Time at War

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When I got home from the Second World War in the autumn of 1945 I knew I wanted to be a writer but I did not know how to write about war. The books about the First World War that I had admired had been about endurance amid the horror and senselessness of war. This could be written about unequivocally. But I had come to realise that the war I had been engaged in was not senseless: it had to be fought, though the horror and impression of futility were there. So in what style could one write about something that was both necessary and futile?

In the 1980s I wrote briefly about my participation in war in my books about my father, Oswald Mosley, who spent most of the war as a security risk in jail. But these accounts were in relation to the peculiar situation of my father. It is only recently in my old age that I have felt at ease in writing fully about my experiences of war.

War is both senseless and necessary, squalid and fulfilling, terrifying and sometimes jolly. This is like life. Humans are at home in war (though they seldom admit this). They feel they know what they have to do.

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