Six Faces of Courage by M. R. D. Foot

Author:M. R. D. Foot [Foot, M. R. D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Military, World War II, Political Science, Intelligence & Espionage, Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9781783379699
Google: kWLNDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Casemate Publishers
Published: 2003-09-19T02:59:11+00:00

5

Victor Gerson

Haim Victor Gerson was born at Southport in Lancashire in 1896, the son of a Levantine textile merchant who thought Lancashire a good base for his work. Southport was in those days a small, quiet bathing resort, with plenty of sand dunes for children to play in, and farming country on the inland side. It lies twenty miles north of Liverpool, then as now a great port, and forty miles north-west of Manchester, where the Royal Exchange was then the commercial capital of the world. Round Manchester lay a dozen busy and prosperous cotton towns. In it the cricket ground of Old Trafford was already famous; and C.P. Scott, editor of the Manchester Guardian in its golden age, had the ear of leading cabinet ministers from the end of 1905. All seemed to be for the best in the best of all possible worlds, if one had money, and the Gersons were not poor.

As members of the Anglo-Jewish community, they were somewhat remote from the ruling class of Edwardian England, which still consisted mainly of the old landed gentry and the Oxford- and Cambridge-trained intelligentsia. They knew that they were firmly fixed on the commercial side of the great gulf that was then still supposed to divide gentlefolk from ‘trade’. Young Victor was brought up all the same to behave as a gentleman: to be straight with everybody, always to tell the truth, to honour his parents, be generous and work hard.

Ever since Anglo-Saxon and feudal times, the gentry had been aware of their duty to bear arms in defence of their country, and his upper-class contemporaries learned to shoot, to ride and to command almost as automatically as they learned to read and write and to stand up when a lady entered the room. In an age of which two of the upper classes’ unspoken mottoes were ‘It will last out my time’ and ‘Everyone knows his place’, there was not much mobility between classes. Victor Gerson cherished no wild hopes, got on smoothly with his parents and his school friends, and looked stronger and older than his equals in age.

This was an advantage to him in the summer of 1914, when what his generation came to call the Great War broke out. An obscure group of Serb student revolutionaries succeeded at the second attempt at killing the heir to the Habsburg throne, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, when he had the temerity to visit Sarajevo, the mediaeval capital of Serbia, on the 525th anniversary of a great Serbian defeat – Balkan peoples have memories as long as the Irish – on 28 June. After a month’s dithering by the Habsburg government of Austria-Hungary, that country forced war on Serbia late in July. The Russians ordered mobilization, in case they had to protect their Serb cousins, whereupon the Germans, to protect their Austrian cousins, declared war on Russia. They had only one war plan ready, which involved defeating Russia’s ally France first, so they declared war on France as well.

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