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another? And that’s not the same as saying that our way is bad but the Nazi way is worse. That won’t do. You can’t fight negatively. A war should be a sort of crusade. But what for?’
    And then, God help us, Roper started to read poetry. ‘But,’ he wrote, ‘I can’t get much out of this very difficult poetry. I’ve got a scientific brain, I suppose, and I like a word to mean one thing and one thing only. That’s why I’ve been going back to people like Wordsworth, who really does say what he means, even though you can’t always agree with what he says. But at least there’s a man who made a religion for himself, and, when you come to think of it, it’s a scientific religion in a way. Nature – trees and rivers and mountains and so on – is something that’s really there, it encloses us. I think of those Nazi bastards coming over and blasting England, andI get a sort of picture of England suffering – I don’t mean just the people and the cities they’ve built, but the trees and the countryside and the grass, and I feel more bitter than if it was Christ on His cross. Is this some sort of new religious sense I’ve got? Would you say it was irrational?’.
    A delightful and inevitable progression from bare reason to sentimentality to sex. He wrote to me from Chesham in 1943, saying that he was doing some sort of course on Army Hygiene and, in his spare time, going out with a girl called Ethel. ‘She’s tall and fair and has blunt fingers and is very wholesome, and she works in a snackbar on the High Street. Would you say I was late in losing my virginity? We go out into the fields and it’s all very pleasant and not very exciting, and I don’t feel any guilt at all. Would it be better if I did feel guilt? I seem to have come very close to England since I stopped believing in Catholicism, close to the heart or essential nature of England I mean. What I find there is a sublime kind of innocence. England would take neither Catholicism nor Puritanism for very long – those faiths built on sin just rolled off like water from a duck’s back. And then, when I think of Nazi Germany, what do I find but another kind of innocence, a sort of malevolent innocence which enables them to perpetrate the most incredible atrocities and still see nothing wrong there. Is there anybody anywhere who is feeling guilt for this war? I lie in the cornfield with Ethel and, to spice it up with guilt, I imagine this is adultery – she isn’t married – or incest, but it won’t work. Of course, in a way it
is
incest, for we’re all supposed to be bound together in a big happy family, brothers and sisters, directing our sexual hate, all hate being really sexual, against the enemy.’
    The really significant letter from Roper came from defeated Germany. ‘I shall never eat meat again,’ he said, ‘never as long as I live. The camp was full of meat, layers and layers of it, some of it still alive. Human meat, sweet surely because it was so near the bone, with the flies buzzing over it and grubs moving. The smell was ofa massive cheese factory. We were the first in, and we wasted no time in squirting our patent Mark IV antiseptic sprays, retching while we did it. I had met this word
necropolis
before and thought it to be a sort of poetic term for describing a city at dead of night, a city of locked houses from which all the living seemed to have fled. Now I saw what a necropolis really was. How many dead or dying citizens did this contain? I had not thought it possible that so many dead could be brought together in one place, and all arranged and stacked so neatly, sometimes dead with still alive. I passed along the neat made-in-Germany streets that had house-high hedges of piled corpses on either side, spraying away, but the spray, for all its powerful smell of clean kitchen-sinks and lavatory-bowls, couldn’t