In the later part of his life Newton was being progressively poisoned by mercury. It is very probable that he was doing this to himself - unknowingly of course - during his alchemy experiments. It can hardly have helped his temper. How ironic, however, that Newton is mostly remembered as a bad-tempered old bastard - pardon, as a misanthrope - and as the man who began removing God from Heaven, whilst Newman is only thought of as a saint. He was made cardinal in reward for trying to turn England back to Catholicism. The pope who rewarded him went on to help to plot more exactly the gulf between the Anglican and the Roman church by declaring all Anglican orders invalid.
   Newton certainly distrusted most of his contemporaries. No doubt he despised nearly everyone. His was the era of tyrannical, bigoted, brutal, revengeful, cruel, and superstitious governance that Dean Swift satirized in his books. Privilege and profit took precedence over dignity, decency and the human spirit. It did so then because God had so ordered the world. Today it does so because the world is ordered by the Market.
   But for his admirer Halley, who coaxed him into writing down his discoveries, and who - in 1687 - almost bankrupted himself to get them published, Newton would probably have published nothing at all. He is said to have given many of his lectures to empty halls, and his discoveries would probably have stayed in his mind or, no more securely, in his journals. Three hundred years later the more obscure of these were still being deciphered. Even when he did entrust his thoughts to paper, he wrote them in Latin. Without Halley the Philosophia Naturalis Principia Mathematica might never have appeared.
   Having lost his belief in the doctrine of the Trinity, after which his college was named, Newton lived in fear that he might be found out. He was secretly a Unitarian. Whether he was also a Grand Master of the Priory of Sion remains uncertain, but certain it is that if enough of the Newmans of his time had learnt his secret, he would have been deprived of his fellowship at once.
   What makes Newton so important to the progress that science did make in ruining Newman's dream is that until over a century later, when the Marquis de Laplace began publishing his Méchanique Céleste, which he began in 1799 but only finished in 1825, there was simply no-one who might have replaced him. It is worth noting too that it was Laplace, far more than Newton, who popularized the notion - certainly in France, and thence possibly in the United States - of the mechanical universe. Paradoxically in a sense he once again strengthened the idea, central to most religions, that the future is ruled by the past.
   However, for at least another hundred years, modern Christian saw no real conflict between their faith and the search for 'pious intelligence'. This seems to have described Newton's position. Against this might be set the notion of 'pious submission'. And this seems to be what Newman admired - submission to knowledge and rules set down in the past and requiring no further translation, addition, modification or interpretation, only uncritical obedience.
   Very many seem to prefer this. If one counts the number of followers of religious beliefs (quite apart from any other ideologies) and then sets this against the number who cannot be categorized in this way, the asymmetry is clearly considerable. It would appear that the question whether it is more natural to do and believe as you are told is correct, or to do otherwise, is answered very unequivocally in this way. It is far more natural to do and believe as some authority tells you is correct.
   But clearly both of these options are not equal. It may be perfectly possible, for example, to persuade slaves that they are free. Their belief will rarely survive their first attempt to leave their masters. Being a slave is not the same as to be free. So then the question becomes: how can a slave who has never known freedom, ever learn what it feels like to be free? What if then they were allowed to choose?
   This is the problem that Plato tried to describe in his allegory of the prisoners in the cave. Seeing only the shadows of the world on its walls, they believe that these shadows tell them all they need to know of their world. Newton's intuition is, typically, a much deeper: 'a Being incorporeal, living, intelligent, omnipresent' seeing 'things themselves intimately, .. thoroughly perceives them, .. comprehends them wholly.' Since 'to comprehend' had also the meaning in his time of 'to contain', he is describing be a Being, etc. which not only to understand the universe completely but contains it.
   It is only very recently that scientists have begun to appreciate the very great degree to which our brains constructs the reality we believe is 'out there'. The reports of our senses are continually combined with our often very limited experience - and even more so with our often very inhibited belief of what is possible - and it is this construction which ultimately determines what we know.
   There is of course one way in which something like Newton's intuition can be made available to almost anyone whose attention is sufficiently uninhibited to allow it. This, I think now, is very probably what had happened to me. Since evolution forces economy on the brain, spiritual experience is very similar to sexual congress: a congress between that 'incorporeal being' and a receptive mind and from it the conception of yet another instance of spiritual understanding. Spiritual understanding has its own evolution and a very special habitat. It takes place in human minds.
   Until very recently, scientists could dismiss such events as mere anomalies, since they were unable to produce and study them in their laboratories. Currently a more fruitful approach is neurotheology. This means attempting to produce sensations of spiritual insight by directly stimulating different areas of the brain. Some of the protagonists of this approach will no doubt subsequently claim that what this proves is that such insights are no more than epiphenomena produced only occasionally by the brain and of no more value to the sum of knowledge than epileptic fits.
   Theology itself is very often no better, when theologians turn eagerly away from the problem of experience, and replace it with an endless examination, interpretation, re-examination, and even 'deconstruction' of history and their own efforts.
   All of these attempts to subdue, tame, essentially to trivialized, this formidable subject can be dismissed for the same reason. This is no fake orgasm produced by a machine; nor is it yet an experience produced by bashing the brain deliberately with electric shocks or drugs. It is a spontaneous and natural human experience which has been reported, studied, researched, cross-referenced, peer-reviewed, tested empirically and experimentally thousands of millions times in thousands of millions of lives for thousands of years.
   The range of reports is exactly as is to be expected of such a natural event. At one extreme there is nothing at all. The British painter Francis Bacon, for example, celebrated with the most unbridled energy only the futility of life: "We are born and we die, that's how it is. But in between we give this purposeless existence a meaning by our drives. There is opportunity for activity" Sex, mainly. As a kind of apostle of his belief, he died very rich. Every Monday the gallery which sold his work happily gave him an envelope containing as much money - it was then £4000 - as an average family man earned in a year. ¹ Quoted by Rachel Campbell-Johnston, TheTimes, 16 Mar 05.
   At the other extreme - well: in between is the great mass of people who only find their purpose in life in being told what to think, what do, what to believe - at the other extreme are people who have, in some form or other, the intuition that there is a purpose to life. This is a fairly large group. More exceptional, however, are those within this group who insist - right now - that although this is what they believe, they do not know more.
   At first it may appear that we are as insignificant as our number; or that we are lost souls; or that we are charlatans; or possibly that we wish to be thought to have access to wisdom so great, strange and fearful, as cannot be communicated to the majority at all. The last is surprisingly easy to do. Often they or their followers call them living gods and the wisest of them say nothing more.
   But we are none of this kind. If further provoked, we are likely to insist that the greatest achievement of the human mind is very probably precisely this awareness that no-one knows exactly how to decide in life exactly between what is good and what is evil. To claim to know more - and we will cite ancient precedent - is very dangerous. 'As soon as you eat of that fruit,' said God to Adam, 'you will surely die.'
   Human minds approximate. This is what they have evolved to do: and several millions time a day they do it very well. To decide, definitely and finally and without allowing for any possibility of doubt or revision - is to push the mind beyond its natural function. The early philosophers were sure. This not what it has either been created or has evolved to do. Because it has not evolved to do this, in all but the most careful controlled contexts - and mathematics is one of these contexts; the sciences attempt to make others - it will make mistakes. In consequence of these, billions live in servitude to governments and governors who claim to possess omniscience and do not. When they make mistakes, millions may die. Democracy is the only way to make the people accountable to themselves for their own mistakes
   Since so many respectable people have come to this conclusion - long after the genius who wrote Genesis insisted that it was God's first command - the most interesting question, by far, is: why then would anyone want to deny it?
   The American anthropologist Marvin Harris and the engineer Buckminster Fuller both answered in much the same way. Fuller's answer would certainly have been that anything that an elite can monopolize sooner or later will be monopolized.
   Harris's is only a little more complete: 'One tempting answer to Pontius Pilate's "What is truth?" ' 'has always been that truth is whatever people can be made to believe. If we stop to ponder the further question "What persuades people to believe?" sooner or later some impatient soul will answer "Power." The ability to make people believe is rooted in the ability to make people conform." ² Cultural Materialism, Harris, 1979
   But both are wrong on one point. It is not the elite who make people conform. It is the people themselves who want to conform. It is only in this way: by being given orders, being controlled, by being punished - even savagely - and by rewarded - even paltrily - that their lives are given direction, meaning, purpose.
   It seems to me that de Sade tried to point this out, making sexual mania and perversion play the part of political power in his grotesque parodies of society. What he wanted to communicate - I believe: although I confess that I read his Philosophy in the Boudoir several times before I noticed it - is that societies themselves, however large or small they are, may act as independent creatures with only this appetite which they share with their their servants and parasites - even their catamites. ³ Philosophie dans le Boudoir, de Sade, 1795'Power is not a means," said Orwell's O'Brien to the wretched Winston, "it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power." ⁴ Nineteen Eighty-four, Orwell, 1949
   And the object of control is control. It has and needs no other reason. There is a control in us, particularly of the feelings we display to others, which in many people is very strong. I learnt stoicism at an early age, and I have noticed in myself a great distinction between the emotions which I can anticipate: the kind which we may believe we should feel and which we can usually control: these are really mostly play-acting, and emotions which tear through us without warning, trashing our composure, reducing our dignity to rags. Only these are true emotions.
   Similarly, the grace of awareness with God; the mutual thanks in being; the flowing in of that inexhaustible joy, serenity and security - this is enough for anyone at once to know what freedom is. And to have it - to have it right now, in this next ten minutes, and at any time - requires nothing but a few moments of stillness and communion. To practise daily is not essential. To practice more often may be necessary sometimes; but is never to be either limited or a duty. No one is keeping tally.
   At the same time, however, I believe, it is this love, not the play-acting kind, which passes between true lovers. This is what makes it so special. It is not ours.
   Then the question as to whether this experience is natural is absurd. Of course it is. Experiments to produce its similacra will doubtless be taken by many as proof that it is only an experience created by the mind. The other possibility seems equally likely: that it is an experience mediated by the mind. How then shall we decide which is more likely?
   I do not think we can. But very strongly indicative of what the truth may be is surely the response of the social structures whose power is threatened by people's freedom to know this experience without their control. The nearly invariably response has always been either to suppress it or to learn a new way to control it. This is essential. Once the ordinary folk know how to free themselves from anxiety and fear and insecurity, they will never be as docile as they before. It is very natural for the powerful to be appalled; very natural for the powerful to act; very natural to insist that the appearance of an independent source of spiritual experience which only the individual mind can perceive without priestly mediators, without rituals, without inspiring rhetoric or architecure: and equally without being wired to electrical machines tended by an army of expensive but well-funded neuroscientists - that this is nothing but a dangerous or unfortunate delusion. We are necessary, claim the powerful Without us you will be utterly and completely defenceless; and then you will be loooooo-ost!
   All humbug. Cui bono is a hard test to beat.
   On this same view there is no essential obstacle to joining pious intelligence and pious submission. As a matter of bald truth, both only require submission to reality: but to reality as it is, and not as we are told it is, or wish it to be, or command it to be. Piety is much akin to love. Love can be a kind of madness: a madness to make us sacrifice anything - time, wealth, freedom, life itself - for what we desire. Learning to keep piety in check is therefore much like learning to keep love in check. Both should be possible without being dangerous.
   To argue with a beautiful woman is a rather dangerous pleasure, but it is a pleasure almost as great as making love to her. She has damaged her foot badly, and is resting it on a chair. This makes it difficult to drop a kiss onto her smiling lips. But they are not smiling anyway The raven black hair is now dove-grey, shining with life, however, and, if anything, even more handsome. The wound is red and suppurating - and plainly painful. I offered several grams of my store of vitamins c, and was relieved and also surprised when she took them. There is less inflammation now; the wound is closing. I am not hailed as another Paracelsus, however. The doctor's cortisone may have helped.
   Occasionally there is a smile, but she is too often often curt and short-tempered. Irascible. But perhaps it is just with me. As usual I am a fool delighted with her company, and have been happy to spend hours just sitting here. But then we argue more than is surely natural. It is a pleasure, as I say - but also chancy, for she is as merciless in dialectic as she in love, and is as inconsistent. When I plead that no conversation between such old friends should become a tank battle: a Panzergefecht, in which every shot is aimed to kill, hitting glacis and turret with ringing clangs and thuds, solid cores gouging red-hot splinters, screeching and whooping as they ricochet.
   "But you do just the same!" she cries: passionate, indignant, clenched fists, flushed cheeks, wide green eyes: a girl again.
   I admit that this is fair. But it is a reflex now. I am really far kinder, and nicer, more tolerant. Even so, battle is battle. My nerves are taut. Finally she challenges me directly: "Tell me the theme - the aim. What exactly are you trying to prove?"
   She had hurt me badly, casually, the day before: "You exaggerate." She said, " Always!" She would not know how much this hurt.
   I have certainly exaggerated an early infatuation into a life-long love affair. This, I will admit. Probably, at a deeper level, this may be what she means. In any case, I do not say that I find this exaggerated - as well as silly. Until recently all scientists thought that they had to do was to go on improving previous ideas to make new discoveries. Then came Bohr (:'scientists are people who make all possible mistakes'), then Gödel, Popper, Feyerabend, Kuhn. They showed that there is rarely any space for new discoveries within the limits of an orthodoxy except the most artificial or mundane. Logic alone, as Bertrand Russell said of mathematics, can only produce tautologies. It was a shock to scientists when they were made to realize that important discoveries not only could be found outside the careful extension of knowledge from the past, but often must be; and then that they might need to depend on intuition not logic - and even on intuition that is vulgar, ridiculous, and absurd. Without such help logic is as helpless as a body made unable to feel. Damassio found his patients who could not laugh could not invent.
   I do exaggerate. This is true. Mostly it is for effect: its official title then is argumentum ad absurdam, with a respectable career. More shamelessly, of course, I do it more childishly to impress; sometimes to shock and to awe; sometimes just for fun.
   I admit this. So now I must be careful. A year ago I would only have been able to answer: 'I think I have got the connection right between teaching mathematics as if to prove the value of certainty, and the social divisions; the intellectual divisions; the fundamentalism, even the racism that follow from this: all poisoned apples from the same poisoned tree. A real devil's brew in most societies, and heating up all the time.'
   That is no exaggeration. It would have been safe. But it still does not reach down to the poison, to where the roots are drawing it up. This must be deeper. I do also like to see her angry. It is almost as nice as seeing her flushed with pleasure. Anything is better than this glum concentration on indifference. She is still frowning, but is reading again: another glossy magazine from a pile beside her. What a waste.
   But perhaps I give a wrong impression. She has always been remarkably beautiful and this of course has made her spoilt. Marlene Dietrich used to sing: Men flock around me/like moths around a flame/and if their wings burn/I know I'm not to blame. But she was always beautiful as well in that way that few are: that is, uniquely. She is used to being noticed, but she has always been funny, and she is also often wise. Frequently harsh in her criticism, but is almost always kind. She is loyal. With children she is always patient and good humoured. She is greatly admired in her village, where most people know her. When by accident she set off the fire alarm in her school one night, which would normally have meant a hefty fine, on being told who had done it, the fire chief only shrugged: "Oh well," he said, "That's just like her." . She is a good wife, and very good mother. She is gentle much of the time and her hands are red from housework. I have now loved her - it is easy to calculate - for over forty years.
   The day before she was telling me with of a recently widowed friend who had suddenly declared his love for her. "Well," I found myself comforting her - and thinking how ludicrous this is: "That's nothing surprising. He is suddenly lonely - and to fall in love with you it is very easy. What should you expect?"
   "Now he is all alone in that big house." Her eyes blur by tears. I have been alone for longer, is my thought. The wife was her friend for years. They shared a birthday. I remembered her only vaguely. Cancer, of course: another long, miserable death. She had sat with the husband as his wife and her friend had slowly died. Her emotion was real.
   And the chair on which she rests her foot is the one on which I sat one morning at breakfast years ago when she dropped a kiss on my lips. Her youngest daughter, sitting with us, was delighted:

I am barking like a bell
from your morning kiss.!"

   She smiled - tenderly: "No. You may be ringing - but not barking." I had said "Ich belle wie'ne Glocke / von Deinem Morgen Kuss" - which is still pretty; but 'bellen' is the noise that dogs make. Bells lauten.
   Her youngest was still delighted. "I'm ringing TOO!" she crowed, clapping her hands. We exchanged an apprehensive glance. How often would she repeat this today to everyone she met - and then be asked to explain it?
   But I have always responded to her moods. After she had told me about her widowed friend, I followed by telling her how much I now liked her husband. To my astonishment I found my throat tightening. I was close too tears.
   "I must tell him", I finished; then fell silent. Why sadness? Then I realized that to dislike him secretly had always been my last line of defence. He is endlessly patient and kind: also stubborn. It was much easier to dislike him than to accept that what I desired was unobtainable. Easier again to accuse him of preventing it.
   I did tell him, however. On my last day with then he came to my room to tell me they were ready to leave. I was unprepared, but all in a moment I told him: "There's something I have wanted to tell you." Then I took a step closer and I took his face in both my hands. This is very unusual for one Anglo-Saxon male to do to another. "I have never really like you before," I continued. "But now I do."
   And then this patient, undemonstrative, very good man, to whom I have been an enemy and an enemy of his family for nearly thirty years, also did the unexpected. He stepped even closer, until we were chest to chest, and hugged me. Ten seconds passed: neither said more. Perhaps we have always understood each other. He did it again a few hours later when they left me at the airport. I kissed the witch on both cheek. IT is years since I kissed her on the lips, and I watched her hand waving until their car disappeared.
   Now the answer came unbidden. I shrugged as if I was about to say something unimportant. Remember, however, that this is her teaching subject.
   "I want to argue," I began, "that the Kingdom of God which Jesus Christ"
   "Just Jesus," she interrupted crossly. What the hell is that? Another Lutheran shibboleth?
   I nod. "Okay - that Jesus promised his followers that they could know in their lifetimes was simply political. He wanted the Jews to achieve a democracy in Palestine. That's why the priests and the mob combined to kill him. Once they discovered what he was really talking about - none of them wanted this."
   The next explosion could have ended life on Earth. Not only did I not know what I was talking about - it was totally impossible; obviously absurd - it was also opposed to everything she had been taught: everything that she had been teaching for thirty years. It was against everything that any sane person knew as fact. And Jesus, she finally informed me: did not speak Greek! Blockhead! Hah!
   I preserved a decent silence: returned no fire. I had not expected the effect to be as powerful as this. Privately I noted it must mean that no-one has thought of it before, although it is pretty bloody obvious (blud, blude, German: stupid, stupidly). Most scholars now accept that the Sermon on the Mount was never delivered all at once. t is a collection of connected sayings and ideas. Whatever its inspiration, these ideas are not original. They form a democratic manifesto. They contain all the essential principles of democracy. Of course it had to be spoken by a Jew to Jews. (My teacher, my good orthodox-taught witch, was still explaining this to me.) Certainly he could not tell them he had come to help them all think like Greeks. Even so, all the elements are there.
   This would be a reason why Pilate could find no fault in him. No Roman governor could allow the restoration of a king to David's throne. But equally no Roman would find the notion of democracy either remarkable or worrying. Rome itself had entertained the idea. Democracies were generally far more peaceful and better organized than fratricidal kingdoms and even more violently conspiratorial satrapies. But for a Jewish rabbi to preach democracy to an exclusively theocratic nation: to people firmly yoked to their priests, endless factions fighting over every kind of foolishness, slaves to an endless cycle of wounded honour and bloody revenge. What a mission! What a joke! 'King of the Jews' was the last mockery of his attempt at a Jewish republic.
   In the long quiet hours of the night after the bombs had stopped going off in Ireland and the bodies had been collected, when necessary, and the fires had been put out I had tried to write that play in which Jesus and Pilate argued politely with each other about truth, loyalty and duty. The Hungarian-born Oxford Professor Geza Vermes suggest I have simply followed an old false trail, that after the last and most disastrous Jewish revolt, from 66 to 70, Christians were only too anxious to distance themselves from Judaism and to emphasize their friendship with Rome.⁵ The Passion, Vermes, Penguin, 2005 I had never said, however, that Pilate was a nice man. He would know that this idiotic plan must fail. Still, it would be amusing to offer the mob the chance to poke their priests in the eye.
   The Qu'ran insists that Jesus did not die. The priests eventually had Pilate recalled to Rome on a charge of having ordered a massacre of Samaritans. This is getting difficult. These Samaritans were 'Mesopotamian people who settled in Samaria after the Assyrian conquest of 722 BC .. the hostility of the Jews towards them was powerful and forms the background to Jesus's parable of the Good Samaritans.' ⁶ Oxford English Reference dictionary, OUP, 1995
   The good Samaritans were hated by the Jews. Pilate is recalled to Rome in disgrace at the behest of the Jews for organizing a massacre. What is missing here?

*

   Perhaps it is unfair to make a kind of Möbius loop out of history: future joined to past and a present with no interval between. Actually, of course, we do this all the time. I was proud to realize as a child that to have any prior knowledge of events of which one still had prior knowledge would be much the same as visiting the past. Not logically impossible, it would still produce so many contradictions as to be very hard to manage. As a child, however, I left out the importance of courage. If you factor in courage, the possibilities are greatly extended.
   Of course, Laplace could be right. Everything could be determined by the past: determined every split second by the myriad of events that, once made, cannot be reversed. Only courage can allow us to defy events that have already been decided like this. Would it have made any difference, for example, if I had known that this long love affair of mine would come to nothing: even worse, to this lack of interest, of notice, care? Years ago it had been a joke with us that some elderly lady had tangled her idiom so that she thought she could express her unconcern by saying: "Piss me over the shoulder."
   I had now a better understanding of what she meant to say. But, no: given my nature, I doubt that it would have made any difference. More to the point, it did not make any difference. In one of our earliest arguments - actually when she told me she had got formally engaged - she told me: "You cannot make the world as you want it."
   But that had happened already. I had decided on the world I wanted. Courage after victory is a little thing compared with courage in defeat. The fact it did not happen as I hoped is not because I did not try. If we do not have the courage to try to change the world, we must accept it, which means to serve, which means to serve others. Futility. There is another alternative. Bacon might indeed say to all of this: "Piss me over the shoulder." And a little more elegantly, but as brutally: "Bring another moth to my flame."
   I am not like him. I believe in love, you see. Not as a game, or even as pleasure - although of course it is that, the best there is: but also much more a commitment. You may think me weak; or you may think me strong. The fact is I could not change. I would not change. If I did I would have been admitting to the futility of the will to make things happen: that accidents have no meaning; that all is accident.
   Most unfortunate of all, I think, are those for whom the past produces inevitability. They submit. This is slavery.

*

   In soldiering, however, I had suddenly had enough. I had enjoyed being a soldier. Although Mr McGuinness and his friends would have regarded me as a legitimate target for getting in the way, as he put it, of persuading the Prods to leave Ireland, "to go back where they came from"; as far as I knew, no-one had actually tried to kill me. Nor I had I been required to kill. What I enjoyed was the simplicity of Army life, its order, its occasional excitements. I had also always enjoyed the vast freedom that it allowed to anyone of a reflective turn of mind to think and to read. Despite all this, my second tour in Germany finally put the kibosh on my military career.
   I would have welcomed a longer period. I still needed get my thoughts in order. But this was not arranged. When one weekend the blessed Snodgrass came to stay, bringing with him a wife - Jane I always found delightful, but there were no babies yet, of which I would become the sadly neglectful godfather of one, Oliver - and bringing with him too that strange combination of earthy common sense and unearthly optimism that I always envied, and when both of us were delightfully afloat one night on whisky, I tried to tell him what I was about.
   He tapped his snuffbox thoughtfully whilst he worked this out. His curious name, he thinks, came over with the Danes, with the Vikings - and since he was now attached to a very grand cavalry regiment indeed, where the monthly mess-bills of many of his fellow officers could easily exceed twice his monthly income, this business with the snuffbox was a part of his defences. He would offer its contents with the most earnest solicitude to anyone whose vanity appeared to need a little puncturing. Our wives were elsewhere. Finally he sighed, and told me: "You should have been a monk.".
   Well past midnight, both of us by now even more uplifted, he decided he really had to go for a run (he had been an Army orienteering champion), and he disappeared into the wet night under a frosting of high clouds and scattered stars, his route being marked around the married lines and the neighbourhood by the bellowing of all the dogs shouting madly at each other: "The Russians are coming! They're coming! Get UP, Get UP, UP, UP!"
   I should have been a monk. Of course. And medieval? Would I then have had that experience, in the most critical of all modern environments, a situation sufficient in itself to convince me that it could not be dismissed as aberration? Obviously not. If it had been centuries ago, as King had suggested might have been a better time - would I then have been able to convey any better the power, the stimulus, the intimacy and immediacy of that tremendous experience and of the fearlessness it instils: "You are OF ME!"
   Others have tried. Something very like this has clearly changed the perspective of thousands of individuals throughout history, people of every caste, class, and culture, all over the world. They were the experiment. The results of the experiment are in. The results do show invariance. Always there is a determination to reduce the savagery with which people treat people: to find a better way; to show people that is what Thou art.
   When the British entered Germany in 1945, they were welcomed by a people not pleased to be beaten, but enormously relieved not to be occupied by Russians looking for revenge, rape and loot. This was now long past. 'From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia; all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in .. the Soviet sphere.' ⁷ From a speech at Fulton, Missouri, 1946There is history in four lines. 'History will be kind to me,' Churchill opined, 'for I intend to write it!'
   The Russians and East Germans were now totally concealed by the wall - The Wall - and the minefield they had laid from north to south. We British were just another feature of this divided land. From being masters of half the world, within a few generations we had been reduced by these useless wars to useful servants to America. It is always important to realize - a nasty, unpalatable, but bitter truth - that America never has allies. It only ever has useful servants: and temporarily. This is what Realpolitik really means.
   Twenty years after Frank Pakenham fell out of his aeroplane at Tempelhof, we engineers were occupying what had been the stables of a Wehrmacht battalion in Minden, a large North German town. Nearby was Hanover. Our first commanding officer was a drunk: amiable, boisterous, uninspiring. When his alcoholism became too obvious, his replacement had spent a short time with the Paras and liked to emphasize his authority by waving his fists. Very soon we loathed each other. His senior warrant officers knew far better than I how to handle him. They kept a file which finally found its way to Corps headquarters. When I last heard, he was managing a tennis shop in Hove. I had left by this time. But he did me a service. It was he who had persuaded me to leave.
   Twenty years was just too long. The problem was morale. Everywhere there were gleaming Mercedes, BMWs, Audis, Opels with fins copied from Detroit, shark-nosed Porsches, even Borgwards from the East. Germany was becoming very rich. It also had an Army again, and its new Leopard tanks were as good as if not better than ours.
   Meanwhile, Britain had fallen flat on its face. In contrast to this new magnificence all around us, virtually all our equipment was older than we were. To support our tanks, which was our main job - the Chieftains were beautiful machines but desperately under-powered and forever breaking down - we were using armoured half-tracks built by the Universal Harvester Company of Illinois. This information was riveted to their dashboard above their multiple gearshifts. Some of these antiques had first rumbled ashore at Normandy and Caen and Hamburg twenty years before.
   Only our heavy recovery crews were older than their vehicles. Most of them were Polish, Latvian, Lithuanians, Romanians - from even further North and East - brought to Germany as slave labourers as young men. After the War many discovered they no families to return to. Hundreds of villages and towns had simply disappeared. Our Army first gave them them food and shelter, then work. Now that Russia occupied their lands, they would not go back. They lived in their own enclaves, sleeping in the backs of their massive vehicles, from which their music's drone might be heard at night.
   One of our wagons was a squat square Humber with a bulldog's face. She was so old that we called her Grandma. One morning Grandma gave one of my mechanics so much frustration that he came into my office in a rage: "Fuck me, Sir" he told me, "It's that fucking ol' Grandma. It's not just the fucking battery that fucked, it's the fucking dynamo, an' all the fucking wiring's fucked too; in fact the whole fucked-up fucking wagon fucked! And I'm fucked if I know how to fucking start the stupid fucking thing."
   After he stamped out again, strengthened by a few calming words from me, I wrote all this down. I have lost the original, but I think I got the gist of it.
   The Russians were coming. They were always coming. We were to be their tripwire. This is an interesting modern concept. It only has a meaning in a certain kind of modern war. We were the trip wire the Russians would need to break as they pushed through Northern Europe for the Channel ports - just like the Wehrmacht in 1940. No-one had really understood why ever they might want to do this. It seemed to pure madness. But madness was what we were told to expect. Marx's theory could only be proved finally to be true when it had conquered the world entirely. This, of course, is not a modern concept at all.
   The difference, we were constantly assured, was that this time - actually like last time - there would be plenty of warning. There would be another Phoney War. Weeks of diplomacy would attempt to discourage or control the angry bear. Meanwhile we would be furiously supplied with all the equipment, the petrol, the ammunition and supplies that normally we never saw. This was all very reassuring. Despite their lack of horsepower our Chieftains did have a superb gun, and there was also something wonderfully reassuring to go to sleep - in a vehicle, of course - near a laager of these great rumbling monsters: the closest that any human being might ever get to sleeping with dinosaurs.
   Alarming still, however, was the confidence with which we were assured that after all the weeks in which we were getting thoroughly prepared to repel them, the Soviets would do exactly what they were expected them to do: nothing else.
   Of course, it would never do for an army commander to call his officers together to tell them: "Frankly, men, I'm worried. I must tell you exactly what I know about the enemy, and how I intend to defeat him. Actually I haven't got a clue about the enemy. I don't know what he's about to do, or what he can do; and I don't know what we are going to do when, or if, he does it."
   This never happens. Confidence is the key to victory. Confidence and elan. It does also help to be realistic. We were given to understand that our commanders knew what our opponents would do even better than they did. They could afford to be realistic.
   The truth, of course - although no-one could afford to be this realistic: it dawned on one only very slowly - was that we were intended to be entirely expendable. This was the reason why we lacked supplies; why our vehicles were museum pieces, why our tanks were too damned slow. You could even see this reason - dimly - in the irritable rejection by the Staff College DS of my perfectly serious proposal to give a pack of anti-tank rockets to every German farmer. It wasn't the banks they would be blowing up in a week: it would be the Army Estimates for the following year.
   In most of the big exercises which we solemnly rehearsed, no troops moved. This was only partly not to upset the Russians. They might take troop movements to signal undeclared war. It also used up far too much petrol. It had also been the custom now for decades for the opposing forces to exchange teams of observers throughout the year. These teams - usually of fairly senior officers - were ferried to and fro on carefully planned routes, in bright painted vehicles, even flying flags. Everyone would know who they were, and of course everyone knew what to hide. These teams were known as BRIXMIS. My friend Jay would later attempt to use the BRIXMIS teams to collect real intelligence. This gave the British command in Berlin the vapours. He was accused of risking Armageddon.
   The headquarters of all the various units would deploy into forward positions, put up their tents, camouflaged of course, ready for nuclear war; and go through the motions of manoeuvring thousands of real guns, real regiments of tanks and real battalions of men, most of which actually remained in barracks. They would continue like this for several days up to the last moment. This last moment was known as H-hour.
   As H-hour got closer, the tempo would slow: the movement of non-existent units on the wall of maps gradually would stop; from the radios that represented them, their operators often sitting side by side, gradually less traffic would crackle. The whole atmosphere of urgency and excitement - of actual belief in the importance and reality of all this activity - would gradually fade away. Pornographic comics would appear. The clerks begin to collect their books to pack them away.
   H-hour itself was always greeted with a kind of relief. Another good job done. In the true reality, nuclear weapon would have been released. The war would then end. Soon after this - probably - so would much of the world. The really fascinating aspect of all of it all was that there was no attempt to continue. There were no plans for withdrawal or redeployment. There were no plans or orders at all. Our wives would have been ordered to bring all cats and dogs to be put down. They would be advised to stay calm. To await further instructions. Further instructions would depend on what was left of Europe after the exchange of a few dozen nuclear weapons and after the clusters of nuclear mines along the border had turned all that massive concentration of Soviet armour in great blooms of radioactive metal dust.
   It was not too difficult to decide to leave this mixture of insanity and farce. After twenty years of practising for just this finale, the Army's drinking culture was ferocious. By midnight on Sunday only the guardrooms could be expected to be sober. Our first CO was not unusual. In the field his command vehicle became a poker and a drinking den. When questions were asked in Parliament, the CO was replaced - but promoted.
   The problem was not just how to leave, but where to go. I wrote to a friend who had left the Army a few years before, the highest flyer of our intake: Sword of Honour; Corps Commandant's adjutant. Suddenly he had decided to leave. He was now, he told me, teaching mathematics in a public school in Oxford and, he assured me, he was infinitely happier. To help me return to England, he enclosed a staff officer's memorandum which told me, step by step, how to leave the Army.
   I followed his instructions, step by step - and five months later we were in Scotland. Having just sheltered from rain coming in from the Atlantic we were standing by the road to Iona, watching twenty-six boxes containing our possessions being unloaded from a Pickford's lorry that had brought them over that morning on from Oban. All around the hills were dark blue or vivid green. The sun was coming out.
   I was a free man again. I also had a kingdom to run.

1 Quoted by Rachel Campbell-Johnston, TheTimes, 16 Mar 05.
2 Cultural Materialism, Harris, 1979
3 Philosophie dans le Boudoir, de Sade, 1795
4 Nineteen Eighty-four, Orwell, 1949
5 The Passion, Vermes, Penguin, 2005
6 Oxford English Reference dictionary, OUP, 1995
7 From a speech at Fulton, Missouri, 1946

Colin Hannaford,

"Soldier."
05/02/05

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