8 August 1978. Cogitations

[Transcription of a tape recording.]

“The faces of old ghosts look in upon the battle”, Tennyson said about that last strange battle in which Arthur took part before he travelled on his journey to the Vale of Avalon. [‘The Passing of Arthur’, Tennyson, Idylls of the King.]

Once more the world has reached the same kind of place in its journey round the sun which it occupied in the battle of Amiens (8 August ), which was said by Ludendorff to mark a black day for the German army. The ghosts look in from the battle again; Asser, Cartwright, and Sergeant O'Toole, the poor fellow who complained that he was only an orphan, with his protuberant ears, his red flushed face, his feelings of depression and anxiety, and his confiding to me that this battle on which he was about to embark together with the rest of the tank crew (I was not one of the crew as I was now commanding the tank section and was the second-in-command of the company) would be his last. He was, of course, quite correct; very soon after the battle started, Cartwright's tank received a direct hit, and the entire crew were killed. When I came across it, the bodies were charred and blackened, and poured out of the door of the tank as if they were the entrails of some mysterious beast of a primitive kind which had simply perished then and there in the conflagration, which must have been set off by the direct hit.

This experience is similar to others I have had in the past, but the similarity refers only to the known facts, not to the unknown. In this respect there are new experiences – unlike any Eighth of August of the past – not least when Francesca and I visited the Shelley and Keats museum in Rome. We both found it an extremely profound and moving occasion, as if we were indeed participating in an experience in which Shelley was still alive. I remember noticing, and being tremendously impressed by, his description of Keats as a greater man than he, a dangerous rival who would be sure to excel him. But he

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