5 JUNE 2004, Page 30

Names written in the great book of remembrance under Magdalen Tower

Waged 17 in the autunui of 1946, there were few people of my age at Magdalen. Ken Tynan, who had come up the year before, was 19 but he was unusual. Many were in their mid-twenties, had had their studies interrupted or postponed by six years of war, were married with children in some cases, and were desperate to make up for the 'undone years'. But there was talk, too, of others who had not come back. Now at last these missing Magdalen men, who really were 'undone', have their own fitting memorial in print. Compiled by two college dons, Roger Hutchins and Richard Sheppard, The Undone Years: Magdalen College Roll of Honour 1939-15. and Roll of Service, 1939-45. this volume of nearly 500 pages, touchingly illustrated and with useful maps, stoutly bound and superbly printed, is a prince of such volumes fit for a shelf of honour. I do not see how it could possibly have been better done.

One looks at the photographs of these handsome, confident young men, uniformed. bemedalled and heavy with badges of rank, and then realises they were in many cases little more than boys. Flying Officer Gray, killed in Indonesia, was 22. So was naval veteran Oath, killed in the Mediterranean. Lieutenant Hardy of the Buffs, killed in Italy, was a mere 20, as was Lionel Dashwood of the Shropshires. The account of Major Campbell, MC of the Black Watch shows what an immense amount of globe-trotting, fighting and adventure he managed to cram into life before he was killed in Burma. But he was only 25. Then there was Tony Shattock of the Secret Intelligence Service, who died of injuries in Italy on an unknown mission. He was 20. There were some older men, to be sure, some of whom made significant contributions to the war. Commander 'Hitch' Hitchens, who ran a group of heavily armed MGBs in pursuit of E-boats off the Dutch and Belgian coasts, was finally killed off the Hook of Holland, aged 34, but not before he had sunk a number of the enemy, influenced our small-warship design, our strateg and tactics, and been awarded the DSO and bar, and DSC and two bars. Again, Major Mostyn Davies, DSO had a sinewy, hand in the Yugoslav conflict before he died of wounds there, aged 33. And Wing Commander Tony Philips, DSC, DFC was a celebrated fighting airman, an ace with six kills to his credit, before meeting his death in action off Finisterre, aged 26. Of course, not only British and Commonwealth forces were involved. Hellmuth Freiherr von Waldhausen, at Magdalen in the early 1930s, was swept into the war too, on the German side. Though his service records have been lost, we know he was killed in action in Ukraine in 1943, aged 31. Also included in the roll is Major Alec Hottell, Silver Star, 1st Cavalry Division US army, killed in Vietnam in 1970, aged 27. Another curious casualty was Colonel Lord Edward Hay, who read history at the college as far back as 1909-11 and served as a regular in the Grenadier Guards, but retired in 1930 to look after a family property. A Territorial colonel, he was recalled in 1941 and appointed commanding officer of the Westminster Garrison battalion of the Grenadiers. He had just finished reading the lesson in the Guards' Chapel, Wellington Barracks, on Sunday 18 June 1944, when it received a direct hit from a VI flying bomb, and he was killed still standing at the lectern, along with 62 other servicemen and 58 civilians, in one of the worst atrocities of the war.

The authors have been at pains to compile a mass of statistics about the college war dead. Six of them were only 20. Magdalen men fought and died all over the world — at Dunkirk and El Alamein, in the Battle of Britain and at Arnhem, at Anzio, in the Gothic Line, in the siege of Malta, in Norway and Normandy, at the sinking of the Tirpitz, the area bombing raids in Germany, in Burma and East Africa, indeed in virtually every theatre of war and every major battle. It is an astonishingly varied and distinguished record for one small institution to have provided. Moreover, the memorial roll is only part of Magdalen's war effort. The authors have compiled a total list of serving men from Magdalen who were matriculated members, senior members, choristers or non-academic staff, some 1,075 in all, plus a further 200 who matriculated during and after 1945 as ex-servicemen. Of these, 116 lost their lives, almost 11 per cent of the serving members — a heavy proportion.

I suppose you could argue that Magdalen men are or were born to privilege. To be a student at Oxford in any capacity is something to be grateful for, and to be one at Magdalen, one of the oldest, certainly the most beautiful and in many ways the most distinguished of the colleges, is to be a favourite of fortune. If these things must be paid for by service and sacrifice, including the ultimate sacrifice of life itself, then Magdalen men may truly be said to have paid in full — the ledgers of death and

glory are made up, accounts rendered, the balance cast and the bottom line drawn; and this weighty yet gracious volume is the record.

Reading the book prompted thoughts both sombre and uplifting. It is harrowing to think of all these bright lives not indeed wasted but spent before their time, and to reflect that an even heavier total has been compiled from the first world war. For what purpose, you may ask? Was not that earlier and even more costly encounter the war to end wars? And did it not, as we can now plainly see, merely sow the seeds of a further catastrophe? The second world war too, in which these young men, casualties and survivors, successfully defended our freedom, slid almost imperceptibly into the Cold War, which lasted 40 years and finally in turn yielded to yet another struggle, this time to defend civilisation itself against horrific and totally irrational violence. Where will it end? Must we go on for ever?

Indeed we must. It was at Magdalen that I first studied Hobbes and imbibed his harsh realism. We are, he wrote, engaged as human creatures in a nice from which there is no escape or respite 'and no contentment but in proceeding'. Oxford dons such as Jowett often referred to the university course as a race for distinction or place or power or position, or simply for glory, adding that life itself was a race in which unforeseen and unforeseeable elements added opportunities and dangers. Wars and rumours of wars, global confrontations and trials of ideological strength arc all part of the endless race, which ceases only in death and absorption into the infinite, where all is tranquillity and stasis. But one mitigating factor in the loneliness of the long-distance runner in life (for, after all, we are all alone in the end, in birth and death and before our maker) is the existence, especially in Britain, of the collegiate spirit. A second lieutenant, aged 20, wounded and desperate in a distant theatre of war, is not entirely alone. He has his family, his faith in God, perhaps, and, not least, his college. He is a Magdalen man even in eociremis; perhaps especially near the endgame. As he lies there, he is still under Magdalen Tower, coming to him over time and distance with its curious out-of-tune unmistakeable chimes that radiate serenity, permanence and the faint but persistent echoes of a religious foundation set up by Bishop Waynflete for the greater glory of God, for the pursuit of learning, and for the good of the souls of young people especially, in war and peace. A comforting thought for all of us.