In August 1945 Cyril Patmore of the Royal Scots Fusiliers returned on compassionate leave from India. A few weeks earlier his wife had written to confess that she was expecting a child by an Italian prisoner of war. ‘Why oh why darling did I have to let you down, me who loves you more than life itself?’ she wrote, pleading for forgiveness and a reconciliation. It was in vain. Patmore stabbed his wife to death. ‘I live for my children and my wife,’ he told the police. ‘I hope the children will be well looked after.’
This bleak anecdote introduces a catalogue of disasters. At the end of the war five million Britons, 90 per cent of them male, were in uniform. The vast majority wanted to be allowed to go home as quickly as possible to resume their civilian life.
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