Young Philby

by Robert Littell

  One copy of Simon & Schuster pocket book number 1 by a chap named Hilton, entitled Lost Horizon, a favorable mention of said book having appeared in The Times culture section the weekend before last week.

  I would be obliged if you would include a gift card in the package with the following note: “From the Hajj, who saved you from the wrath of a furious tailor in the souk of Damascus by purchasing a soiled djellabah, which, come to think of it, ought to fit you now.”

  Y’r ser’v’t

  Harry St John Bridger Philby Esq.

  Maida Vale

  10: CALAIS, MAY 1940

  Where The Times Special Correspondent Mr. Philby Is Accused of Betraying King and Country

  May something or other, 1940

  Mr. Ralph Deakin, Esq.

  Foreign Editor

  The Times

  London

  My dear Mr. Deakin,

  Herein, the report you requested of my time with the British Expeditionary Force in Flanders.

  With the civil war ended and Franco ruling the country with an iron fist from Madrid, I quit Spain in August of ’39 and made my way across the Pyrenees to an overgrown village in northern France which fancied itself an undergrown town: Arras, where the British Expeditionary Force’s general staff had set up shop. The BEF’s intelligence section, a starchy pride of reserve captains and colonels so freshly mobilized some of them were still attired in civilian shirts with mother-of-pearl studs and patent-leather shoes, took a dim view of my presence. They appeared alarmed by something in my résumé but as its cardboard cover had been stamped “For Eyes Only,” I was unable to identify the sore point. I can only suppose, what with the Soviets having signed a nonaggression pact with Nazi Germany last year, that the intelligence chaps were put off by my being married to an Austrian Communist: Visions of me collaborating with the Red devil danced in their heads. I wound up cooling my heels for three weeks in the Hotel du Commerce waiting for accreditation—a painless interlude, I will concede, as the bar was stocked with Mr. John Walker’s Scotch whiskey to accommodate the ranking BEF officers billeted at the hotel. By the time I got the requisite pink slip with “Special Mission Accorded by the general staff for the Purpose of Journalism,” Britain and France had honored their treaty obligations and declared war on Germany after Hitler invaded Poland. When I managed to get permission for a junket through the beet fields of Flanders to look for the war Britain had declared, I couldn’t find it for the simple reason there was none. American headline writers took to calling the eight months between our declaration of war and the blitzkrieg through Belgium and France “the Phony War.” The Germans, in an uncharacteristic display of humor, dubbed it “Sitzkrieg.” The French, struck by the ludicrousness of the standoff, christened it “La drôle de guerre.” The Royal Air Force pilots who dropped propaganda leaflets over Germany daily came up with the “Confetti war.”

  Whatever name it went by, it was a bizarre interval—110 British and French divisions, dug in along the Belgian and French borders, sitting on their duffs, gazing across no-man’s-land at 23 German divisions (the bulk of the German army was said to be engaged in the East), with nobody on either side firing a shot in anger.

  It took me two and a half months of submitting daily requests to the press office, two floors below my own room in the hotel, before I discovered a yellow chit folded into my letterbox authorizing me to join a group of journalists being taken on a tour of the legendary Maginot Line of fortresses, behind which the French proposed to fend off the Hun if he ever attacked. We entrained for Metz at four the next morning, winding up in a third-class carriage chock-full of French conscripts in khaki greatcoats returning from furlough. CBS’s Bill Shirer cadged an interview with their commanding officer, a bearded chap carrying a bamboo stick tucked under his only arm (the other having been shot off in the First Great War), who boasted that his men would make short work of the Hun once they reached the front. Hearing this, his junior officers cheered; the rank and file, peeling oranges the odor of which in closed railway compartments never failed to make me queasy, continued singing their bawdy songs. At Metz’s central station we were delivered into the hands of French press officers who shooed us, like schoolchildren on a day trip, into a cavalcade of Monsieur Citroën’s famous traction avant limousines repainted for the duration with brown and olive-green camouflage stripes, as if that would render them invisible to the German pilots patrolling the bridges over the Moselle in vintage Fokker biplanes, likewise painted with brown and olive-green camouflage stripes.

  Once across the Moselle, the Citroëns drove through vineyards that stretched off to the horizon, eventually pulling up at the edge of a meadow with three observation balloons tethered to stakes driven at an angle into the ground. At a field mess in a tent—alas, also painted with camouflage stripes, which had the effect of dampening our civilian appetites—a noncommissioned rating sporting one of those absurd French chef’s hats had set out sandwiches of rillettes and chilled bottles of local May wine flavored with woodruff and pineapple slices. (Several members of our press party spoke openly of defecting to the “Frogs.”) Employing my pidgin French, I managed to chat up a balloonist who’d been aloft earlier in the day. Pleasant enough fellow named Sixte something. He was a recent graduate of the French military academy Saint-Cyr and looked to be too young to have any use for a straightedge razor. I asked him if he had spotted signs of life beyond the Germans’ Siegfried Line whilst aloft in his observation balloon. Studying the words “WAR” and “REPORTER” printed across the front of my infantry helmet with what can only be described as perplexity, he allowed as how the only thing of military interest he’d seen was a Hun observation balloon. Picture it, Mr. Deakin: The war had been going on by then for—what?—the best part of four months and the two balloonists may have been the only ones on either side of the front to catch a glimpse of the enemy. When I think back on this decidedly drôle de guerre, I am reminded of the complicity of these balloonists, ten or so miles distant from each other, the German in all probability as young as his French counterpart (since only young men oblivious to the hazards of war volunteer to man observation balloons), the both of them using pocket mirrors to catch each other’s eye with glints of sunlight before their respective ground crews pulled them in, like bloated hogs on long leashes, when night fell.

  I won’t bore you with a detailed description of the Maginot fortress we visited—I expect you will have seen it in the Pathe newsreels a dozen times. Suffice it to say the evidence of flower beds and vegetable gardens on the French side didn’t make it any less depressing. The troops manning the fortress, living underground as they did for months on end, had the miens of miners from the coal face—the pupils of their eyes were reduced to pin pricks, their skin was deathly pale from the absence of sunlight. Everything of consequence in the fortress transpired underground: The men ate, slept, fornicated (there were Croix Rouge nurses seconded to the fortress’s infirmary), defecated, watched cinemas in a hundred-seat auditorium; all of this in facilities blasted out of the bowels of the earth, the man-made bunkers joined by narrow passageways with steps chiseled into the stone and lighted by naked electric bulbs every several yards. It was, come to think of it, what one imagines life must be like in a submarine: The great majority of the crew live in artificial light inside the hull, only the lucky few get to climb to the conning tower and see the sea. In this case, the lucky few stationed aboveground in the fortress’s giant turret peered through periscopes focused on what looked to be an enemy trench system topped with sandbags. If there were Germans in the fortification a football field away I never caught sight of them when I was given a turn at one of the periscopes.

  Back in our Citroëns, we were whisked off along dirt roads to an enormous underground storage facility several miles behind the front. Our French chaperones were eager to convince us that the line of invincible fortresses ordered up by their minister of war Maginot would never run short of supplies—we walked endless aisles between giant
stacks of artillery shells, hospital cots piled one atop the other, wooden crates filled with rifle and machine-gun munition, cartons of canned food, even cases of vin ordinaire destined for consumption (so I supposed) by conscrits ordinaire. At one intersection in the vast hangar we came across a quite tall French colonel engaged in a heated argument with a quite short corporal-major. The colonel, wearing a belted leather jacket and a tanker’s helmet, a cigarette bobbing on his lips, thick army stockings fitted over the shoe part of his knee-high boots to keep him from slipping on the ice, turned out to be the C.O. of the 507th armored regiment, stationed well back from the Maginot Line in reserve. It developed that the colonel, one C. de Gaulle according to the metal name tag pinned immediately over his breast pocket, was scavenging for tank treads that had been delivered to the Maginot depot despite the fact that there were no French tanks posted on the Maginot Line. “Monsieur Maginot’s fortresses are utterly useless,” the exasperated colonel told us, much to the discomfiture of our press chaperones. “The Germans will not attack them, they’ll simply go around them. The next war will be fought by tanks and won by the side that is the more mobile. To be mobile, chers messieurs, my tanks require treads!” The corporal-major, who had hash marks trickling down his sleeve indicating he was professional army, stood his ground, refusing to release the treads to de Gaulle without a written order, in triplicate, signed by the sector commandant. Scowling to indicate he had run out of arguments and patience, de Gaulle attached the chin strap of his tanker’s helmet, formed his thumb and forefinger into a pistol, and pointed it at the war medals on the corporal-major’s chest. “Snap your identification tag in two,” the colonel ordered, as if the pistol were real. (The tags, worn on a wrist bracelet, had a soldier’s name impressed on them twice; if he were to be killed on the battlefield, half the tag was broken off and nailed to his coffin.) The bewildered corporal-major wasn’t sure whether to take the colonel’s fingers as a joke or a threat. He looked over at us, hoping we would clarify the situation, then, shrugging, stamped a chit and waved with the back of his hand toward the crates of tank treads. De Gaulle’s men promptly loaded them onto two lorries. De Gaulle himself squeezed into the sidecar of a motorcycle and, pumping his fist in sign for the lorries to follow, sped away with his prize.

  Mind you, Mr. Deakin, phony war is a damn sight better than the real thing. Between occasional forays to beet fields and dismal Maginot fortresses, I hung around the Hotel du Commerce, stuffing myself (on your shilling) with foie gras de Strasbourg au Porto, drinking Armagnac hors d’age, playing poker into the wee small hours. Aside from the contretemps at the underground storage facility, the only skirmishes I personally witnessed before Herr Hitler’s Panzers struck were between our group of foreign correspondents in Arras and the BEF’s press officers, who considered the mere mention in a dispatch of the weather over Flanders to be tantamount to treason. On one memorable occasion my Under a blazing sun provoked the wrath of the BEF’s duty censor, a reserve colonel with tufts of hair on his cheekbones that looked to be whetted with axel grease. The brass nameplate on his desk read M. R. Protheroe, Acting Chief Censor. “You are spying for someone, Philby,” he announced huffily as he blotted out the offending phrase with a thick black marker. The reserve colonel’s jowls quivered as he exhaled onto his precious censor’s seal and stamped what remained of my dispatch so it could be sent from the telegrapher’s Nissen shed on the roof of the Hotel du Commerce. “Under a blazing sun indeed!” Colonel Protheroe fumed. “Precisely what the Hun’s Luftwaffe pilots must know to attack our positions in Flanders.”

  “Hun’s Luftwaffe pilots are rather occupied at the moment bombing Warsaw, which is roughly a thousand miles from here,” I remarked.

  This particular reserve colonel had the mentality of a small dog that locks its jaws on your trouser cuff. “You’re working for someone beside The Times, Philby,” he persisted. “Rest assured I shall get to the bottom of this. Who employs you to provide weather information?”

  “Pravda,” I said. “‘Under a blazing sun’ is actually a code phrase for ‘The BEF are running short of Daggett and Ramsdell Herbal Sun-Oil.’”

  “Your taking of a serious matter lightly has been noted against you,” Colonel Protheroe declared. “Providing the Hun with weather information it can get ahold of simply by subscribing to The Times must be seen as a betrayal of king and country.”

  I recount this episode, Mr. Deakin, so you will grasp what war reporters—to employ my sainted father’s appellation—were up against whilst covering the BEF in Flanders. The high point of our sojourn in the Hotel du Commerce involved organizing a lottery on whether the Phony War would end with a whimper or a bang. We had all thirty-seven journalists billeted in the hotel, along with a mixed bag of BEF ranks, maître d’s, restaurant captains, taxi drivers, desk clerks, and telegraphers, buying into the lottery at three quid a head.

  The chaps who put their money on the bang, me amongst them, won.

  On 10 May, a Friday if memory serves, the shooting war began with German Panzer divisions pushing through the Ardennes woods to bypass the Maginot Line entirely and attack Belgium and France from an unanticipated direction. In London, Prime Minister Chamberlain, having famously waved his umbrella whilst promising “peace in our time” after the Munich conference with Herr Hitler, had the good sense to resign. King George VI had the good sense to replace him with the former First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill. I had the good sense to quit the Hotel du Commerce one jump ahead of the invading boche, who in short order pierced the BEF’s front and headed for the English Channel, effectively splitting the Allied armies in two. It was, as everyone now understands, the beginning of a dreadful debacle that must rank as the single worst defeat of British arms in history. We war reporters fled Arras in a municipal omnibus requisitioned by the general staff press people, who felt duty bound to personally escort us. The next days passed in a blur consisting in equal measure of dust rising from the roadways of Northern France and panic emanating from the hordes of civilians running for their lives, many on dilapidated bicycles, others pulling farm carts piled high with their worldly possessions. We drove through deserted villages acrawl with crazed dogs abandoned by their owners—they had been tied to fences and could be heard for miles howling with hunger. Our BEF lads were putting them down, one bullet to a dog. We sped across country bridges as army engineers wired explosives to the pilings. Somehow we reached Amiens, only to be roused from our beds before dawn to flee to Boulogne. That city was bedlam. Soldiers from a dozen countries bivouacked in the streets, refugees riding horses or bicycles or on foot clogged the roads leading in from the countryside. The local constabulary patrolled through the night to prevent the looting of abandoned homes. From time to time, rifle fire reverberated through the city, giving rise to rumors of German paratroopers landing in soccer fields adjacent to schools. As the telegraph lines to England were down I wasn’t even able to file a dispatch describing the scenes I’d witnessed, not that they would have gotten past the censor, especially if I had mentioned the weather.

  Since we couldn’t work, several of us hired out the hotel’s limousine and set off to play a round at the famed golf links in Le Touquet. We were waylaid en route by P. G. Wodehouse, who had a cottage thereabouts. Elated to find himself in the company of Englishmen, Pelham stood us drinks in the local café. He told us that he and his wife reckoned the Germans were civilized chaps, propaganda to the contrary notwithstanding, and had no intention of joining the exodus. Luckily for us we had stopped for a drink because word soon spread that Guderian’s Panzers had reached the front nine of the links. Hearing this, we promptly abandoned any notion of golf and set off for Calais (figuring, as Collier’s Weekly Martha Gellhorn quipped, we could return the hotel’s limousine after the war). Fact is I regretted not driving up to Touquet—imagine the scoop if I’d discovered that German commanders went to war with golf clubs in their tanks and had suspended the blitzkrieg to play a round.

  In Ca
lais I chatted up some subalterns from one of those elite units, The Queen Victoria’s Rifles, I think it was. They were reconnoitering for buildings to defend in the port area. They’d been told Churchill had issued an order to hold Calais to the death and were ready to do it, except they didn’t know where their general was, they weren’t sure who was in command or when their heavy equipment would be offloaded. I suppose it was then that I realized the whole shebang—the Maginot Line, Flanders, The BEF H.Q. at Arras, Amiens, Boulogne, Calais, the beaches of Dunkirk up the coast—was a colossal cock-up. Hitler had been training his Stukas and his Panzers for years whilst we brandished umbrellas. If there is an upside to the story, it’s that we seem to be managing to evacuate tens of thousands of our boys off the beaches of Dunkirk, though as Churchill has pointed out, wars are not won by retreats.

  I’ve been assigned a berth on what looks to be one of the last fishing boats out of Calais harbor—I’m typing this on my trusty Underwood portable in the cramped galley that stinks of diesel oil, actually. The French captain plans to cast off at ebb tide tonight and hopes to reach Dover before first light to avoid the Luftwaffe pilots stalking juicy targets in the channel. Hard to believe I will be in England tomorrow morning and, with any luck, in London tomorrow evening. Truth is, I feel guilty as all hell saving my own hide and leaving The Queen Victoria’s Rifles behind to hold the harbor. But my guilt didn’t keep me from accepting the berth when it was offered. Oddly, the Reserve Colonel M. R. Protheroe, the one who accused me of betraying king and country by describing the weather over Flanders, is a fellow passenger. “You look to be familiar,” he said when he saw me backing down the ladder to the galley, my helmet with War Reporter attached to the kit on my back and clanging against it. Colonel Protheroe appeared to have difficulty bringing me into focus. His eyes had the vacant stare I’d seen so often on shell-shocked soldiers in Spain.