old soldiers observed silence for comrades who had died in France. ‘It was a very militaristic occasion, in fact. I still feel uneasy. There was a kind of glorification of war itself.’
While their father made them wary of the army, the boys shared a fascination with the Great War’s poetry, novels and films. To John, the conflict in the trenches was a ‘tragic and mythopoeic event’. He became ‘haunted by its imagery, its pathos, the waste, the heroism and futility’ via the writings of Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon and Ernest Hemingway.
The 1938 Munich Crisis, when the British and French ceded western Czechoslovakia to Hitler’s Germany, affected him less than ‘two momentous discoveries: D. H. Lawrence and beer’. Having left school at the age of fourteen in 1936, he was working as a junior clerk in an accountant’s office. In his free time, he read James Joyce, courted young women and drank Younger’s Scotch Ale at the pub. He and Kenneth were not above getting into trouble, once drunkenly climbing the roof of a hotel to break into it. After their arrest and trial, the local newspaper called them ‘the boxing Bain brothers’. Their two-year probation was less notable than the newspaper’s disclosure that John was eighteen. Until then, his twenty-six-year-old girlfriend, Sally, thought they were the same age. She accepted the age difference, but John’s father disapproved of the girl. He ordered John to leave her, backing up the command by throwing a punch. For the first time, John fought back and gave his father a black eye. It was the last time his father would strike him, but they stopped speaking to each other.
John’s response to the declaration of war in September 1939 was ‘one mainly of puerile excitement’. He did not, however, rush to the colours. When the German bombing raids known as the Blitz began in September 1940, Bain’s mother and sister were evacuated to the Cotswolds for safety. The three men of the family stayed on in uncomfortable silence in Aylesbury. Having lost his job with the accountants after his arrest, John went to work selling spare parts for the Aylesbury Motor Company at thirty-five shillings a week. His attempted enlistment in the Royal Air Force faltered over the medical exam that discovered his bad eye. He wrote later in ‘The Unknown War Poet’,
He enlisted among the very first
Though not from patriotic motives, nor
To satisfy the spirit of adventure …
In December, he and Kenneth decided to enlist in the Merchant Marine. While their motives were unclear, merchant service offered two advantages: a way out of an intolerable life at home and the opportunity, provided the Luftwaffe or Kriegsmarine did not sink their ship, to cruise around the world. With £400 that they stole from a hidden store of cash their father kept to avoid income tax, they fled to London. They spent lavishly, taking a room at the Regent Palace Hotel and buying tickets for Donald Wolfit’s production of King Lear and Myra Hess’s lunchtime recitals. They got drunk in one Soho pub after another. Finally, they went to the Shipping Federation to sign on as merchant seamen. ‘Our interview with the uniformed officer at the Federation was brief and humiliating,’ Bain wrote. They tried the docks in Cardiff and Glasgow, where the recruiting poster drew them into the infantry that Christmas.
The journey from Scotland to El Alamein to Wadi Akarit to the Mustafa Detention Barracks seemed to follow a grim logic. The conflict between his contempt for his father and his love of war literature led to his flight from home and enlistment in the army. That Bain ended up, however much by chance, in a Scottish regiment as his father had in the First World War seemed more than coincidental. He had, after all, followed his father into boxing, boozing and womanizing. Having escaped paternal cruelty by standing up to it, he took the one action – desertion – that would imprison him even more surely than he had been at home under his father’s oppressive control. A system of gratuitous bullying confronted him now.
His poem ‘Love and Courage’, though written years later, captured his predicament:
… He could conceal
his terror till his Company was called
to face real battle’s homicidal storm.
He chose desertion, ignominy and jail.
That is, if any choice existed, which I doubt.
On him – the average, free soldier – victory depends.
Psychology for the Fighting Man, p. 365
IN LOWER MANHATTAN on Thanksgiving Day 1943, Stephen J. Weiss took the oath to ‘support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.’ At the end of the induction ceremony, similar to his own only twenty-five years before, William Weiss told his son, ‘If you need me, just say the word.’ The older man’s reserve, an effect of wartime trauma, had denied Steve a functioning father since childhood. Neither father nor son knew the full psychological toll of America’s previous war in Europe. Fortune magazine reported at the time of Steve’s induction, ‘Today, twenty-five years after the end of the last war, nearly half of the 67,000 beds in Veterans Administration hospitals are still occupied by the neuropsychiatric casualties of World War I.’ Steve was going where his father had been, to unlock secrets long concealed from him. He did not plan to ‘say the word’. It was his time to experience war, and paternal guidance would have to come from the army.
Steve and the other recruits boarded a train bound for the army’s transit camp at Fort Dix, New Jersey. The army issued him a serial number, 12228033, and ordered him to commit it to memory. If he were captured, that number, his name and his rank were all that he was permitted to tell the enemy. Fort Dix began the transformation of youngsters into soldiers. The previous year’s hit song by Irving Berlin might have been written there:
This is the Army, Mister Green,
We like the barracks nice and clean,
You had a housemaid to clean your floor,
But she won’t help you out any more.
While Fort Dix’s officers and non-commissioned officers feasted