There was no question as to who would be my hero from then on: I had become an enthusiastic fan of the wiry general with the black beret. I will never forget the night-scenes with the flashes of fire from the big guns, tanks rushing through the sand-dunes and the Scottish infantry advancing to the tune of the bagpipe. After a lot of pleading, my father even allowed me to watch the movie about the battle of Alamein. This was the time of the Eighth Army’s spectacular campaign in North Africa, and it thoroughly fascinated me. So, at about age nine, I began to devour the newspapers and followed the fronts with pins on the maps I had put up in my bedroom. Later on I became aware of the fact that the war was really being fought by British armies and the much more remote Americans and Russians. So I built a wooden rifle, equipped myself with a tricolour armband and a beret, happily shooting imaginary “Boches” in the garden. At school, the French freedom-fighters were our great heroes for a time I was infected by this and wanted to be an “FFI” myself. The important newspapers openly endorsed the Allied cause, and in the French-speaking part of Switzerland where I grew up, France was considered as a sort of mother-country, at least culturally. It must be explained here that Swiss neutrality during the Second World War was certainly the official policy, but it was rather obvious on whose side the sympathies of the great majority lay. Monty welcomed by crowds in Copenhagen, May 1945 I decided right away that this was a golden opportunity for finally seeing one of the great Allied generals who had so roundly beaten the detested Germans half a year ago. When I came home for lunch at our rented chalet, my sister excitedly told me that the great Field-Marshal Montgomery had just arrived and would spend some time at the venerable Hotel Golf & Sport. In February, 1946, our family was vacationing in Saanenmoeser (Bernese Oberland) and I had just spent another morning receiving group instruction on the fine points of “stemm-christiania” and other then ultra-modern skiing techniques. Of course I had never dreamed that this would lead to a rather remarkable friendship and a correspondence which spanned a quarter of a century. However, my first meeting with Field-Marshal Montgomery at the age of eleven and a half years was a clear case of premeditation. T HE IMPORTANT THINGS in life are usually due to accidents or coincidences. Since 1972 he has been the editor of the science-technology pages of the Neue Züricher Zeitung.” He continued in the latter office until 1997, since when he has been a freelance writer. He pursued a research career in materials science with the Du Pont company and the University of Denver in the USA. The editor’s introduction of him says he “studied chemical engineering, graduating in physical chemistry at Zürich. Lucien Felix Trueb as born in Zurich on 28 June 1934. The accounts of Lucien Trueb and Richard Luckett appeared in Monty at Close Quarters: Recollections of the Man, edited by Tom Howarth (London, 1985), described in the fly-leaf as a “series of recollections of Viscount Montgomery of Alamein by close friends and associates” which “contains many new insights and some surprises”. This is followed by a few remarks by Trueb shedding slightly more forthright light on the friendship, a little light on the subject shed by other boys befriended by him, and a few concluding observations on the Field-Marshal’s sexuality. Much the best documented of these love affairs was with the Swiss boy Lucien Trueb, whose own account of it has pride of place in what follows. From 1946 onwards, when he was already fifty-eight and a widower, he had some intense emotional friendships with boys around or approaching puberty that have been characterised by one of the boys and some writers as, in effect, unconsummated Greek love. MONTY’S LITTLE SWISS FRIEND AND OTHER BOYSįield-Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery (1887-1976), 1 st Viscount Montgomery of Alamein, universally known as “Monty”, was much the most celebrated British general of the Second World War.
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