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Authors: Michael Ridpath
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father who had instilled a hatred of war into him. Arthur de Lancey had joined up in 1916, an older replacement for the wave of enthusiastic young subalterns who had been wiped out in the first two years on the Western Front. He had fought well, winning a DSO at the Somme in 1916 and a Victoria Cross a year later at Passchendaele, when he and a lance corporal had captured a German machine-gun position and held it against fierce counter-attacks until the rest of his company arrived. To Conrad as a boy this had seemed impossibly brave, and he was desperately proud of his father the war hero.
But the war hero had been changed by that day. His arm was badly mangled and had to be amputated. The scars in his mind were much worse. He was overcome with bouts of depression and irritability where he would fly into a rage with his wife or his children for no apparent reason. These bouts were unpredictable, and they could last a day or a month, but they were in stark contrast to the much longer periods of normality when he was wise, kind and approachable.
He developed a passionate opposition to war in all its forms. After the armistice he became involved in international pacifist organizations, and spent time and money in supporting the Quaker Emergency Committee, which helped starving children in post-war Germany. As Conrad grew older, he came to admire his father’s idealism; indeed it paved the way for his own whole-hearted support of socialism when he was at Oxford.
But Lord Oakford, as he had become on the death of Conrad’s banker grandfather in 1931, had been desperately disappointed in his son when he had gone to Spain. For Conrad it had been an agonizing dilemma. Like his father he believed that killing people was wrong, even in a just war. But he also came to believe that fascism was evil, and that unless it was stopped it was an evil that would swallow the whole continent of Europe. It fell to the idealists of the world, young men like Conrad, to stop it, to draw a line in the sand. Conrad wasn’t alone; many of the Oxford undergraduates who had voted against King and Country in 1933 set off with him to fight and die for Spain three years later. But for Lord Oakford, the case was much clearer. War was wrong and Conrad was wrong to go and fight in one.
It hadn’t seemed like that at first. When he had first arrived in Spain, Conrad had been invigorated by the spirit of comradeship and egalitarianism he had found in the International Brigade, indeed throughout the whole Republican Army. Trade unionists, socialists, communists, anarchists, professional soldiers, peasants, students and even schoolchildren from all over Europe and from every corner of Spain had joined together to fight fascism. And over the winter of 1936–7 they had succeeded, defending Madrid heroically. It was a heroism of spirit as much as a heroism of military prowess and Conrad was proud to be a part of it. Conrad came from a background of extreme privilege and had spent half his life feeling extreme guilt about it. Now, fighting shoulder to shoulder with some of the poorest and most generous people he had ever met, he felt fulfilled for perhaps the first time in his life. He was good at it too.
But things had changed. War took these young idealists and corrupted their humanity: the incident Conrad had witnessed of the rape of the nuns was but one tiny event among thousands. The Republican Army was ill-disciplined and ill-organized and facing defeat, so the Soviet-backed communists took matters in hand. The improvements in military training and discipline were no doubt necessary. But as the spring of 1937 turned to summer, the Republic fought its own civil war. A new secret police force threw men of doubtful political allegiance into prison, many foreign volunteers among them. The commissars thrived on talk of a fifth column of fascist-inspired traitors and a new category of enemy they invented, the ‘Trotskyist-Fascists’ who were
But the war hero had been changed by that day. His arm was badly mangled and had to be amputated. The scars in his mind were much worse. He was overcome with bouts of depression and irritability where he would fly into a rage with his wife or his children for no apparent reason. These bouts were unpredictable, and they could last a day or a month, but they were in stark contrast to the much longer periods of normality when he was wise, kind and approachable.
He developed a passionate opposition to war in all its forms. After the armistice he became involved in international pacifist organizations, and spent time and money in supporting the Quaker Emergency Committee, which helped starving children in post-war Germany. As Conrad grew older, he came to admire his father’s idealism; indeed it paved the way for his own whole-hearted support of socialism when he was at Oxford.
But Lord Oakford, as he had become on the death of Conrad’s banker grandfather in 1931, had been desperately disappointed in his son when he had gone to Spain. For Conrad it had been an agonizing dilemma. Like his father he believed that killing people was wrong, even in a just war. But he also came to believe that fascism was evil, and that unless it was stopped it was an evil that would swallow the whole continent of Europe. It fell to the idealists of the world, young men like Conrad, to stop it, to draw a line in the sand. Conrad wasn’t alone; many of the Oxford undergraduates who had voted against King and Country in 1933 set off with him to fight and die for Spain three years later. But for Lord Oakford, the case was much clearer. War was wrong and Conrad was wrong to go and fight in one.
It hadn’t seemed like that at first. When he had first arrived in Spain, Conrad had been invigorated by the spirit of comradeship and egalitarianism he had found in the International Brigade, indeed throughout the whole Republican Army. Trade unionists, socialists, communists, anarchists, professional soldiers, peasants, students and even schoolchildren from all over Europe and from every corner of Spain had joined together to fight fascism. And over the winter of 1936–7 they had succeeded, defending Madrid heroically. It was a heroism of spirit as much as a heroism of military prowess and Conrad was proud to be a part of it. Conrad came from a background of extreme privilege and had spent half his life feeling extreme guilt about it. Now, fighting shoulder to shoulder with some of the poorest and most generous people he had ever met, he felt fulfilled for perhaps the first time in his life. He was good at it too.
But things had changed. War took these young idealists and corrupted their humanity: the incident Conrad had witnessed of the rape of the nuns was but one tiny event among thousands. The Republican Army was ill-disciplined and ill-organized and facing defeat, so the Soviet-backed communists took matters in hand. The improvements in military training and discipline were no doubt necessary. But as the spring of 1937 turned to summer, the Republic fought its own civil war. A new secret police force threw men of doubtful political allegiance into prison, many foreign volunteers among them. The commissars thrived on talk of a fifth column of fascist-inspired traitors and a new category of enemy they invented, the ‘Trotskyist-Fascists’ who were
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