Traumerei of war and peace

parents and sister. On one of the last days I spent the afternoon

swimming from a beach on nearby Erraid -- David Balfour's island -- with

my first and only teenage love, Margaret.

A tall, slender creature with auburn hair, blue eyes, and freckles,

she swam asgracefully as the friendly, trusting seal which accompanied

us. We were in the sea for several hours. Neither before nor since have

I known Hebridean waters so warm. It was perfect summer weather.

The only clouds over Iona that month issued from a portable radio set

-- a novelty then -- which the Rev. Jimmy Donald, a young Ayrshire

minister, switched on morning and evening outside Mary Ann Maclean's

store beside the jetty so that we could all keep abreast of the

international news.

When, on September 2, Margaret and I bade each other farewell on the

pier at Oban it was with the certainty that the next day would bring a

declaration of war against Germany. I never saw, or even heard of, her

again.

In Glasgow, September 3 dawned bright and sunny. It seemed that the

heatwave was to continue even if we were on the threshhold of war. As we

listened in silence to Neville Chamberlain's brief broadcast I wondered

vaguely what war would entail. It was hard to believe that this was an

historic occasion, so conditioned had we all become to the inevitability

of war.

As long ago as 1936, on a walk to St Columba's Bay, Iona, a German

youth a little older than myself had explained quite unemotionally that

Hitler's policies were bound to lead to war. ''Within the next five

years,'' he had said. How right he was.

In 1939 I was 17. The prospect of war thrilled me with a spirit of

adventure but the uncertainty of it filled me with fear and I felt angry

at the incompetent statesmen of Europe who had failed to keep the peace

and who, I had no doubt, would take great care to spare themselves the

dangers, hardships, and miseries of war. At the same time, I had no

doubt of the need to go to war to stop Hitler. I don't think anyone in

Britain doubted that, not even the pacifists.

As a family we regularly attended morning service in Westbourne

Church, Hyndland. The minister was the Rev. Adam Burnet, D.D., the most

eloquent preacher I have known (for three years in the 1950s I was to

share a room in the Glasgow Herald as a fellow leader writer with his

nephew, Alastair Burnet, before he went into television).

On September 3, the start of the service had been postponed for half

an hour to enable the congregation to listen to Chamberlain. When he

entered the pulpit Dr Burnet began by saying:''No doubt all of you have

heard the Prime Minister's broadcast this morning and are aware that

Britain and France are now at war with Germany . . .''

He was interruped by a very loud bang.

A shudder went through me that must have been visible. Could the

Germans have been so prompt in dropping their first load of bombs?

I was astonished that the faces of Dr Burnet and those of the

congregation I could see betrayed no emotion.

There was a second bang, not quite so loud this time, and I realised

it was thunder. Nonetheless, I was still deeply shaken, for it seemed to

me that this was God expressing His displeasure at mankind for

perpetrating a second Great War so soon after the first.

After the service we walked home along Great Western Road and came

upon the first casualty of the war sprawled on the railings of Botanic

Gardens opposite Kew Terrace. It was a huge balloon that had been struck

by lightning, part of the enormous and quite useless balloon barrage

that had been erected in and around Glasgow to protect the city from

enemy aircraft.

That evening my grandparents came to supper. It was a particularly sad

occasion for them. Aged in their upper seventies, they had grown up in a

time when the Germans, not the French, had been our trusted allies. In

1914 they had sent four sons to the Great War. Alastair, my namesake,

was blown to bits in the mud of Flanders when still in his teens. The

others were all wounded, in my father's case three times (and twice

gassed). Now they had to face the prospect of their grandchildren going

to war with the same enemy only 20 years later.

My grandmother had studied music in Leipzig in the early 1880s and was

an accomplished pianist. Before she went home that night she sat down at

my mother's grand piano and played Schumann's Traumerei, slowly and with

great feeling. When she had finished she sat gazing into space for a few

moments, then quietly put down the lid. Although she lived for another

17 years I never heard her play the piano again.

Unlike our forebears in August 1914, no-one in September 1939 thought

it would be all over by Christmas. Most of the people I knew reckoned --

still optimistically -- that it would last about three years. They also

thought, correctly, that it would be a more mobile war than that of

1914-18. No-one, even in the dark days of Dunkirk, the Battle of

Britain, and the Clydebank blitz, thought for a moment that the Germans

would win.

The next time I heard Schumann's Traumerei played on the piano was in

June 1945 in the picturesque medieval town of Tangermunde, an inland

port on the Elbe. I was then a captain in the Highland Light Infantry

and commandant of the town which had a population of about 30,000

Germans and, on the outskirts, several camps for Displaced Persons

(forced labour) who were almost as numerous and mainly Polish, Yugoslav,

and Russian.

Working for me -- from early in the morning until late at night six

and sometimes seven days a week -- was an attractive young girl from

Berlin, Marianne Gartner. My responsib-

ilities were to maintain law and order among the civilian population

and to prevent them from starving. The first was easy, the second very

difficult. There was a critical shortage of food throughout Germany and

a dire shortage of vehicles in Tangermunde to collect it from the

nearest depots.

It was all work and no play -- that is, until one day when Marianne

told me it was her twentieth birthday. She was having a little

celebration with a few friends at an aunt's house where she was staying

with her grandmother. Would I care to join them?

I hesitated, explaining to her the severity of non-fraternisation laws

and that if I were caught paying a social visit to Germans I would have

to face a court martial. None of us soldiers had a conscience about

fraternising with German women. My commanding officer had the

comfortable theory that ''all foreigners are goblins except foreign

women and they are international.'' At the time I did not know that if

one of my men wanted to walk out with a German girl he would first take

out a Polish girl and persuade her to give him a rosette of the Polish

national colours which they all wore.

The next night, to protect himself from the military police, he would

pin it to the dress of his German girlfriend.

Compromising with fear, I turned up at Marianne's party after the

other guests had left. It was a hot night and we sat in a cool porch

eating a birthday cake which, despite the austerity, had strawberries in

it, and drinking ersatz coffee. It was a spacious porch, more like a

small sitting-room, which reminded me of the one in my grandmother's

house in Broomhill, Glasgow.

Presently from the sitting-room there floated the lilting notes of

Traumerei, this time played by Marianne's Tante Bertha. For me the war

had begun and ended with the same music but not on the same notes --

fear and anger had been replaced by relief and hope.

That was 44 years ago. An innocent romance with Marianne did not last

but was replaced with a friendship which continues to this day. She is

now Marianne MacKinnon, the mother of three Scottish sons, all

professional men, and lives near Glasgow. Two years ago, when she

published the story of her life in Nazi Germany before the war, I

reviewed The Naked Years for the Glasgow Herald.

Half a century ago such a consequence of the war was aeons beyond my

imagination.