View of the World

by Norman Lewis

  I asked for the mullah to be pointed out to me, and we went below together. Despite the late season, the weather remained hot. The ventilation had failed and the prisoners, crammed into the holds, and stripped to their underpants, lay in rows, as African slaves must have done, their limbs shining with sweat. The wooden partitions dividing up the holds released an ingrained sourness adding to the sharp odour of so many bodies in close confinement. There was a great shortage of water, because all the Muslims were obliged to wash ritually six times daily. One or two spaces had been cleared for the men to squat in circles to listen to their storytellers, and Golik called my attention to the mullah seated cross-legged in one of these circles, a small man with a polished ivory head and a face full of scepticism and malice. It was the mullah who led the audience’s formal outcry of astonishment or alarm whenever the storyteller reached a dramatic crisis in his narrative; and whenever a man had to pass behind him he went over to kiss the prayer beads the mullah dangled from his hand. We noted men at prayer, taking care, Golik said, to make their prostrations well within the mullah’s view. This in itself was a bad sign, he said, for public prayer was discouraged in the Red Army, and could cost a man promotion. If no uniforms came, they would all fall back in prayer.

  The journey from Taranto was slow and tedious with the ever present threat of trouble brewing in the holds. A hot wind from Africa breathed on the ship night and day. The Mongul Buryat tribesmen chanted interminably about death and paradise, and the water dripped ever more slowly from the latrine pipes. Golik felt his authority draining away. The two junior lieutenants, Pashaev and Genghis Khan (there was also a private with this distinguished name) pretended no longer to hear his orders, while the mullah terrified the men by his trances during which he prophesied doom for all of them.

  On 28th October we reached Port Said, where we were told that there would be a delay of some days during which we would trans-ship to the Devonshire. Here we were joined by two more interpreters, Private Shor from Aleppo, and a Bulgarian Jew, Sergeant Manahem, who had led the twelve-man demolition team in Colonel Keyes’ unsuccessful commando raid on Rommel’s headquarters.

  With the arrival of these fluent Russian speakers I saw my presence on the Devonshire as unnecessary. I had never been given any indication, except by the mad major at Taranto, as to what I was expected to do, and I had had virtually no contact with the OC Troops, who was in all probability himself completely mystified as to what I was doing there, and had at no time sought to make use of my services.

  I therefore visited Movement Control at Port Said to request permission to return to Naples, hoping to be favoured by the technicality that the movement order issued in Taranto instructed me to accompany the Reina del Pacifico to its destination, and made no mention of a further voyage on the Devonshire. My reception by the Movement Control Officer was a bleak one.

  Seeing that my arguments were without effect, I produced for the first and last time an extraordinary identity document issued to members of my previous North African section when sent on the more absurd kind of missions. This authorised the bearer to wear any uniform and called upon all persons subject to military law to assist him in any way, etc. The effect on the officer was less than electrifying. He took the paper, glanced at it, and threw it down. ‘This may have worked for you in North Africa,’ he said, ‘but it won’t here, and it won’t in PAI-Force, where you’re going. Get back to the ship.’

  Aboard the Devonshire again, I found that in my absence the British uniforms had arrived. Bound to the wheels of the military machine which, once set in motion could not be stopped, the quartermaster’s department had spewed forth a wild assortment of stores, including not only the so-long-desired uniforms, but all the complex and in this case useless impedimenta supplied to troops, including anti-gas equipment, entrenching tools, camouflage netting, long-johns, to say nothing of razors and shaving brushes, the uses of which were mysterious to these hairless men.

  The prisoners swarmed like bees, buzzing with excitement over the piles of equipment dumped in their midst. Suddenly the fog of inertia and depression had been dispersed. Golik, in an evilly fitting battle dress, but full of martial zest, had become the hero of the day. Morale was ebullient, and even the heat and stench of the holds seemed to have subsided. When the men could find space to walk among these crowded bodies, they did so more briskly, and had straightened themselves up. The mullah had retired to the latrines, ‘to await a great vision,’ and here he remained for the rest of the day.

  Within a few hours the last of the Russians had been kitted out as British soldiers, and the tailors among them were given shears and set to work adapting garments made for the big-boned well-fed men of the West to the smaller bodies of Asiatics bred in the main from generations of mare-riding nomads. With their upgrading, the prisoners were to be given full army rations too, and although these men had eaten human flesh, they refused the liver – which was all the meat we ever received – on religious grounds.

  Our fully-fledged Russian Allies, as they now were, seized with the greatest delight on the three-fourths of this gear, which one would have supposed to be quite useless, and began to convert these to their special purposes. Working with extreme ingenuity and skill, they dismantled such objects as zinc water-bottles, mess-cans, and above all tooth brushes, nail brushes and combs; and pierced, spliced and amalgamated them to produce a variety of miniature musical instruments: strange antique-looking fiddles, lutes, pipes and rebecks. Soon the bowels of the ship quivered with the wild skirl of oriental music.

  We sailed from Port Said on 2nd November with hope fizzing like an electric current through the ship. Golik, transfigured with optimism, had one more request to make. Included in the kit issued to each Russian was a truly superb Canadian blanket of the finest and fleeciest grey wool, and Golik now asked if he could be permitted to have a pair of these transformed by the tailors into a Red Army-style officer’s great-coat, in which he would like to make his appearance at the celebrating concert to be given by the ex-prisoners next evening. This, he assured me, would set the final stamp upon his authority.

  It was hard to refuse Golik anything, especially as in any case our interests interlocked. All that mattered was to come to the end of a trouble-free journey. The coat was made in a day: a garment fastening high in the neck, and falling to within six inches of the wearer’s toes. It would have conferred dignity upon a trader in the old camel market at Ismailia. He came on deck to show it off when it was ready, standing at the rail against the hot glitter of the sea and the incandescent Arabian coast-line, and a couple of off-duty members of the escort, sunbathing nearby, got up awkwardly as if undecided whether to stand to attention. When we went below most of the prisoners saluted him.

  The concert given by the Asiatics was unlike anything I had ever seen before, or have seen since. It was an entertainment to fill the steppes’ great emptiness, and hollow in time, transplanted perfectly here in the faceless surroundings in which we crouched. The art of the nomads had grown up without the aid of stage props, and depended on mime and masquerade, plus a dash of shamanistic witchery; it lifted the mind clear away from unacceptable reality to glowing new worlds of the imagination. Costumes were procured by magical adaptations of camouflage netting and gas capes. Supreme theatrical art had transformed a man who had tasted human flesh into a tender princess, stripping the petals from a lily while a suitor quavered a love song; we heard the neighing of the horses and the thundering hooves of a Mongol horde on their way to sack the town. Whatever these men had suffered in the camps, nothing had been able to take their art away. It was to be understood that this spectacle devised for the entertainment of the princes of Central Asia would have little appeal for the soldiers of the British escort, for not a man attended. What was less easy to understand was the boredom of a European Russian like Golik, who, sweltering in his coat, fell almost instantly asleep, snoring heartily to the accompaniment of arcadian pipes.

  Next day the process
of rehabilitation went ahead according to Golik’s plans. The Russians were allowed up on deck in batches, and a little space was set aside for Golik to conduct token inspections, check hair-cuts, and lecture his NCOs on military tactics. The OC Troops making his rounds of the Russians’ quarters in the holds, noted that at last these had been scrubbed out to his complete satisfaction, and Golik was complimented, and some further relaxations decreed. The mullah had been forcibly put into a British battledress, and for the moment little more was heard of him. We all began to breathe more easily. This interlude of calm was disrupted by a most singular happening.

  The three interpreters were profoundly oriental in their backgrounds, an influence which especially showed in their attitude to gold. This they appeared to regard as a magical substance, quite apart from any value it possessed for its purchasing power. Sergeant Manahen wore a signet ring made from gold wrenched from the jaw of a dead Italian on the battlefields. This had become like an African ju-ju for him – something invested with its own spirit. He did not like the ring to be touched, and complained of feeling a slight headache whenever he removed it from his finger to wash his hands. Shor, from Aleppo had been give his first bath as a baby in a bath into which one hundred gold coins had been showered; and his parents, holding his arms and legs, had made him go through the motions of swimming ‘so that he should swim in gold for the rest of his life.’ Benjamin had spent his boyhood in a religious community in which only the Rabbi handled money, and it was an unfortunate chance for all of us that this young man, for whom gold until now had been a legend, should have been the one to have smelt out its presence on the ship.

  Benjamin was cheerful in appearance and sympathetic in manner, and the prisoners confided in him more freely than they did with us. It was this special intimacy that had sprung up that clearly induced one of them to show him a gold coin he possessed, and Benjamin borrowed it from the man and brought it to me, agog with excitement, for a ruling as to whether it was genuine. Of this there was no doubt. The coin was an Edward VII sovereign, but the mystery was where it had come from, and I asked Benjamin to do his best to find out. Questions were met with a smokescreen of conflicting stories, designed it was to be supposed, to cover up guilty facts. Piecing the evidence together, we concluded that the sovereigns had been taken from a British agent parachuted into Northern Italy, who thereafter, in all probability, soon vanished forever. We knew that agents sent behind the lines were normally supplied with gold, either in the form of sovereigns, or five-dollar pieces which had an accepted value wherever they might be offered.

  What proved to be of fundamental importance in these events was that Benjamin, by his probings, discovered the existence, and eventually the whereabouts, of many more coins – about fifty in all, and immediately set about devising a method of persuading the prisoners to part with their treasure.

  The ship possessed its own NAAFI, open for an hour daily, and selling a limited supply of such things as chocolates, sweets, cigarettes, stationery and depressing souvenirs stocked up in its call at Port Said. Despite their new status the prisoners were not allowed to visit this, perhaps because it was assumed that they had no money to spend.

  Benjamin got his hands on a NAAFI price list, bought a sample of each article in stock and went in search of those with hidden gold. When he found one he pushed a square of chocolate into his mouth, and let him hold a toy camel, or work a lighter shaped like a sphinx. His offer was to supply one pound’s worth of NAAFI goods for every gold sovereign. This was sharp practice, for everyone but the intended victims of the swindle knew that sovereigns changed hands in the bazaar of any Middle-Eastern town at five pounds, five shillings apiece. Many of the prisoners were reluctant to pay up, and when one hung back, Benjamin brought into play a particularly disastrous form of salesmanship. His argument – as we learned too late – went, ‘You’ll be off this ship in a few days. After that what good will money be to you? Surely you know what’s going to happen?’ Sometimes at this moment, he went so far as to point a forefinger to his temple in a significant way.

  In the end Benjamin succeeded in convincing most of the prisoners to discard hope in exchange for the pleasure of the moment, and they handed over the gold and went off chewing a Cadbury’s bar, and often clutching a ridiculous toy. In this way the seeds of despondency were effectively sown, and soon the men began to go down with it, one after one, like victims of an epidemic disease.

  The storm broke with the Straits of Hormus sinking below the lip of the sea behind us, and Khorramshahr waiting, like a frown on the face of destiny, only two days away. The prisoners had been allowed on deck and a slow swing of the pendulum of authority back to Golik had left the mullah isolated, as one by one his adherents again placed their neck under the yoke of military discipline. The Pilgrim of Truth had got rid of his uniform once more, and now wore a kaftan with voluminous sleeves and a large turban, both made from British army underwear. He still received the unctuous attention of a hardcore of followers, most of them, it was said, having some special reason to fear Soviet retribution.

  The mullah had professed all along not to understand Russian, so, when the final confrontation took place, and Golik ordered him to go below and put on his uniform, the Battalion Commander took care to be seconded by Junior Lieutenant Ghenghis Khan, still sullen, but finally subdued, who repeated the order in the Uzbek language.

  Golik had prepared himself for what followed. The mullah, an agile man, jumped to his feet, shrieking to his supporters to follow him, slipped through the ring of Golik’s guards, and jumped into the sea. Golik, close at his heels, went in after him. A number of men intent on suicide had been inspired to climb the rails, but their resolution was demolished by the general outcry of akoola! (shark). In fact, the twisting grey shapes of large fish were to be seen everywhere, swimming close beneath the surface. The mullah’s kaftan billowed in the water, he spread his arms feebly as if trying to fly; his eyes were closed and the sea washed the memory of fury from his face. Golik had reached him in a vigorous dog-paddle and kept him afloat, while the ship hove-to, and a boat was lowered.

  For the mullah, when he was lifted aboard, this was the end of the road. The Uzbeks had gone dashing along the rail for a last gaze into eyes full of the rapture of paradise, but all they saw was a man fighting to fill his lungs with air and wincing and puking like a drowning kitten. He had not been permitted to die, and his survival was a matter for humiliation and sorrow. They watched the artificial respiration being given on the deck, saw the mullah’s limbs move and his eyes open; then they turned their backs, and went away.

  The last day on board was spent in preparation for the handover, which was to be elevated to a military occasion; the men of the escort fussed endlessly with their equipment and practised the arid drill movements with which they hoped to dazzle their Soviet opposite numbers.

  I saw Golik as he readied himself for the fateful confrontation.

  ‘What do you feel about things now?’ I asked.

  ‘Optimism. As long as you people stand by us. At worst I’ll do ten years in a camp. I’m twenty-five now. I’ve still plenty of life left.’

  We squeezed through the narrow waterway of Shatt El Arab, and tied up under a cold drizzle in Khorramshahr. In this threadbare city the Russians and the West were in daily mistrustful contact. It was the military show-window of nominal allies who hid their aversion between unbending correctness and skin-deep affability.

  We looked down over a glum prospect of marshalling yards under the soft rain. All was greyness, befitting the occasion. In the middle-distance the strangest of trains came into sight, an endless succession of pygmy trucks, like those used in the West to transport cattle, but a quarter their size. It was drawn by three engines, the leader of which gave a sad and derisive whistle as it drew level with us. It stopped, and this was the signal for a grey cohort of Soviet infantry to come on stage and change formation before deploying to form a line between us and the train.

  The es
cort party and the returning prisoners now disembarked, and there was more ceremonial shuffling of men, slapping of rifle stocks and stamping of boots. The OC Troops and the Soviet Commander then strutted towards each other, saluted, shook hands, exchanged documents formalising the completion of the handover, and the thing was at an end.

  With the three interpreters, I had been quite left out of this. Our presence had always been an anomaly, a suffix to the OC Troops’ authority for which the Army had provided no rules. Excluded from the ceremony, and ignored by both sides, we went our own way. Sergeant Manahem had actually passed through the line of Soviet machine-gunners, cast like identical tin soldiers, to inspect the trucks they were guarding, in which our Russians were to be transported back to their Fatherland. He came back to say that they had been used to transport pigs, and from the smell of them, he believed that they had recently served this purpose.

  The British had about-turned and marched away back to their ship, but no objection was raised when we stayed on to watch the Soviet Commander and a following of goose-stepping subordinates inspect the front rank of the Russians, who were now prisoners once again. They came to Golik, standing, immensely stylish in ultimate defeat, at the head of his battalion. The Soviet commander circled him slowly in absolute silence. Both men were of the same height and build, and their greatcoats were identical in cut and length, but Golik’s was the better of the two. The Commander then turned in my direction and signalled to me, and I went over to him. He spoke good English, and his manner was pleasant. ‘Comrade liaison officer,’ he said. ‘Please do me a favour. I prefer to avoid speaking to these pigs. I ask you to give them the order to board the train.’