The men to whom we owe our freedom

David Twiston Davies
Acouple of months ago I produced a volume of military obituaries. It was a stimulating, if chastening experience for someone who strongly resisted a military
career on leaving school. As I made my selection from more than 1,000 brave and distinguished soldiers who had lived to a ripe old age, I became uneasily aware that they were the lucky ones.
What about those often only briefly mentioned as "another officer". killed alongside the man whose obituary was published some 40 or 50 years later?
One answer is contained in Downside at War. This contains entries on more than 100 old boys of the Benedictine public school who died in the Second World War and later conflicts. Their names are recorded on the recently renovated war memorial in the school grounds, and the book records their time in the school, service careers, as well as the circumstances of death and burial places, when known.
Most striking arc the photographs, which in several cases seem ghostly reminders of my own contemporaries in the school: the nephews of uncles they never knew. Only one, showing a moustached officer reading a newspaper, elicits a cheerful glow in the reader; the others are formal portraits. A few of these young men have broad smiles, which makes them seem all the more vulnerable. Most either look into the distance with quiet determination; significantly the Poles seem the grimmest. Or they stare straight into the camera, challenging two subsequent generations to answer whether we have lived up to their example and cherished the freedom they earned us. Many had no life between leaving school and joining up, to meet their ends. One was shot while landing on a Normandy beach; another took off on a photographic mission never to return; a third was on the bridge when his ship received a direct hit. But not all perished in action. A small number died of illness; a member of the Home Guard was killed in the one raid on the factory where he was a brilliant engineer.
While it is a pity more information is not given, there are still some surprises. Pilot Officer Michael Rawlinson, brother of the Tory minister, Lord Rawlinson of Ewell, joined the monastery after leaving school, but was gently told that perhaps he was too fond of jazz to have a voca
tion. Flying would be the next best thing, he declared, and he was shot down after accounting for two enemy aircraft in 1940. There is the account of hosts spread around a ruined French church in a vivid letter written by the army chaplain Dom Gervase Hobson Matthews just before his death.
Wing Commander Michael Robinson, DSO, DFC, became involved in a drinking joust with an aggressive Luftwaffe officer on a pre-war skiing holiday in Germany; he was astonished several years later to find that he had forced down the same man to land in a Kentish hop field.
The dilemma of Count Peter Wolff-Metternich is the most heart-rending. After Downside he did military service in Germany, then returned to work in London before realising that war was inevitable and returning home, where he married an English girl. He died on the Eastern Front; his entry says that the happiest period of his 25 years was at Downside, where he developed an unshakeable faith.
For all their conventional appearance, these young men differ little from today's generation; those who took part in the Gulf War proved that. They were just surer of what they had to do, and why.
David Twiston Davies is the editor of The Daily Telegraph Book of Military Obituaries.
Downside at War is available from the Downside Abbey Bookshop, Stratton-on-theFosse, Bath BA3 4RH, priced £25 plus postage.