The Last Enemy

The Last Enemy

This one of the finest works of literature in the English language. It is as good as 'Wuthering Heights', as good as 'King Lear'. Both Heathcliffe and Lear end as different people from what, to begin with, they were.

So does Richard Hillary. He was a fighter pilot who was terribly burned in action, suffered endless operations and endless pain, and found at last that 'man is not an island'.

He starts as a self-centered and self sufficient person, and ends at one with the sufferings of humanity, having undergone, like St Paul, a falling of scales from his eyes, after which he sees whole. The details of his injuries and recovery are the physical equivalent of this spiritual journey.

He had a capacity for mysticism which few people have. Probably his original hard boiled attitude was a defence against the unwelcome insights which this gift gave him, an escape into cynicism.

He saw in a dream the death of his friend, Peter Pease. The capacity to dream this dream could not have come to a truly cynical man, only to an unawakened mystic.

In the end he felt at one with, and eternally a part of, his dead friends. He went back to flying despite being disabled, because he wanted to be killed so that he could rejoin his dead friends.

I first read this book when I was about ten years old, shortly after its first publication. Now, at the age of seventy seven, it still fills me with tears. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the wars of the twentieth century, and their effect upon those who participated in them. It will be read as long as the World Wars are remembered.