The Deserters: A Hidden History of World War II by Charles Glass Page B

To avoid a thrashing, they kept that joke to themselves. Yet his childhood was awash with reverence for a war he knew only through hearsay. John later told an interviewer, “I also remember very vividly Armistice Days when I was a child, because I actually wore my father’s medals. He got his medals out, and I would have them on my jersey, my jacket, whatever I was wearing.” He would turn out in the town square, while old soldiers observed silence for comrades who had died in France. “It was a very militaristic occasion, in fact. I still feel uneasy. There was a kind of glorification of war itself.”
    While their father made them wary of the army, the boys shared a fascination with the Great War’s poetry, novels and films. To John, the conflict in the trenches was a “tragic and mythopoeic event.” He became “haunted by its imagery, its pathos, the waste, the heroism and futility” via the writings of Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon and Ernest Hemingway.
    The 1938 Munich Crisis, when the British and French ceded western Czechoslovakia to Hitler’s Germany, affected him less than “two momentous discoveries: D. H. Lawrence and beer.” Having left school at the age of fourteen in 1936, he was working as a junior clerk in an accountant’s office. In his free time, he read James Joyce, courted young women and drank Younger’s Scotch Ale at the pub. He and Kenneth were not above getting into trouble, once drunkenly climbing the roof of a hotel to break into it. After their arrest and trial, the local newspaper called them “the boxing Bain brothers.” Their two-year probation was less notable than the newspaper’s disclosure that John was eighteen. Until then, his twenty-six-year-old girlfriend, Sally, thought they were the same age. She accepted the age difference, but John’s father disapproved of the girl. He ordered John to leave her, backing up the command by throwing a punch. For the first time, John fought back and gave his father a black eye. It was the last time his father would strike him, but they stopped speaking to each other.
    John’s response to the declaration of war in September 1939 was “one mainly of puerile excitement.” He did not, however, rush to the colors. When the German bombing raids known as the Blitz began in September 1940, Bain’s mother and sister were evacuated to the Cotswolds for safety. The three men of the family stayed on in uncomfortable silence in Aylesbury. Having lost his job with the accountants after his arrest, John went to work selling spare parts for the Aylesbury Motor Company at thirty-five shillings a week. His attempted enlistment in the Royal Air Force faltered over the medical exam that discovered his bad eye. He wrote later in “The Unknown War Poet,”
He enlisted among the very first
Though not from patriotic motives, nor
To satisfy the spirit of adventure . . .
    In December, he and Kenneth decided to enlist in the Merchant Marine. While their motives were unclear, merchant service offered two advantages: a way out of an intolerable life at home and the opportunity, provided the Luftwaffe or Kriegsmarine did not sink their ship, to cruise around the world. With £400 that they stole from a hidden store of cash their father kept to avoid income tax, they fled to London. They spent lavishly, taking a room at the Regent Palace Hotel and buying tickets for Donald Wolfit’s production of King Lear and Myra Hess’s lunchtime recitals. They got drunk in one Soho pub after another. Finally, they went to the Shipping Federation to sign on as merchant seamen. “Our interview with the uniformed officer at the Federation was brief and humiliating,” Bain wrote. They tried the docks in Cardiff and Glasgow, where the recruiting poster drew them into the infantry that Christmas.
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    The journey from Scotland to El Alamein, Wadi Akarit and the Mustafa Detention Barracks seemed to follow a grim logic. The conflict between his contempt