The Pursuit of Laughter (31 page)

Father Brocard is a Carmelite priest, an expert on type and printing, and the author of several books on fairly obscure writers of the end of the nineteenth century. He was born to Protestant parents, and says he became a Catholic because, as a very religious boy, he suffered from acute boredom in the chapel of his low-church school.

After his conversion, as a young man, he worked for G.K. Chesterton’s magazine
GK’s Weekly
. Deciding that his vocation was for monastic life, he became a novice of the
Dominican Order.

In 1941 he joined the RAF, and is wonderfully funny about his wartime adventures. He ended up in Germany, in 1945. There were strict rules about no fraternisation, of which he took not the slightest notice. He still sees his friends from Wulfrath, which is now ‘twinned’ with Ware.

After the war he decided not to go back to the Dominicans, and joined the Order of the Canons Regular of the Lateran; though finally he transferred to the Carmelites, and was ordained a priest at Aylesford Priory in 1954.

For many years he edited the
Aylesford Review
, in which he often supported unpopular and unfashionable causes if he thought them right. It was his courage and independence which got him into trouble with the hierarchy and the Cardinal. When the spirit moved him he did not hesitate to write to
The Times
.

Perhaps we should be thankful that at least Cardinals still have red hats, even if their trains have been docked. Father Brocard is glad that during his time in Rome, at the Carmelite college, there was still the old Roman splendour, before, as he says, Popes were given paupers’ funerals.

* The Pope.

The Habit of a Lifetime
, Sewell, B.
Evening Standard
(1992)

When General Fuller was appointed military assistant to the CIGS the
Sunday Express
described him as ‘probably by far the cleverest man in the Army’. This was in 1926, when Fuller was 47; he was already well known as a writer on military matters. A professional soldier, he had fought in the Boer War as a very young man; during the First World War he served on the stall in France. He did not invent the tank, but when this new weapon appeared on the scene in 1916 he was the soldier who immediately understood its
potential
. Since he had no power to direct the method of deploying the tanks they were largely wasted, but then and after the war he devoted his brilliant intelligence and far-seeing
imagination
to tanks and mechanized warfare.

It goes without saying that although a younger generation of army officers agreed with them, the old generals paid little attention to Fuller’s theories. Field Marshal Montgomery Massingberd, for example, was still talking about the necessity of using tanks to support cavalry at the end of 1928. But if Fuller’s books were largely ignored in England they were read, admired and understood, and his precepts acted upon, in Germany. Shortly before World War II General Fuller was invited to a military parade in Berlin. Thousands of tanks thundered down Unter den Linden. Hitler greeted him afterwards with the words: ‘I hope you were pleased with your children?’

Some of our generals were stuck in 1914, but it was the politicians who ruled Britain in the 20s and early 30s who were criminally negligent of our country’s defence. Completely frustrated, Fuller left the army in 1933 to devote himself to writing. The only politician who insisted that Britain must be armed in an armed world, and that it must be equipped with a modern mechanized force, was Oswald Mosley. For this reason General Fuller joined the British Union of Fascists in 1934.

Brilliance is not always considered an asset in England, but how did it come about that General Fuller, who was not only the cleverest man in the army but a military thinker of genius and a first rate writer, was completely unheeded in official circles? The author of
‘Boney’ Fuller: The Intellectual General
gives a wonderfully frank answer:

He was regarded by many senior officers as ‘too clever by half’, and he had an ‘
impossible
wife’. ‘He was an uncomfortable and all too aggressively cerebral member of the
military
organization’, writes Brigadier Trythall. ‘Uncomfortable’ is strangely enough the very word used about him by Fuller’s noted disciple, Adolf Hitler. A great admirer, he once asked me whether the General might not be an ‘
Unbequemer
’ in an organization. Mosley never found him so, he was a loyal and splendid colleague. On the other hand for stupid people he was uncomfortable, with his rapid and sarcastic manner of pointing out their inadequate processes of thought. Liddell Hart, the other English military genius of the century, maintained close friendship with Fuller for many decades: he sought his
company
and obviously did not find him uncomfortable. As to the ‘impossible wife’, Mrs Fuller’s admiration for Boney was boundless and her loyalty to him absolute. True, she had a strong foreign accent, either Polish or German, but as a convinced European with an ineradicable English accent I cannot accept that this made her ‘impossible’.

It was Fuller’s patriotism and concern for our defences that took him into the British Union of Fascists, and it was his patriotism which made him oppose the second World War. He saw at once that, win or lose, this war would be the end of Britian’s greatness. If, however, once the fatal war had been declared, his advice had been asked, there would most likely have been no lightning defeat of France in 1940. The Allied armies had more tanks than the Germans, but it was the Germans who used their armour in accordance with Fuller’s text books on mechanized warfare. As he used to say: ‘The greater the mass of the opposing infantry the greater the victory of the armoured divisions.’ Even if some of the soldiers had found him uncomfortable his expertise, his professionalism, his
intelligence
,
would have been of incalculable value to Britain, fighting for its life. ‘Extreme intellectual competence’ is not considered a grave disadvantage by everyone. General de Gaulle is quoted as having asked in 1943, ‘What about your best soldier, General Fuller?… I have often wondered why he is never used.’ Admittedly General Fuller had no great
opinion
of Mr Churchill, whom he once described as the greatest mountebank since Nero, ‘but Nero had the better of him in that he committed suicide when comparatively young; that, at least, was a decent act’, he added characteristically. He had an ‘intellectual disapproval of Churchill’s political aims and military strategies, and emotional distaste for Churchill’s style.’

A letter in
The Times
recently pointed out what strangely childish nicknames our
generals
in World War II were known by: Squeaker, Boy, Jumbo, Pip, Bubbles. Fuller’s
nickname
was Boney, the name the English gave Napoleon during the Napoleonic wars. With his small stature and sharp intellect it suited him admirably; a name any soldier would be proud to bear.

Brigadier Trythall’s biography is excellent in many ways, an enthralling book. He often allows Fuller to speak for himself, and when he does so the brilliance and charm of the man come across. Perhaps I should declare an interest: I was devoted to General Fuller and delighted in his clever conversation and sarcastic, unkind jokes; I was also very fond of Mrs Fuller.

‘Boney’ Fuller: The Intellectual General
, Trythall, A.J.
Books and Bookmen
(1977)

A book called
Political Violence and Public Order
, by an American, might well be about the tragic situation in Northern Ireland, but a glance at the photograph on the jacket shows mounted police, not armoured cars and tanks. In fact, Mr Benewick’s book (a product of the flourishing PhD industry) deals with not very violent violence. He has no bombs to record, no gunmen, no arms and legs blown off, not a single death. It is a history of
fascism
in England in the 30s, but only of a fractional part of fascism: the part connected with violence.

The hundreds of public meetings, where attentive audiences listened to Sir Oswald Mosley’s economic and social policy for what was then a very sick country with over two million unemployed, are hardly mentioned. It is not politics but violence that interests Mr Benewick. Meetings and marches where there were clashes between fascists and
communists
are described at length. They were fascist meetings and fascist marches, and they were attacked by communists. This is known as fascist violence; had a communist
meeting
been attacked by fascists, presumably it would have been communist violence. If a notable orator, putting forward a quite difficult argument, has assembled a crowd of
people
many of whom have paid for their seats to listen to a speech, he and his stewards are unlikely to attack their audience.

After the Olympia meeting, which a large number of communists, drummed up for days before by the
Daily Worker
, tried to smash, Lloyd George wrote (
Sunday Pictorial
, 24 June 1934): ‘The Blackshirts secured an audience of 15,000 people to pack the huge exhibition hall…. I feel that men who enter meetings with the deliberate intention of
suppressing
free speech have no right to complain if an exasperated audience handles them rudely.’ Strangely enough, this defence of Mosley by an ex-Prime Minister is not
mentioned
in the long account Mr Benewick gives of the Olympia meeting. It is omissions such as this which show a certain bias.

The other charge made is that Mosley and his fascists provocatively marched through East London, said to have been hostile to them. It is worth remembering that a large
proportion
of the men who marched were in fact citizens of East London, and that it was there the fascist candidates polled 19 per cent of the votes at municipal elections in 1937, elections where only householders, that is by and large older people, had the vote. Among young people in that part of London Mosley had mass support.

Far from it being the fascists who ‘invaded’ East London, they considered it was they who had been invaded from foreign parts by people who could not even speak English, but who were handy with foreign notions of how to fight a man they disagreed with, such as throwing potatoes with razor blades stuck in them.

In Mr Benewick’s book there are slovenly mistakes and misspelt names, and he is at times grossly inaccurate. There is a bad example of this on page 162: ‘Mosley could say without any hesitation… from the bottom of my heart, “Heil Hitler”.’ These words were in fact written by Captain Gordon-Canning MC, an ex-10th Hussar, in a contribution to
The Blackshirt
. In both style and content they are so unlike anything Mosley ever wrote (
le style c’est l’homme
) that no intelligent person who had made a detailed study of him could conceivably make this particular mistake, and Mr Benewick is not unintelligent. An
historian
would check the origins of so controversial a statement.

‘The combination of slow promotion, unsettled beliefs, personality conflicts…’ these according to Mr Benewick are the reasons why Mosley left the old parties. Slow
promotion
? At the age of 32, Mosley was the Minister charged with the hardest task facing the government of the day: how to solve the unemployment problem. It would not be easy to find an example this century of quicker promotion. It was because not only the policy he devised but any action at all was refused that he decided to build a grass roots movement. He had no supporting press and had to speak, and be heard, or give up. Mr Benewick describes him as ‘an outstanding leader whose appeal reached charismatic dimensions’, which sounds like an American compliment. Attacked, he and his men defended
themselves
, and that is the beginning and end of fascist violence.