War of Shadows

by Gershom Gorenberg

  Almasy was secretly in love in the late 1930s, just not with Dorothy Clayton. The letters to him from his lover, the young German actor Hans Entholt, may be the only map, lightly sketched, of Almasy’s inner world. In one letter, Entholt writes, “I told you long ago that all your adventures were only an escape.” Another letter hints that Almasy is bothered by Hans’s apolitical failure to share his enthusiasm for National Socialism.43

  What is most truthful about The English Patient is that it is explicitly fiction. In Almasy’s conflicting reports written in different languages, as in the countless accounts of the war that unintentionally celebrated the wrong people as heroes, or that intentionally did so, in the memories of people who knew only part of what happened or who misheard what were anyway rumors—in all these the line between fact and imagination is less definite.

  Beneath each well-known piece of history is another story that was preserved in long-secret documents or in papers that men brought home and left in attics, or that died with women whose generation was widowed by the war. What has been told so many times that it is bright and definite and unambiguous may turn out to be a coded message from the past, meaning something else entirely, waiting to be deciphered.

  THE ROYAL ARMY next shunted Bagnold to Hong Kong, where in 1934 he finished a book, Libyan Sands: Travels in a Dead World. The last chapter argues that the wadis found by Almasy in Gilf Kebir were not a true oasis fed by springs. Zerzura, wrote Bagnold, was not a real place, but a “wish-oasis,” waiting to be found, “difficult of access, if one is enterprising enough to go to look.” Zerzura was a destination worth searching for and always out of reach, which would vanish on the day when the entire earth had been explored.44 Almasy said he’d found Zerzura. Bagnold was happy not to have.

  Along with articles Bagnold had written in the Times of London about his journeys, Libyan Sands established him as a celebrity explorer. Meanwhile, army doctors determined that a bug called tropical sprue that he’d caught in Hong Kong, or perhaps on his journey to the ruins of Angkor Wat in Cambodia, had destroyed his stomach’s ability to produce digestive acid, rendering him an invalid for life. He was discharged from the military, moved into a gentleman’s serviced flat in London, ate his dinners at a club, and inexplicably recovered completely from his illness. So he set out to answer the questions he’d brought home from the desert about sandstorms and dunes that seemed to be alive. In the summer of 1939 he completed The Physics of Blown Sand and Desert Dunes, a scientific work mapping a previously unexplored field.45 Decades later it would be used to understand the movement of dunes on Mars, where perhaps Zerzura was now to be sought.46

  Bagnold finished his Physics just in time. Soon after, the army called him back. His troopship’s intended route was to the Suez Canal, then down the east coast of Africa. In the Mediterranean, though, another ship collided with it. The damaged troopship put in at Port Suez, Egypt, at the north end of the Canal, where its passengers were to wait for the next convoy. Bagnold preferred to spend the accidental leave with friends. He got on the train to Cairo, a city trying to figure out whether it was at war.47

  By then, Almasy had left.48 Hungary was not at war, but its alliance with both Germany and Italy may have been reason enough for a well-known Hungarian to feel safer elsewhere—or to be told to leave. Besides Hans’s letter, there’s other testimony that Almasy firmly chose sides well before the war. It comes from shipping magnate Laszlo Pathy, who was Hungary’s honorary consul in Egypt for the decade before the war. According to Pathy, in the mid-1930s he requested an audience with King Fouad to introduce Almasy. The king, it was known, wanted to create an Egyptian Desert Institute; Almasy wanted to head it and submitted his plans. Eight or ten days later, Pathy got a phone call from the king’s chamberlain, curtly rejecting the Hungarian explorer. Later, Pathy would recount, he invited Trevor Evans, the private secretary of Ambassador Miles Lampson, for tea. Lampson’s man explained the king’s decision.

  Both the British embassy and Egyptian intelligence, Evans said, had told the king that Almasy “was acting on behalf of the Nazis” and wanted the position to make it easier to do “spying in the desert” for Germany.

  This is hearsay—a suspicion repeated by Evans, as Pathy remembered it long afterward.49 Maybe until the summer of 1939, the dubious count’s only solid allegiance was to the desert. In September, people had to make choices. Henceforth, Almasy’s loyalties were finally certain.

  3

  NEXT KING OF THE NILE

  September–October 1939. Cairo–Rome.

  FAROUK, KING OF Egypt, had reigned three years when Germany invaded Poland.1

  With his ascension to the throne, Farouk had inherited his late father Fouad’s seventy-five thousand acres of fertile Nile Valley fields, making him the owner of the largest landholdings in Egypt. He inherited his father’s palaces and compulsively acquired collection of weaponry—from daggers to pistols to cannons—to which Farouk compulsively added. The rifles in the collection did get used; Farouk liked to hunt big game in Sudan, nominally part of his realm. He collected rare coins, too, and cars, starting with the Austin sports car his father gave him when he was eleven to drive around the palace grounds, and including the Mercedes Benz that Adolf Hitler gave him as a wedding gift, the same make used by high Nazi officials.2 All of his cars were red. No one else in Egypt was allowed to own a red car.

  Nonetheless, Farouk was a popular monarch, in part because he was the first of his dynasty who could give a speech in Arabic, the language of his country.

  Farouk was nineteen years old in 1939. He could have whatever he wanted, except full rule of Egypt.

  Farouk’s great-great-grandfather, an Albanian officer in the Ottoman army named Muhammad Ali, arrived in Cairo in 1801. A French army originally led by the ambitious young general Napoleon Bonaparte had occupied the Ottoman province of Egypt for three years. When the French foray into the Middle East collapsed, Egypt was left in chaos. Muhammad Ali and his skilled Albanian soldiers were supposed to bring the Nile back under Constantinople’s control.

  Instead, he brought Egypt under his own control. In the course of his rise, Muhammad Ali forced Ottoman sultan Selim III to recognize him as governor. He massacred the Mameluke aristocrats whose families had dominated Egypt since long before the Ottomans came. He seized their land and the land held in trust by Islamic institutions, much as Henry VIII had seized the holdings of British monasteries. He developed cotton as Egypt’s export crop. He built schools and sent graduates off to study in Europe so they could return as technocrats before the term existed. He built a conscript army on European lines, put down a revolt in Arabia for the sultan, and then sent an army into the Levant, intending to take Constantinople so he could replace the sultan. Britain forced him to retreat. As quid pro quo, it forced the sultan to make Muhammad Ali’s governorship hereditary. In name, the Ottomans were still sovereign. In reality, Egypt was independent—but the new lords of the land still spoke Turkish.

  Muhammad Ali’s grandson Ismail set out to build a new European Cairo, a Mediterranean Paris with wide avenues and grand villas, with parks and museums and an opera house, next to the old Cairo. Wealthy Egyptians lived in the new town along with immigrants from around the Mediterranean drawn to the rising metropolis: Italians, Greeks, Jews and Christians from the Levant, and others. The two Cairos stood for two Egypts: one where people spoke French, Italian, and Greek, sent their children to European schools, and traded with the world; another where people spoke Arabic, owned tiny bits of land or worked the land of the wealthy, and for the most part went to no schools. The American Civil War gave Ismail a windfall: the Union blockade of the South sent world cotton prices climbing fourfold. When the war ended and the cotton bubble burst, he went on spending. He hired out-of-work Confederate officers in his bid to expand his realm southward to create his own African empire, another step toward matching European monarchs.

  In the process, Ismail virtually mortgaged the country to European banks. He sol
d his family shares in the new Suez Canal at fire-sale prices. Britain and France took over Egypt’s finances, then forced Ismail to abdicate in favor of his son, Tewfik, in 1879. Ismail went into exile in Italy. Conditions for Egyptians worsened. In 1881 a revolt broke out against Tewfik. In September 1882, British troops took Cairo, this time to stay.

  It was a bizarre conquest. Tewfik remained the khedive, the viceroy, ostensibly for the Ottomans. In reality, Egypt was under military occupation, and the British consul general ruled the country. The cotton went to Britain, as did the profits, with the added value for the occupier that British military rule guaranteed the defense of the Suez Canal, the short route from Britain to India, Singapore, and Hong Kong. When the Great War broke out in 1914, the fiction of Ottoman sovereignty became impossible to maintain. Tewfik’s son, Khedive Abbas Hilmi II, publicly urged Egyptians to support the Central Powers. Britain declared Egypt a protectorate and replaced Abbas Hilmi with another of Ismail’s sons. When he died, Ismail’s youngest son, Fouad, who’d grown up mostly in Italy with his exiled father, took his place.

  After the war, a group of prominent Egyptians formed a delegation—a wafd in Arabic—to attend the Versailles peace conference. In Europe, the victors were breaking up the defeated empires and granting nations their independence. US president Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points endorsed the hopes of the age: it promised borders and statehood based on nationality—a country for Polish speakers, a country for speakers of Czech and Slovakian.

  Egypt, though, had the misfortune to be ruled by a victorious empire, and to be in Africa, not Europe. Britain blocked the delegation and exiled its leaders. Cairo’s streets filled with demonstrations, followed by riots. British troops stamped out the revolution, but sparks kept bursting into flame. Wilson’s recognition of the British protectorate over Egypt in the midst of the uprising added American betrayal to British repression.3 The segregationist US president apparently did not think that the progressive principles of self-determination should apply to Africa.

  In 1922, Britain compromised and proclaimed Egypt an independent country, at least in name. Fouad was crowned king. The delegation to Versailles established a political party dedicated to full independence, the Wafd, which won a landslide victory in the first elections. On paper, Egypt was now a constitutional monarchy, modeled on Britain. What became known as Egypt’s liberal age began.

  In reality, the Wafd was committed to the “constitutional” part of that description, the palace only to “monarchy.” And the protectorate remained. Britain had dictated the terms of Egypt’s faux independence, pending an agreement someday in the future on relations between the two countries. Britain’s representative, the high commissioner, played the king and the Wafd against each other. The British Troops in Egypt stayed on. The Egyptian army “was kept in the requisite state of tranquility by the British officers seconded to it and by depriving it of artillery, modern arms and… ammunition,” as Raymond Maunsell, who became the intelligence officer of the British Troops in Egypt in 1932, would write. The European Department of the Egyptian Interior Ministry, headed by British officials, “was, in fact, in control of the entire security apparatus of the Egyptian government.”4

  (Maunsell was unusual among junior officers for getting out beyond the Gezira Club and Cairo’s bars. He spoke Arabic and had been one of Bagnold’s exploring companions before getting the intelligence post.5)Cairo drew more foreigners—some of them refugees from dictatorships rising in Europe—and more landless peasants. For the poor, Egypt was a Dickensian nightmare under very bright sunlight. In Egypt as a whole, one out of every two children died by age five. Just one-seventh of the population was literate. Meanwhile, most members of parliament owned large tracts of land—feudal lords wearing the suits of democratic politicians. In Cairo, wealthy Egyptians shopped at the same new department stores as foreigners. Men could spend long evenings at bars, or in Cairo’s red-light district. The liberation of better-off Egyptian women proceeded only as far as attending school and not wearing veils. The women of the royal family, descended from Muhammad Ali and intermarried with Ottoman royals, wore low-cut gowns to balls—except for the young Queen Nazli, wife of Fouad, who was kept a near-prisoner in the palace, out of sight of other men.6

  Princess Nevine, one of Farouk’s countless cousins, recorded in her memoirs that her parents did not let her and her siblings “learn Arabic too early as it would ruin our pronunciation” in European languages. When her grandmother got around to teaching her Muslim prayers, Nevine had to memorize the sounds by rote. The real native language of the royal clan was mutual resentment, since all the princes thought that “at one point or the other they or their fathers should have reigned” if the succession had proceeded properly.7

  WHILE PRINCES BICKERED, a different succession took place: in 1933 a new high commissioner, Sir Miles Lampson, moved into the British Residency. Lampson was a career diplomat, fresh from seven years in Peking, and a recent widower. The word “imperious” could have been invented for Lampson, and not just because of his dedication to the British Empire. He stood six feet, five inches and weighed 250 pounds. Two motorcycle outriders, blasting their whistles, escorted his car on Cairo streets. He did not carry money, or his own cigarette case or fly whisk; lesser beings handled those things. He had a secretary whose job was to take down the diary entries that he dictated to record his meetings, dinner guests, and the precise number of birds he and his guests had killed in his frequent excursions to the British Residency’s private hunting grounds.8

  In Cairo, Lampson met a high-society visitor, Jacqueline Castellani, daughter of a famous Italian physician and his English wife. When they married at the end of 1934, she was twenty-four; he was fifty-three.9

  Farouk often appeared in Lampson’s pages as “the boy.”10 True, Farouk really was a boy of sixteen when King Fouad died suddenly in April 1936, and his smooth, round, pale face looked even younger. Farouk was in London at the time, studying part-time at the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich, accompanied by two chaperones, the former diplomat and desert explorer Ahmed Hassanein and Aziz el-Masri, an Egyptian military man. In early May, Farouk returned to Egypt, to the cheering of orchestrated crowds at whistle-stops between Alexandria and Cairo.

  Parliamentary elections had just been held; the Wafd won over three-quarters of the seats. Lampson discreetly met with Wafd leader Mustafa el-Nahas and leaders of lesser parties about who would sit on a three-man regency council, which would reign in Farouk’s place until he came of age. Lampson told each politician that he “had no desire to get mixed up in purely Egyptian affairs.” Asked if he insisted on seeing the names of the regents in advance, Lampson replied that “insistence was too strong a word.” In diplomacy, the strongest way to confirm something can be to deny it very softly.

  Nahas wanted Farouk to go back to England to complete his education. The young king was popular and—Nahas thought—dependent on the British. Lampson agreed with Nahas that having Farouk around was bad for parliamentary power and for Egyptian independence. For just those reasons, Lampson kept the king in Cairo, and arranged for Eton College to send him a tutor from England.11

  A few months later the tutor complained to Hassanein, now the chamberlain of the royal household, “As to my job… I had never been given an opportunity even of trying to do it. I neither lived in the palace nor saw the king more than once or twice a week if I was lucky.” Hassanein, the closest thing that Farouk now had to a father figure, was sympathetic but “dislikes doing even the gentle amount of scolding which he can hardly avoid.” The tutor observed that Hassanein was “largely preoccupied” with Queen Nazli, Farouk’s mother, who was liberated by the death of Fouad. This observation was shared by virtually all of Egyptian high society.12

  Farouk was powerless, the regents compliant. For Lampson, this made it easier to wrap up negotiations with Nahas, now prime minister, on the long-delayed treaty between Britain and Egypt.13

  The agreement, signed in August 193
6, opened by proclaiming that “the military occupation of Egypt… is terminated.” What came after qualified this. Sudan, until further agreement, would still be joint Egyptian-British territory. (Sudan was the southern part of Ismail’s old kingdom. Officially Egypt shared sovereignty there with Britain. In reality, a British general ruled it as a colony.) Britain would keep ten thousand troops near the Suez Canal to protect the waterway, but would gradually remove its army from Cairo and Alexandria. The two countries would have a military alliance. If either were at war, the other would “immediately come to [its] aid.” And if Britain were at war, “His Majesty the King of Egypt” would give Britain the use of his ports, airfields, and territory, and would censor the press and declare martial law.14

  War was more than an abstract possibility. Mussolini’s Italy had just conquered Ethiopia. An Italian marching song from that war went,

  We want to renew

  the great Empire of Rome

  marching on the path

  that the Duce has shown us.15

  With Ethiopia subdued, Mussolini proclaimed that Italy was now a “Fascist empire.”16 In Europe, Mussolini’s new foreign minister, his thirty-three-year-old playboy son-in-law Galeazzo Ciano, was meeting Nazi leaders to create what would become known as the Rome-Berlin Axis. (The name was coined by Hungary’s fascist prime minister, Gyula Gömbös.) Separating Italian East Africa and Libya, obstinately and temptingly, lay Egypt and Sudan.17 This threat may explain why Nahas agreed to the military provisions that left British troops in Egypt. He wanted a free Egypt, not Italy taking Britain’s place. Nahas had a cold, sober view of fascism.18

  The treaty said Egypt was independent. So Lampson’s title switched from high commissioner to ambassador. His home was now officially the embassy, but the old name, the British Residency, stuck to it. Lampson’s view of his job remained that discreetly, but “with tact and firmness, British influence should remain the governing factor” in Egypt.19