Time at War by Nicholas Mosley

but he was also now a critic. His line was that what Nietzsche had seen as the ‘Will to Power’ was a comparatively primitive affair; what was demanded of the ‘higher type’ of man was rather a ‘Will to Achievement’. I had not been able to read much Nietzsche yet (his books were almost unobtainablein wartime England) but it seemed to me that my father had got his own reading wrong: what Nietzsche was on about was not the ability to exercise power over other people, but a power (if this was the word) over oneself. That is, one needed the ability with part of oneself to observe and be critical of other parts of oneself: and by this possibly to reorder them. But this my father did not seem to have recognised – although he did have the capacity, sometimes, to laugh at exaggerated parts of himself. I don’t think I talked much with Mervyn about Nietzsche, but Mervyn seemed to me to illustrate, with his quiet and amused irony, more of what Nietzsche meant by a ‘higher’ man than what had been envisaged by my father. I didn’t talk much with Mervyn about my father; in later life he would say about him just – ‘A man should have the courage to say what he thinks.’
    In my own letters to my father during my time in Egypt I was still plunging about on difficult and not very well thought-out ground; but usually in efforts to understand the daft predicament of war in which I found myself –
    I think the Hellenists of the 18th and 19th centuries shrank from the acceptance of ‘horror’ in nature because they did not realise what far greater potentialities for horror there are in the unnatural man. To a sensitive spirit of this generation the ruthless sense of doom in nature is not a quarter so horrifying as the miserable sense of futility when in contact with the ‘unnatural’ man of the present day. Anyone who has fought in the last two wars must realise this. It is incredible that thereare sane men who believe that by renouncing natural life they can alter it or be immune from it. But could they not learn to make deals with it?
    And then –
    There is an interesting man in my Company called Desmond Fay who before the war was an active communist. He is intelligent and very reasonable; and when we feel earnest enough we talk of this and that. And the more we talk the less is the difference that I can see between the conceptions of the communist and the fascist corporate state. But then the only training I have had in the theory of Fascism was in the Pamphlets that you sent me when I was to debate on the subject at the Abinger [my prep school] Debating Society.
    In one of the letters that I wrote to my father at this time there is a short passage blacked out, intriguingly, by the censor. I had been describing my often hilarious week’s leave in Cairo, and the last sentence before the blackout was ‘The best sport of all was being rude to the ignoble staff-officers of GHQ’.
    To my sister, who had been wondering rather dolefully whether she should have a go at reading Nietzsche, I had written that my favourite line in
Also Sprach Zarathustra
was – ‘I would believe only in a God who knew how to dance’.

8
    When we arrived back at Taranto in September I found that there was now a Rifle Brigade battalion in Italy, and a formal request that I should rejoin it. I was dismayed at the prospect of having to get to know, to become trusted by, a new platoon again – and indeed, a new set of officers. And of course I did not want to lose my relationship with Mervyn. Also I had come to appreciate the anarchic style of the London Irish, and did not want to go back to what I remembered as either the ‘stuffiness’ or indeed the affectations of the Rifle Brigade mess at Ranby. So I told this to Mervyn, and we consulted with our CO, Bala Bredin, and he put in a formal request, backed by the brigadier and a personal plea from me, that