Ross All Valiant Dust

An Irishman Abroad
1. Auflage 1992
ISBN: 978-1-84351-402-2
Verlag: The Lilliput Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 186 Seiten

For many of its participants, the Second World War was the most intense period of their lives - with horizons widened by grief, strangeness and excitement. Peter Ross, graduated from Trinity College, Dublin, to become a troop commander in Montgomery's Eighth Army. He took ship to Egypt and was active in the Western Desert campaign, concluding with El Alamein, a memorable and historic battle which marked the turning-point of the war. Hospitalized and awarded the Military Cross, Ross returned to take part in the D-Day landings, the liberation of Brussels and the advance on the Rhine. All Valiant Dust is a young Irishman's experience of war, vividly recounted with compassion and humour. Its painfully realized remembrance of the din and tempo of desert conflict, and much besides, documents extraordinary times.

PETER ROSS was born in India in 1914 and educated at Repton and Trinity College, Dublin where he won the Philosophical Society silver medal and founded the Squash Club. He joined the Royal Tank Regiment in 1940, won the Military Cross in North Africa and ended the war with the rank of Captain. He established Brook House preparatory school in south County Dublin in 1952 and was headmaster there until his retirement in 1977. He is author of To the Stars (1946), a history of Sandhurst Military Academy, and The Old Story, a book of poems. He died in January 1991.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Ross, Peter

Leseproben

FOREWORD

In 1953 Jack Sweetman, who played rugby for Old Wesley and had had a final trial for Ireland, asked me to coach boxing in Brook House School. As I got out of the Law Library shortly after four, it would be great if I could come along and put the mites through their paces. Jack was soon to move on to Headfort School, where he became a legendary figure. After he left I continued to coach at Brook House, which was how I came to know Peter Ross, the headmaster there. Peter was a small man, well below average height, and it seemed incredible to me that he should have been a first-class soccer player at Repton and awarded the Military Cross at El Alamein. A born schoolmaster, he inspired boys to fulfil their physical and mental potential. At football matches he would run up and down the sidelines like a terrier, yelling with the enthusiasm of a thirteen-year-old, ‘Come on, Brook House!’ Once he discovered that the oval ball game was the only one played in Irish prep schools, he became as knowledgeable and fanatical about it as he had been about soccer.

A condition under which I had agreed to coach boxing at Brook House was that I should not be paid a salary. I would like to think that this scruple was born out of a strict loyalty to the Corinthian code, but there may have been at the back of my mind the fear that an insolent jack-in-office would at some future date demand the return of the sports trophies I had won, on the grounds that I forfeited my amateur status by coaching for financial reward. However, though I received neither silver nor gold for my efforts, I was rewarded in kind.

One of the teachers at the school was the writer Monk Gibbon, and it was through Peter that I began a thirty-year friendship with Monk, or Bill, as he was known to his friends. Peter had a genuine love of literature and was an admirer of Gibbon’s work, and conversations over tea, after I had taught the boys the value of a straight left and, more importantly, how to avoid that of their opponents, would be stimulating, as talk of books and poetry flowed back and forth. Bill, like Peter, was an excellent sportsman, a six handicap at golf, and a crack hockey player. The other prep schools in Dublin at that time, Aravon and Castle Park, were long established, and it took an enormous amount of energy and organization on Peter’s part to keep Brook House going. But it grew rapidly, after ten years moving from Clonskeagh to Ashtown Park in Monkstown, and then to Bray. The school was founded in 1952, by 1955 there were fifty boys, and at its height numbers rose to 190.

In mid-career Peter had a serious cardiac illness which would have meant retirement for most. But it didn’t seem to take a feather out of him; he even increased his work-load. Fortunately he had an ideal partner to assist him – his wife, Paddy. When I first came to Brook House I was dazzled, as was everyone else, by this lovely-looking girl – the perfect English Rose, who rivalled in looks the current stars of the British screen revival, Deborah Kerr, Glynis Johns and Greer Garson. Sunny-tempered and full of laughter, Paddy seemed to do everything: run the house-keeping, supervise the dining-room, help with the accounts, remaining through it all a seraphic figure who represented in this all-male school the female psyche which was part of the boys’ lives at home.

Peter was born during a bridging period in the evolution of Irish society, when Ireland was part of the United Kingdom, but was to spend most of his life in a country which had become self-governing. It was an era when the Anglo-Irish exerted themselves in establishing an identity: Yeats, AE, Lady Gregory, Synge and Douglas Hyde had probed the imagination of their class, and striven to recognize the Irish side of their personalities. Those who came after them were helped by that great creative burst at the turn of the century further to pursue and explore the nature of the identity of their class as Irishmen. We get a glimpse of this in the Introduction to All Valiant Dust when Peter recalls an argument with a bullying history master at Repton who had vilified Ireland. Even when he was thousands of miles away, memories of home were always flitting through his mind. In the desert the night before the battle of El Alamein he would remember sailing in Donegal Bay with a friend the day war was declared. The desert in winter, ‘in that moment of semi-darkness when the sun sank behind the horizon’, induced in him nostalgic memories of an Irish bog.

I think one episode here shows as tellingly as anything I have ever read the identity that can be forged between Irishmen of different backgrounds when they are outside their own country. The Catholic chaplain in his battalion, who he calls Father Joyce, was from the West of Ireland. The other officers knew that Father Joyce had a weakness – he cheated at cards. These officers would make Peter furious by adding condescendingly, ‘You see, he’s Irish.’

Then one day there was a German air attack and Peter lay flat on the ground with his company unable to rescue a nearby anti-aircraft gun crew who had been bombed and some of whom were seriously injured.

Suddenly, as another wave of bombers manoeuvred into the sun, a staff car moved out towards the stricken gun crew.

‘Get back, you idiot!’ someone shouted.

The car lurched and stopped, a jagged hole torn in its side. Out of it stepped a man, very deliberately, as though nothing extraordinary were happening. It was Father Joyce, the sleeves of his white shirt rolled above his elbows. He walked purposefully towards the wounded men. Bombs were bursting all around him, and bullets splintering the shale. But on he went. He bound up wounds; he gave spiritual comfort where he could not otherwise help. He never faltered, never even ducked when the bombs landed near him.

Later on I saw him, armed with a spade and a pick, digging graves through that ungiving surface.

That evening he arrived late for the game of cards, because he was writing letters to the relatives of the dead and wounded.

Bravery in battle is sometimes a matter of impulse caused by fear, an adrenalin-driven act to hide a greater fear, a fear of death through inaction, or even the fear of being thought afraid.

But Father Joyce’s actions were not a matter of impulse. They were deliberate, they were continuous, aimed at helping men in mortal danger. There were no heroics for Father Joyce, no ‘going over the top’, rifle in hand, inspired by the thrill of combat. Had there been no war, and had I known him only in peace-time, I would probably have written him off as a petty buffoon. How many acts of courage and devotion are curtained off behind apparently uneventful lives?

Which was the real Father Joyce – the man who cheated at cards to win a few pence, or the man who risked his life so fearlessly to help those soldiers? It is an imponderable question, since it suggests that the complexity of human motives and feelings can be expressed in terms of black and white. I know that Father Joyce didn’t cheat for the money, which could mean nothing to him. It may have been an act, a ‘playing Irish’ to amuse his fellow officers, or even a fling of contempt and defiance at their assumption of superiority.

Peter Ross’s war started when he joined the 3rd Battalion of the Royal Tank Regiment as a second lieutenant under the command of the much-decorated General Robert Crisp, the famous South African Test cricketer.

Some time later, on 23 October 1942, Peter found himself pitched into the battle of El Alamein, where he was badly wounded during a rescue operation from a burning tank. Even in its reserved military prose, the citation describing the action – for which he was awarded the MC and promoted to captain – conveys his exceptional courage.

On 29th October, 1942, a Crusader Tank was knocked out by anti-tank gunfire. Three members of the crew were badly burnt.

2/Lt. Ross unhesitatingly took up his Scout Car to the burning tank which was within a few hundred yards of enemy M.G. and anti-tank gun positions. In his Scout Car he ferried the wounded men back to a second Crusader under heavy M.G. and a tk fire.

2/Lt. Ross then travelled with the wounded men on the back of the second Crusader until it was hit and set alight. The clothes of all the men on the back and in the Crusader caught fire.

2/Lt. Ross beat out the flames with his bare hands and helped the wounded to the safety of slit trenches nearby.

All this time the party was under very heavy M.G. and a tk gunfire.

2/Lt. Ross did not rest or attempt to protect himself until the last wounded man was safely evacuated. He suffered severe burns and shock. His very gallant action saved many valuable lives.

Peter wrote to his parents:

For some mysterious reason I have been awarded a decoration. Can’t think why. I’m happy about it for one reason – it is for helping to save lives, not to take them.

One might think of this as false modesty. But I don’t think it is. He remained throughout the war and, indeed, throughout his life, puzzled by the whole strange business of killing, and sceptical about the value of war: ‘The result was glorious but the actual battle wasn’t. Like all battles, it was hideous.’

Some of the best insights into the nature of war have come from writers depicting it from the point of view of non-combatants and peripheral dodgers, like O’Casey in Juno and the Paycock and Shakespeare with Pistol Bardolph and the Fat Knight in the...