Going Up Read Online Free

more enjoyable, to sustain than sincerity. With calculated riskiness, I invited an unenthusiastic platoon to relish the comedy of excelling at something that neither they nor I wanted to do. My Tuesday afternoon squaddies responded with eager complicity: pretending to be keen turned conformity into performance. In my last Quarter, seconded by Sergeant James Cellan-Jones, I marched ‘Lockites’ into a tie with ‘Robinites’ for first place in the school drill competition. Which of the adjudicating officers could guess that our snappy uniformity carried a stamp of irony?
    Promoted to under officer, I joined the only other Carthusian of the same rank, David Vansittart, a curly-haired, blond, blue-eyed Robinite. We two alone were entitled to wear officer’s uniform, carry a leather-encased swagger stick and sport a Sam Browne belt. We also had the exalted right to parade in brown rather than black boots, a privilege I lacked the means to exercise. I could, however, look forward with some confidence to selection as an officer when the time came to do National Service. My khaki future was postponed by a government ordinance that allowed scholars first to go to university. It must have been intended to increase the military intake of young men with serviceable degrees in subjects such as engineering, medicine and current foreign languages.
    Although competence in Latin and Greek was likely to be of small utility on the battlefield, one band of classicists was known to have played a notably gallant part in the war. A visiting lecturer had told us how knowledge of ancient Greek had qualified Stanley ‘Billy’ Moss, Patrick ‘Paddy’ Leigh Fermor, C. M. ‘Monty’ Woodhouse and Xan Fielding to lead guerrillaoperations in Crete and on the Greek mainland. Seen from a distance, the adventures of those latter-day philhellenes furnished one of the few romantic episodes of the Second World War.
    While at Charterhouse, Stanley Moss had been the fag-master of my friend Peter Green, probably the greatest, certainly the most versatile, of modern classical scholars. In 1950, Moss published the bestseller Ill Met by Moonlight . A film version, in which Leigh Fermor was played by Dirk Bogarde, embellished its real-life hero’s Byronic renown. Moss himself, a Jew who was Leigh Fermor’s 2 i/c in the great adventure of kidnapping the German general Heinrich Kreipe, derived little kudos or satisfaction from his success. ‘Paddy’, on the other hand, acquired iconic standing in Greece, and an elevated literary reputation in England, for the rest of his long life. He had been at the same school, King’s Canterbury, as Somerset Maugham. Common Old Boyishness may explain how come, as a guest at the Villa Mauresque, Leigh Fermor offended his host by daring to tell a funny story about someone with a very b–bad s–stammer.
    Moss was never at ease in the post-war world. In Peter Green’s words:
    Bill was a charmer de luxe : very handsome, enormous natural grace. But he was also the absolutely classic example of the romantic Mediterranean expat with a Peter Pan psyche … he simply couldn’t, wouldn’t grow old, or indeed up. Billy was the one who actually married his Polish countess, but drank himself to death at about the same age as Dylan Thomas.
    Perhaps Moss, the rolling stone, could never forget the hundreds of Cretan hostages who were shot in reprisal for his and Paddy’s audacious, award-winning exploit.
    For non-combatants, the transcendent quality of literae humaniores was illustrated in the story of how, as his kidnappers led him through the Cretan mountains, General Kreipe glanced at snow-capped Mount Ida and then,perhaps in order to pull educated rank on his captors, recited the opening lines of Horace’s Ode 9, Book One:
    Vides ut alta stet nive candidum
    Soracte, nec iam sustineant onus…
    When Kreipe hesitated over the next phrase, Leigh Fermor took the cue and continued, without pause, to the end of the poem. The general