They would say, ‘I hope someone got the swine who got you: how you must hate those devils!’ and I would say weakly, ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ and leave it at that. I could not explain that I had not been injured in their war, that no thoughts of ‘our island fortress’ or of ‘making the world safe for democracy’ had bolstered me up when going into combat. I could not explain that what I had suffered I in no way regretted; that I had welcomed it; and that now that it was over I was in a sense grateful for it and certain that in time it would help me along the road of my own private development.
(The Last Enemy, page 166)
Potted biography (from Wikipedia)
Born in April 1919, Richard Hillary was 20 when the Second World War broke out. He was the son of an Australian government official and his wife, and attended one of the UK’s top public schools, Shrewsbury School, before going on to Trinity College, Oxford (‘a typical incubator of the English ruling classes before the war’).
At Oxford he was a fit, handsome man who devoted all his energy to rowing, hoping to achieve a ‘Blue’ (‘Unfortunately, rowing was the only accomplishment in which I could get credit for being slightly better than average.’) His memoir contains some very funny rowing stories, particularly the tour of German and Hungarian regattas he went on with seven fellow rowers who wangled free tickets and hotel rooms on false promise that they were the ‘official’ Oxford Eight, which they very much weren’t.
But at the same time as rowing, he joined the Oxford University Air Squadron and the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve. The undergraduates all knew war was coming.
Hillary was called up to the Royal Air Force in October 1939. He was sent for training in Scotland then, in July 1940, was posted to B Flight, No. 603 Squadron RAF, located at RAF Montrose, still in Scotland but, for the first time, flying Spitfires.
On 27 August the Squadron was moved south to RAF Hornchurch, in Essex, and immediately saw combat in the Battle of Britain (10 July 1940 to 31 October 1940). In one week of combat Hillary personally claimed five Bf 109s shot down, claimed two more probably destroyed and one damaged.
On 3 September 1940 i.e. seven days into his new posting, Hillary had just made his fifth ‘kill’ when he was shot down by a Messerschmitt Bf 109. He describes vividly the key mistake he made. After getting an enemy plane in his sights he let off a 2 second burst of machinegun fire which he saw hit the machine. But instead of breaking off and wheeling away, he let off another 3 second burst to make sure and that was long enough for another Messerschmitt to get on his tail and hit him.
Trapped in his cockpit while the Spitfire burst into flames Hillary was badly burned, then passed out, then literally fell out of the plane as it tumbled down towards the sea. The cold air revived him, he deployed his parachute and landed in the North Sea, where he was rescued by a lifeboat from the Margate Station.
If school and university were part 1 and combat flying was part 2, now began the third part of Hillary’s short life, an extended period of medical treatment for his appalling burns.
Hillary was first treated at the Royal Masonic Hospital, Hammersmith and then at the Queen Victoria Hospital in Sussex. Here he came under the direction of the plastic surgeon Archibald McIndoe and endured three months of repeated surgery in an attempt to repair the damage to his hands and face. Pioneer patients were known as McIndoe’s ‘Guinea Pig Club’. It was a painful and psychologically devastating period.
The Last Enemy
The Last Enemy is a carefully crafted text. I’ve copied the outline of Hillary’s life from Wikipedia in order to show how he treats it in The Last Enemy. The Last Enemy is in three parts:
- The proem (‘a preface or preamble to a book or speech’)
- Book One – his life up to the shooting down, focusing on Oxford then his RAF training
- Book Two – medical treatment, plastic surgery, return to a semblance of civilian life
1. Proem
A short 6-page Proem, an intense description of the day he took off with the rest of his squadron, engaged in a dogfight, was hit and his cockpit immediately burst into flames, how he struggled to open the hatch, tumbled through the air, and then the long, long time (four hours) he spent in the cold North Sea, entangled in the straps and ropes of his parachute, the tortured thoughts that went through his head, his feeble attempts to deflate his life jacket and drown himself, which turns out to be harder than he expected. It is told with the winning, upper-class sang-froid of his class.
There can be few more futile pastimes than yelling for help alone in the North Sea, with a solitary seagull for company, yet it gave me a certain melancholy satisfaction, for I had once written a short story in which the hero (falling from a liner) had done just this. It was rejected.
Then willing arms are pulling him up, his parachute is cut free, brandy, a blanket and the long chug back to Margate, ambulance, hospital, anaesthetic. Blimey. It’s harrowing stuff. But what led up to this fatal moment? How did we get here?
2. Book One
Book one contains five chapters. He skips past his parents and childhood and boyhood and school, and the text opens with young Richard a bright young undergraduate at Oxford University, and this is where we get introduced to the book’s style and purpose.
There’s a lot of facts about Oxford and undergraduate life, as there will later be a lot of facts about the different planes he trained and flew in. It is all told in the bright and breezy style of the confident English upper class, with lashings of self-deprecation and irony.
The press referred to us as the Lost Generation and we were not displeased. Superficially we were selfish and egocentric without any Holy Grail in which we could lose ourselves. The war provided it, and in a delightfully palatable form. (p.24)
But what sets it apart from other memoirs of bright young things is Hillary’s earnest, if rather immature, young mannish attempts to make sense of it all, to make sense of his life, how it fit into his generation’s attitudes and experiences.
On the face of it this gives rise to a number of descriptions of how he and his generation felt about, say, international politics, English society, the British Empire or the writers of the 1930s, the poets of the generation just before them, all of which give rise to quotable soundbites (which are often included in social histories of the period).
On politicians
We were convinced that we had been needlessly led into the present world crisis, not by unscrupulous rogues, but worse, by the bungling of a crowd of incompetent old fools.
Class consciousness and the 1930s poets
Despising the middle-class society to which they owed their education and position, they attacked it, not with vigour but with an adolescent petulance. They were encouraged in this by their literary idols, by their unquestioning allegiance to Auden, Isherwood, Spender, and Day Lewis. With them they affected a dilettante political leaning to the left. Thus, while refusing to be confined by the limited outlook of their own class, they were regarded with suspicion by the practical exponents of labour as bourgeois, idealistic, pink in their politics and pale-grey in their effectiveness. They balanced precariously and with irritability between a despised world they had come out of and a despising world they couldn’t get into… (p.13)
The post-war future
Was there perhaps a new race of Englishmen arising out of this war, a race of men bred by the war, a harmonious synthesis of the governing class and the great rest of England; that synthesis of disparate backgrounds and upbringings to be seen at its most obvious best in R.A.F. Squadrons? While they were now possessed of no other thought than to win the war, yet having won it, would they this time refuse to step aside and remain indifferent to the peace-time fate of the country, once again leave government to the old governing class?…Would they see to it that there arose from their fusion representatives, not of the old gang, deciding at Lady Cufuffle’s that Henry should have the Foreign Office and George the Ministry of Food, nor figureheads for an angry but ineffectual Labour Party, but true representatives of the new England that should emerge from this struggle?
(Partly this passage stood out for me because of his use of the phrase ‘the old gang’ referring to the corrupt old aristocrats and public school johnnies who run everything, because it copies the phrase from an Auden poem:
We know it, we know that love
Needs more than the admiring excitement of union,
More than the abrupt self-confident farewell,
The heel on the finishing blade of grass,
The self-confidence of the falling root,
Needs death, death of the grain, our death.
Death of the old gang…
From The Destruction of Error by W.H. Auden, 1929)
There’s a lot of stuff pitched at this level, undergraduate generalisations about society and it’s very readable and interesting, as far as it goes. It took me a while to realise that Hillary has a deeper, sometimes quite buried, purpose to all this. And this is to describe how the narrator matures and grows up, so that the book could have been titled The Socialisation of an Egotist. Or maybe, How The Egotist Grew Up.
I read a commenter on Amazon saying they disliked Hillary because of his sense of entitlement and arrogance, but I take that as being precisely the point of the book, to show the reader that that’s how he started off and to take you on his journey of maturing. It is a Bildingsroman. It is a coming-of-age story. The whole point is to start with the hero being immature, rootless, drifting and fantastically self-absorbed. He lives for the moment. He lives to express himself and fulfil himself. Rowing’s what he’s good at and partying and being handsome and witty with other gilded, witty, athletic posh types, and so this is how he spends his time.
And so this is the attitude he brings to fighting the war: he laughs at all the ‘rot’ about the Empire and patriotism and the great this, that or the other. He doesn’t give a stuff for any of that grand talk. Keith Douglas, in Alamein to Zem Zem, sees the advent of war as a personal challenge, and that’s just how Hillary sees it:
For myself, I was glad for purely selfish reasons. The war solved all problems of a career, and promised a chance of self-realisation that would normally take years to achieve. As a fighter pilot I hoped for a concentration of amusement, fear, and exaltation which it would be impossible to experience in any other form of existence. (p.24)
It’s a point he rams home with repetition, convinced most of his peers feel the same:
We continued to refuse to consider the war in the light of a crusade for humanity, or a life-and-death struggle for civilization, and concerned ourselves merely with what there was in it for us… (p.46)
He gives us good pen portraits of his undergraduate friends and then he enlists and is whisked off to Scotland for training. Here we are introduced, once again, to quite a large number of chaps, some of whom are really very well off: a son of Lord Beaverbrook, several landed gentry who invite them to go grouse shooting on their vast estates. (It’s notable that Hillary positions himself as very much not part of the huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’ set; he describes at least two separate shooting invitations at length and each time makes it clear he hates stomping through wet heather and mud in order to stand around on a windswept hillside shooting at a few wretched pheasants. He dips into that world, but he is not of it.)
But the point I’m making about the fairly large cast of other characters (for example, all the pilots he trains with and then in his squadron – I counted 32 named individuals in all) is that although we get their height and hair colour and university background and everything, there’s a persistent thread of Hillary considering them as psychological types, and measuring them against his own, very well expressed egocentricity. Take what he says about his fellow pilot Peter Howes:
The change in Peter Howes was perhaps the most interesting, for he was not unaware of what was happening. From an almost morbid introspection, an unhappy preoccupation with the psychological labyrinths of his own mind, his personality blossomed, like some plant long untouched by the sun, into an at first unwilling but soon open acceptance of the ideas and habits of the others. (p.45)
He sees in others the maturation process which the book ends up being about. This comes into focus in the character of one of the young flyers he meets, a chap named Peter Pease, who is a devout Christian.
Peter was, I think, the best-looking man I have ever seen. He stood six-foot-three and was of a deceptive slightness for he weighed close on 13 stone. He had an outward reserve which protected him from any surface friendships, but for those who troubled to get to know him it was
apparent that this reserve masked a deep shyness and a profound integrity of character. Soft-spoken, and with an innate habit of understatement, I never knew him to lose his temper. He never spoke of himself and it was only through Colin that I learned how well he had done at Eton before his two reflective years at Cambridge, where he had watched events in Europe and made up his mind what part he must play when the exponents of everything he most abhorred began to sweep all before them.
Many, many things happen. They train, they fly, they fight, they go dancing and drinking. There is an interlude where we discover some of the pilots have been using their spare time to entertain small children who have been evacuated from urban centres to the small hamlet of Tarfside (pages 78 to 79). There is a lot of detail and incident and character, all described in a winningly confident pukka style.
But at the core of Book One is the longest chapter in the book (26 pages in the Penguin edition) titled ‘The World of Peter Pease’ for it contains a prolonged debate between Richard the selfish atheist and Peter the quietly spoken, selfless Christian. Richard volunteered for the RAF because he selfishly wants the experience of flying a Spitfire and shooting down enemy fighters. Peter is serving because has observed events across Europe and come to the conclusion that the Nazis represent real Evil, Biblical Evil, created by the Devil. What they are doing is Devilish and must be combated by all good Christians.
Hillary isn’t Dostoyevsky or Sartre. Their debate isn’t pitched in sophisticated theological or philosophical terminology. And it doesn’t last that long, pages 82 to 91. But you have the sense, the dramatic literary sense, that although he’s writing the account, Hillary himself knows he’s on quicksand. There’s an old saying that you know you’re losing the argument when you resort to insults, as Hillary finds himself doing:
‘You are going to concern yourself with politics and mankind when the war is over: I am going to
concern myself with the individual and Richard Hillary. I may or may not be exactly a man of my time: I don’t know. But I know that you are an anachronism. In an age when to love one’s country is vulgar, to love God archaic, and to love mankind sentimental, you do all three.’
But the more fiercely Hillary argues that nothing matters except the self, that he’s only fighting for the experience, that life is about self expression and getting as much out of it as you can, the more you can feel him beginning to doubt himself:
I’m not concerned with genius. I’m concerned with my own potentialities. I say that I am fighting this war because I believe that, in war, one can swiftly develop all one’s faculties to a degree it would normally take half a lifetime to achieve. And to do this, you must be as free from outside interference as possible. That’s why I’m in the Air Force. For in a Spitfire we’re back to war as it ought to be–if you can talk about war as it ought to be. Back to individual combat, to self–reliance, total responsibility for one’s own fate. One either kills or is killed; and it’s damned exciting. (p.85)
‘Exciting’, the same word Keith Douglas uses in Alamein to Zem Zem:
It is exciting and amazing to see thousands of men, very few of whom have much idea why they are fighting, all enduring hardships, living in an unnatural, dangerous, but not wholly terrible world, having to kill and to be killed… (Alamein to Zem Zem)
Interesting coincidence as this may be, it doesn’t strengthen Hillary’s case. A close reading suggests the quietly spoken Christian, Peter Pease, is on the solider ground. I couldn’t say whether Hillary intends the reader to take his side, but I think he intends it to be a close-run thing.
(It might be worth mentioning in passing that Auden felt the same. After he had emigrated to America in 1939 her came to realise that all the so-called ‘political’ poetry he wrote in the 1930s was, deep down, motivated by personal needs and urgencies and that, if it came right down to it, why were we fighting the Germans? If everything is personal and psychological, then maybe it’s possible to change your personality, or in a different mood, support the Nazis. Where was the solid, objective basis on which to found your belief that the Nazis were wrong, not a matter of taste or scruple, but the conviction that what they were doing was simply wrong and anti-human? Arguments like this were part of Auden’s process towards readopting the lapsed Anglican Christianity of his boyhood. You cannot allow the fight against the Nazis to depend on your vacillating mood, on personal preference. There must be an objective truth outside yourself. There must be a God who underpins a universal moral order, who underpins Human Morality. This is the conviction expressed in different styles by Auden, T.S. Eliot, C.S. Lewis and many other writers of the age, and explains why the Second World War saw an upsurge in Christian faith, from a wide range of people asking themselves this question: ‘Why am I so sure the Nazis are wrong? Because there are universal moral standards external to me, there is a Moral Law, there is a timeless Creator who underpins them.’)
In the moral or philosophical terrain (i.e. not the fighter pilot or medical parts) of the narrative, Peter Pease is triangulated with another character, David Rutter, a convinced pacifist. It is worth quoting Hillary’s description of Rutter at length for what it tells about the ideas floating around in 1939:
‘Modern patriotism,’ he would say, ‘is a false emotion. In the Middle Ages they had the right idea. All that a man cared about was his family and his own home on the village green. It was immaterial to him who was ruling the country and what political opinions held sway. Wars were no concern of his.’ His favourite quotation was the remark of Joan’s father in Schiller’s drama on the Maid of Orleans, ‘Lasst uns still gehorchend harren wem uns Gott zum Köng gibt,’ which he would translate for me as, ‘Let us trust obediently in the king God sends us.’
‘Then,’ he would go on, ‘came the industrial revolution. People had to move to the cities. They ceased to live on the land. Meanwhile our country, by being slightly more unscrupulous than anyone else, was obtaining colonies all over the world. Later came the popular press, and we have been exhorted ever since to love not only our own country, but vast tracts of land and people in the Empire whom we have never seen and never wish to see.’
So he’s not just a pacifist but has clearly thought-out views about the meretricious role of the popular press and the bogusness of the British Empire (something Hillary isn’t very impressed by, either). Rutter is only one among many named characters in the book, but Hillary explicitly links him to Pease by virtue of his thought-through, principled stance.
3. Book Three
As mentioned above, book three starts with Hillary recovering in hospital and follows the long, gruelling process of the treatment for his burns and then the plastic surgery designed to give him a semblance of a face and of hands (at one point the surgeon taps the shiny white part of his knuckle – which Hillary can’t feel – and points out it’s raw bone; he was burned to the bone).
This is very gruelling for the reader because in each of his hospitals Hillary, of course, meets and finds out about patients in much worse plight than himself. Worst of all is the burns hospital in Sussex which includes a 15-year-old girl who was totally burned by molten sugar on her first day in a factor, and who screams in agony all the time. God.
He has umpteen hallucinations under the influence of heavy painkillers for months. In one he is in the cockpit with his friend Peter Pease when he is shot down and killed. (This chimes eerily with the Roald Dahl short stories of close relatives, mothers or wives or friends, witnessing at first hand the deaths of their loved ones miles away in bombers or fighters. Was it a very common hallucination or intuition, one wonders.) The nurses are almost universally excellent and there are many little examples of their kindness and tact when dealing with the devastatingly injured, and the towering example of Sister Hall, who is a firm but compassionate ruler of the burns ward at the Queen Victoria Hospital, Sussex.
Peter’s wife, Denise, comes to visit and, when he is well enough to leave hospital, Richard often goes to stay at her house in Eaton Place. In fact it’s one of the mild surprises of the book that he is allowed to leave hospital and travel to London, to meet old friends for drinks etc, even while his treatment continues. It’s because each of the skin grafts to give him new eyelids or new lips, takes months to ‘take’.
The climax of the book comes quickly and I found overwhelmingly moving, if for reasons I don’t fully understand. It is in two parts. One day Hillary accepts an invitation from his old friend David Rutter, the pacifist, and takes the train out to his cottage in Norfolk. The door is opened by David’s wife, Mary, who is visibly shocked at Hillary’s appearance. They shake hands, make a pot of tea, sit down to chat but Hillary finds Mary quite aggressive. After a while Rutter intervenes to explain that she is over-compensating, because so many of their friends in the Forces end up berating Rutter for being a pacifist. OK, Hillary processes this fact, but senses there is a deeper reason for Mary’s unhappiness.
Then it comes out. David has lost his pacifism. As the war has continued he has come to doubt his stance. The Nazis have emerged as not just another enemy in another war, but the most evil force history has ever thrown up and this is a war to preserve not just democracy but all human decency. And so David has come to doubt his contented pacifism.
As country after country had fallen to Hitler his carefully reasoned arguments had been split wide open: it was as much the war of the unemployed labourer as of the Duke of Westminster. Never in the course of history had there been a struggle in which the issues were so clearly defined. Although our peculiar form of education would never allow him to admit it, he knew well enough that it had become a crusade. All this he could have borne. It was the painful death of his passionate fundamental belief that he should raise his hand against no man which finally brought his world crumbling about his ears. (p.168)
And so his wife Mary is distraught. She thought she knew where they stood. She thought they shared common values and now she doesn’t know any more. I thought this was all beautifully sense, imagined and described.
In the climax of their conversation, David asks Richard what he should do and Richard suddenly feels like a fraud, a fake. He has no principles of his own beyond seeking self-fulfilment and adventure. He has no moral ground on which to stand, from which to give David the certainty he has lost and wants to find again. They shake hands and Richard catches the train back to London feeling like a fraud.
This is what I mean by Bildungsroman. Remember the Amazon commenter who said they disliked Hillary’s arrogance and elitism. Well, this scene exemplifies my point that the initial arrogance is calculated; it is part of a calculated literary strategy, to follow the journey of cocky, handsome, privileged young public schoolboy on his journey to shame and humility. And the interesting thing is that it is not the shooting down, the burning or the terrible pain which does it; it is the example of the other people around him, it is Peter Pease and Denise and David and Mary.
Psychological climax
All this prepares us for the climactic last few pages of the book. His train from Norfolk pulls in to Liverpool Street Station during a German air raid. A taxi picks him up but then the driver says they’d better take cover, so Richard tells him to pull over at the nearest pub and they both duck inside. Here the atmosphere is febrile as the bombs fall all around. Then they hear a series of bombs coming closer and closer and everyone throws themselves to the ground. Is this it? the reader wonders.
No. There’s an almighty explosion, the floor jumps up, the windows shatter and so on, but they stagger to their feet alive. The bomb fell next door. An air raid warden opens the door and asks for help digging through the rubble, Richard volunteers. After a while of removing rubble they come to a bed, and slowly disinter a little girl who is stone dead. She was being held and protected by her mother, pinned by rubble to the bed, her leg broken under her. Richard has a flask of brandy and pours a little into the woman’s mouth and she opens her eyes to weakly thank him and then, seeing his melted face, says ‘I see they got you too’, and then she died.
I’m crying all over again as I write this. Richard struggles to screw the lid of the flask back on, gets to his feet and pushes past the other rescuers on the rubble, into the street and struggles with all his strength not to start screaming, to start running as fast as he can and screaming at the top of his voice. Something inside him has finally, totally, utterly snapped. Forgive me for quoting it at length, but its power lies in the thoroughness and cumulativeness of the horror;
Someone caught me by the arm, I think it was the soldier with the girl, and said: ‘You’d better take some of that brandy yourself. You don’t look too good’; but I shook him off. With difficulty I kept my pace to a walk, forcing myself not to run. For I wanted to run, to run anywhere away from that scene, from myself, from the terror that was inside me, the terror of something that was about to happen and which I had not the power to stop.
It started small, small but insistent deep inside of me, sharp as a needle, then welling up uncontrollable, spurting, flowing over, choking me. I was drowning, helpless in a rage that caught and twisted and hurled me on, mouthing in a blind unthinking frenzy. I heard myself cursing, the words pouring out, shrill, meaningless, and as my mind cleared a little I knew that it was the woman I cursed. Yes, the woman that I reviled, hating her that she should die like that for me to see, loathing that silly bloody twisted face that had said those words: ‘I see they got you too.’ That she should have spoken to me, why, oh Christ, to me? Could she not have died the next night, ten minutes later, or in the next street? Could she not have died without speaking, without raising those cow eyes to mine?
‘I see they got you too.’ All humanity had been in those few words, and I had cursed her. Slowly the frenzy died in me, the rage oozed out of me, leaving me cold, shivering, and bitterly ashamed. I had cursed her, cursed her, I realised as I grew calmer, for she had been the one thing that my rage surging uncontrollably had had to fasten on, the one thing to which my mind, overwhelmed by the sense of something so huge and beyond the range of thought, could cling. Her death was unjust, a crime, an outrage, a sin against mankind — weak inadequate words which even as they passed through my mind mocked me with their futility.
That that woman should so die was an enormity so great that it was terrifying in its implications, in its lifting of the veil on possibilities of thought so far beyond the grasp of the human mind. It was not just the German bombs, or the German Air Force, or even the German mentality, but a feeling of the very essence of anti-life that no words could convey. This was what I had been cursing — in part, for I had recognised in that moment what it was that Peter and the others had instantly recognised as evil and to be destroyed utterly. I saw now that it was not crime; it was Evil itself — something of which until then I had not even sensed the existence.
And it was in the end, at bottom, myself against which I had raged, myself I had cursed. With awful clarity I saw myself suddenly as I was. Great God, that I could have been so arrogant!
In the final pages Hillary reviews the entire narrative in a new light, his cocksure self-centredness destroyed for good. Why did he enjoy bating Peter Pease, so obviously right about the moral aspect of the war? Why had he quietly mocked the selfless determination of Peter’s widow, Denise? Why had he failed to acknowledge the deaths, the sacrifices of all his flying colleagues, ‘the Berrys, the Stapletons, the Carburys’ who instinctively honoured the dead? And all the people with terrible burns and amputations who he met in hospital, in his self-centredness, he had seen them only as objects of interest and then irritation.
Even David who he had gone to see earlier the same day, when he needed help, advice, some kind of guidance, Hillary had recoiled into his smart and aloof self-centredness, because his philosophy of life – that life is entirely and only about Self Fulfilment – could provide no guidance, no basis for helping anyone else.
Again memory dragged me back. It had been this very day who had sat back smoking cigarettes while David had poured out his heart, while his wife had watched me, taut, hoping. But I had failed. I had been disturbed a little, yes, but when he was finished I had said nothing, given no sign, offered no assurance that he was now right. I saw it so clearly… ‘Do you think I should join up?’ On my answer had depended many things, his self-respect, his confidence for the future, his final good-bye to the past. And I had said nothing, shying away from the question, even then not seeing. In the train I had crossed my legs and sat back, amused, God help me, by the irony of it all.
Now the enormity of the pointless, cruel death of the woman in the bombed house finally breaks his reserve, smashes the smooth, protective arrogance which has been his carapace all his life. He has lived in a trivial world of ‘nice comfortable little theories’ (p.176), protected by his ironies and his detachment. All his life he has refused to embrace the reality of the world.
Stricken with guilt, Hillary spends a sleepless night agonising over his hundred and one failures and only in the last two paragraphs does some kind of way forward appear to him, a way to atone for his shallowness, his heartlessness, his failure to help. He will write. He will write it all out.
I would write of these men, of Peter and of the others. I would write for them and would write with them. They would be at my side. And to whom would I address this book, to whom would I be speaking when I spoke of these men? And that, too, I knew. To Humanity, for Humanity must be the public of any book. Yes, that despised Humanity which I had so scorned and ridiculed to Peter.
If I could do this thing, could tell a little of the lives of these men, I would have justified, at least in some measure, my right to fellowship with my dead, and to the friendship of those with courage and steadfastness who were still living and who would go on fighting until the ideals for which their comrades had died were stamped for ever on the future of civilization.
Those are the last sentences. Reader, you hold in your hands the fruit of Hillary’s decision to help in the wider struggle, to honour his comrades, dead and still living, and to redeem himself. It is, I think, an incredibly powerful ending.
Epilogue
What follows isn’t in the book; it’s the rest of Hillary’s biography as copied from Wikipedia:
In 1941 Hillary persuaded the British authorities to send him to America to rally support for Britain’s war effort. While in the United States, he spoke on the radio, had a love affair with the actress Merle Oberon (!), and drafted much of this book, which was to make him famous.
Hillary managed to bluff his way back into a flying role even though, as was noted in the officers’ mess, he could barely handle a knife and fork. He returned to service with No 54 Operational Training Unit at RAF Charterhall, for a conversion course to pilot light bomber aircraft.
Hillary was killed on 8 January 1943, along with Navigator/Radio Operator Sergeant Wilfred Fison, when he crashed a Bristol Blenheim during a night training flight in adverse weather conditions, the aircraft coming down on farmland in Berwickshire, Scotland.
Credit
The Last Enemy was published by Macmillan and Co in 1942. All references are to the 2018 ‘Centenary Collection’ Penguin paperback edition.
Related links
Other flying memoirs
- Sagittarius Rising by Cecil Lewis (1936)
- Going Solo by Roald Dahl (1986)
- First Light by Geoffrey Wellum (2002)
Books & Boots 