Ways of Escape

by Graham Greene

  Looking over my short stories now which stretch in time from 1929 to the eve of the 1970s I am struck by an odd fact – humour enters very late and very unexpectedly. The only three stories I wrote during the war were humorous ones – there again the short story was an escape, an escape from the blitz and the nightly deaths. So perhaps the stories which make up the collection May We Borrow Your Husband?, all written during what should have been the last decade of my life, are an escape in humour from the thought of death – this time of certain death. Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in the human situation.

  2

  ‘Panic fear’ – I had felt that once in the East End of London in the 1930s when the police charged the crowd which was obstructing a Mosley march. I had felt it momentarily in Vietnam when I found myself lost between the French parachutists and the Viet Minh outside Phat Diem, but there are situations so absurd that absurdity kills fear. In 1967 I was a tourist visiting Israel for the first time. I wasn’t deliberately seeking a troubled place, but lying against a sand dune in the autumn sky under Egyptian fire from anti-tank guns, mortars and small arms, I couldn’t help thinking that the phrase ‘The Six Days War’ was a bit of a misnomer. The war was too evidently still in progress.

  Of the six of us lying flat against the dune two were truck drivers, and after an hour they abruptly took off, running doubled up the fifty yards to their truck exposed to the Egyptian shore, which was less than half a mile away. I watched them with selfish apprehension (sooner or later I might have to take the same track), but they made it successfully; one started the engine and they disappeared from sight in the direction in which most of the shells were falling. We weren’t tempted to follow them yet.

  My companion, the major, lay at right angles to me at the bottom of the slope. Shrapnel had nipped a small piece out of his cheek. When he stopped dabbing it with his handkerchief two horseflies settled on the unimportant wound like cats round a saucer of milk.

  It was a quarter to three. I wondered how long it would be before the United Nations observers settled a cease-fire this time.

  It was nineteen years since the War of Independence, and the sides of the road from Tel Aviv to West Jerusalem, which was held with such difficulty against odds, were still littered with the remains of battle – small lightly armoured cars, with faded in memoriam wreaths lying over them like buoys above a wreck. They are Holy Places which a Christian tourist is apt to ignore, yet this ugly sort of immortelle has deeply affected the imagination of Jewish artists, and in the Garden of Statuary at the new National Museum the objets trouvés of war, stuck up on pedestals, contrasted grimly with the smooth sensuous Henry Moore sculpture and the pretty, elegant mobile of Alexander Calder, swimming round and round in the cool Jerusalem air. Suddenly Calder and Moore seemed to belong in a gentle, academic, elderly world. There is another mobile by Jean Tinguely – a black, clanking piece of machinery like a bit of a bombed pithead that continues to work for a while with the miners dead or fled: the sound pursues you through the quiet garden.

  The garden, so unsuitably named the Billy Rose, was a good preparation for seeing the Sinai Peninsula and following the road to El Arish and the Canal taken by the forces of General Tal. Here were the more recent objets trouvés of war.

  Hemingway once described the battlefield of the Spanish Civil War as covered with scraps of paper: here it was covered with tin and wood, and next time perhaps it will be with plastic: food tins and petrol tins and shell cases everywhere, ammunition boxes, tracks like discarded snake skins, and of course the burnt-out trucks on their backs or their sides as they were rushed off the road, showing their intestinal coils like medical diagrams of robots. Only an occasional group of Egyptian tanks retained a scorched, upright dignity and sometimes even faced in the direction of their enemy. Some trucks had started through a grove of date palms towards the blue still sea as though their drivers hoped to escape from war. The bouquets of dates hung overhead out of reach, brown, orange, yellow, scarlet; the trucks failed to reach the white beach before they were sent up in flames.

  There wasn’t much more than that for a tourist to see, yet the tourists were already arriving in coaches at El Arish, disembarking at a smashed building with an improvised soft drink bar. Some of the women wore funny hats marked Israel, and there were formidable matrons with blonde hair who spoke American and probably belonged to book clubs. A man with two cameras round his neck asked a soldier where he could find a rest room and was told to choose any quiet corner. The coaches went no further into Sinai and it was possible to believe that the war was over and only waiting for the refuse trucks to tidy it all away.

  But at Kantara nothing was over: this was the frontier as it has always been for Israel, in the south, the west and the north, life under the guns of the enemy. A tall building flew the blue UN flag, the headquarters of the UN observers. The Israeli officers, who liaised with the UN observers, occupied a house behind which had once been a doctor’s, and the Egyptian flag flew on the other side of the Canal about as far as the Nelson monument from the National Gallery.

  ‘If there’s firing,’ the colonel said, ‘don’t go into the street. You see the field of fire – it’s a certain way of dying.’ On a board was written ‘Hilton Hotel, Kantara. First Class Accommodation. All full.’ There hadn’t been an incident for two weeks, he said, but you never knew. I said to the colonel, ‘I have a reputation of bringing trouble with me,’ but I didn’t mean it seriously.

  My companion the major and I shared a room in a building behind the doctor’s house haunted by cats who kept on leaping through gaps in the mosquito wire. There was a trench between and a strongpoint of sandbags in the centre of the doctor’s house.

  ‘But if firing starts,’ the colonel said, ‘get straight into your trench. Don’t come to the house. Things escalate here very quickly, but they usually start with small arms.’ I thought that perhaps he was trying to create atmosphere for a tourist.

  Dinner was not quite up to even the Hilton standard. It seemed unlikely that the Israeli army would be corrupted with either alcohol or hot food. There was a cold pizza, a sort of tomato-coloured smear over rather dry bread, and an equally frigid Welsh rarebit washed down by lemonade; afterwards the officers watched Cairo television, though only one man had a smattering of Arabic. The reception was as bad as the programme. A man sang interminably about love, never changing his profile, and there was a drama about family life – nothing military.

  The tours of duty were eight weeks and they must have seemed very long without even a nightclub. A sense of danger lent the only savour, but, as the colonel said, there had been no incident for two weeks.

  The UN observers on the Israeli side were under an Australian colonel at Kantara. Next day, travelling down the Canal, I met a Burmese officer, a Frenchman, a Swede and a Finn (English was the common language they all spoke). They too, like the Israeli officers, did their own haphazard cooking, but at least they had a little beer. Like civil servants they tried hard to believe in the importance of their own duties, and like civil servants they were subject to Parkinson’s Law. A big fleet of white UN cars stood in the yard of the Kantara HQ: one mortar shell could have dispersed them for ever.

  From Kantara to Port Tewfik at the end of the Canal there were four permanent posts manned day and night by observers and liaison officers, and there were other points which they had to visit regularly. ‘We stay a quarter of an hour here,’ the Burmese officer said by a smashed pontoon bridge, and at the end of a quarter of an hour, he grinned happily – ‘All peaceful’ – and we drove on.

  This was the signature tune of our drive: ‘All peaceful’ at the broken swing bridge, ‘All peaceful’ opposite Ismalia, where we stood listening to the voices of the Egyptian sentries, ‘All peaceful’ along the Bitter Lakes, where thirteen ships lay at anchor, the prisoners of the Canal, ‘A
ll peaceful’ at Port Tewfik.

  Suez, like a long grey rubbish dump, lay across the way and at the entrance of Tewfik there was a homemade statue in white stone of an Israeli soldier looking towards the Sinai desert: a very bad statue, but the inscription in Hebrew was imaginative: ‘We looked Death in the face, and Death lowered his eyes.’

  When an incident occurred an observer reported to his headquarters at Kantara, Kantara reported to the bureau of General Odd Bull in Jerusalem, Jerusalem reported to Ismalia, and then cease-fire negotiations could get under way.

  Lunching with the observers at Port Tewfik on baked beans and squares of tepid tinned beef, I asked how long it took for this chain of communications to be completed. ‘Not more than three-quarters of an hour,’ the Swedish officer said. He had very decorative rank badges and I suppose this was the nearest he was ever likely to come to war; a conscientious man tired of the desert heat who loved the cold and the long nights of northern Sweden.

  ‘And suppose,’ I asked, ‘you were not here at all, wouldn’t things perhaps be arranged more quickly between the Israeli command and the Egyptians?’

  ‘But there is no way for them,’ he said, ‘to communicate at all without us,’ and I couldn’t help remembering the white flags which I had seen still dangling from many houses in Gaza. A white flag does not need a UN observer. Its message is clear.

  I wanted to say, ‘Surely the very fact that a cease-fire will be agreed upon in a matter of hours tempts the Egyptians, especially while the Assembly talks and talks in New York, to create incidents which will be stopped before there are too many casualties or too much danger of serious engagement?’ But in Sinai one very quickly adopted the Israeli attitude of kindly protectiveness to these men who had come a long way from home to live in great discomfort and some danger and who had to believe that their function had value.

  ‘Everything peaceful,’ the Finnish officer said as we drove away.

  Near the Bitter Lakes, where the road ran parallel to the Canal half a mile away, we were stopped by a soldier. He was there to halt traffic. There was firing, he said, further on near Ismalia. Down a branch track, between us and the Canal, a quarter of a mile away, lay a unit of artillery and a couple of camouflaged tanks. A truck drove up beside the jeep and halted too. It was a little past two and the sun was very hot.

  We stood in the road listening until at last we detected a faint bim-bam of guns. Smoke rose in the sky, perhaps above Ismalia. ‘We ought to get near cover,’ the major said, and we ambled over to a sand dune and then ambled back because no one had followed our example. The sound of gunfire came no closer.

  Then without warning there was a whistle overhead and a shell exploded with a mushroom of black smoke perhaps a quarter of a mile beyond us. We ran for the sand dunes and before we were properly down two other shells exploded. The major began to dab his cheek. I remembered how the colonel had said, ‘Things escalate very quickly here.’

  The sentry, a red-haired young man with a toothy grin, was the only real professional among us. I envied him his steel helmet. He was dissatisfied for some reason with our particular sand-bank, so he led us to another, and after a series of shell bursts to yet a third. I couldn’t myself see any difference. In each case we were protected by the dune from the Canal and exposed from behind where the shells were bursting. If the Egyptians were trying to hit the artillery post, I thought, surely sooner or later they will shorten their fire and then we’ve had it.

  Apprehension, except when there was a whistle overhead, gave place after a while to resignation. It was nearly two forty-five and not a shot had been fired from the Israeli side.

  Well now, I thought, the observers must be at work. If the incident began at two, the chain of communications must be nearly completed. Perhaps the cease-fire would be at three, but at three there was no change, except now I was aware of a beastly sound, far more demoralising than the whistle of a low trajectory shell fired by a tank or an anti-tank gun, the gentle secretive whisper, flip-flap-flip, of a mortar shell stealing through the air.

  After every explosion we looked back – they were still overshooting, and at every sound in the air we flattened into the sand. A breeze raised my shirt and I felt more vulnerable. I took silly precautions like taking off my sun glasses in case they broke into my eyes. I remembered the blitz, but the blitz had one great advantage – the pubs remained open.

  It was about then that the two truck drivers made off. I was inclined to follow their example, but small-arms fire opened from the Canal and put paid to that idea. And at last, nearly three-quarters of an hour after the first Egyptian shell, the Israeli artillery went into action.

  Like the first barrage over London, it was an encouraging sound, until the little devil of fear whispered in our ears, ‘They’ve disclosed their position now. The Egyptians will shorten their range,’ and when the tanks joined in, ‘After every burst they changed position. Perhaps at this moment they are approaching the other side of our dune and making us a major objective for the Egyptian anti-tank guns.’

  I found it encouraging to see the apprehension in my companions’ eyes and the tension of their bodies. It would have been lonely to share the sand dune with heroes.

  At the beginning we lay in silence. We only began to talk to each other when fire slackened – except for the sentry, who at every new sound overhead gave a definition of the shell, sometimes erroneous as when he thought for a moment we were being bombed from the air. Social life began only when the artillery fell silent and then stopped again abruptly at the whistle of a shell or a flip-flap of a mortar as though all our attention had to be directed towards altering its course.

  Four o’clock came and no cease-fire. I began to analyse the emotional stages of a man under fire if only to understand better those kibbutz workers who had suffered this for nearly twenty years. First reaction was fear, but certainly not panic fear which is felt in a crowd or in solitude, and this developed gradually into resignation (‘Well, if this is the end, it’s the end. At least I shan’t die of cancer or be humiliated by senility’).

  When the cease-fire failed to arrive at four and again at four fifteen (we had been lying on the dune now in the heat of the afternoon sun for two hours) irritation began to set in. I felt like Henry James listening to an anecdote at the dinner table that went on too long for his purpose. The fatuous words of our provincial politicians came to mind. I thought of all the empty speeches in the Assembly of the United Nations: these bombardments were debating points to be made there.

  At four forty-five fire slackened, and then in the silences which were always interrupted sooner or later, apprehension returned again – it would be an absurd chance to be killed by the last mortar shell. How often Shimon X or Ygael Y must have felt that, and for them this shelling was an everyday fear, not alleviated as in my case by a professional interest. By five fifteen the artillery had ceased and there were only occasional bursts of small-arms fire, so we made a run for the jeep and took the next five exposed kilometres at a speed which would have been reckless if it had not been prudent.

  At Kantara when we arrived after dark there were now ruins which hadn’t been there when we drove out, but the doctor’s house had only lost a little plaster and the UN house still stood. The Egyptian flag had disappeared across the Canal and there were flames in eastern Kantara which burned till five in the morning. Artillery had opened up nearly the whole length of the Canal, the greatest incident in two months, but in Kantara of four dead one was an Arab child of three and another an Arab criminal. Lives cost a lot of ammunition.

  The UN observers were busy making out their report over their tepid meal. All knew very well which side had broken the cease-fire, but papers must be made out in due form and filed. Parkinson’s Law applies to the multiplication of files as well as personnel. In my small area of observation I knew that the Egyptians had fired first and the Israeli artillery had not replied for nearly three-quarters of an hour (my sole occupation on that dune had be
en noting on my watch the passage of time), but that was not what the UN would consider to be reliable evidence.

  There is the story of an Israeli sentry shot dead on the border, and the UN observer who demanded proof of the incident.

  ‘Proof? But here’s the body.’

  ‘Yes, but the man might have shot himself.’

  ‘Through the forehead? With a rifle?’

  ‘One of his companions might have done it accidentally. This isn’t what we call proof.’

  The odds against an observer himself being present at the opening of an incident were heavy, and so the paper work went happily on. An actual incident was finally so swathed in paper that all its reality was lost. It became no more than a series of contradictory reports from either side of the Canal, filed for lack of ‘proof’.

  Back from the Sinai desert I opened my paper the next day. Secretary-General U Thant complained that both sides had neglected to use the ‘UN cease-fire observation machinery’ and had not complained directly to the UN military observers ‘for remedial action’ (that long chain of communication, Kantara – Jerusalem – Ismalia and back) and had ‘reacted impulsively by immediately shooting in case of alleged breaches of the cease-fire’.

  Three hours of fire by artillery mortars and small arms remained, in that fairyland of UN investigation, ‘alleged’ like a crime in a British court of justice, but I couldn’t help feeling that ‘impulsive’ was not the right word to use for the Israeli reaction when I remembered the long three-quarters of a long hour as we lay on the sand dune waiting for any reply to the Egyptian fire.