I forced myself to remember that this terrifying bandit was a part of that Latin America which I pretended to love, and that even a Chiapas Indian, fresh from revolution and probably an atheist, was still, by the grace of Spain and the Church, a caballero. And of course, when treated as such, he was. As soon as the flares were put out and the river bank was silent, he agreed to escort me to Tapachula and to allow me to cable London.
I spent three days in the little hotel at Tapachula waiting for confirmation that my guarantee had been deposited. It was the only period on the whole tour when I was bored. The town was wholly Indian and had the dejection of the full tropics. There was nothing to do, nothing to read, nothing to see, and I was not allowed to explore the district. Largely I slept and ate strange fruits. Sometimes I watched the women washing clothes in the river. Sometimes I would have a drink with the bandit. Indeed I began to look upon him as my only friend in the overgrown infinities of the Americas. We parted with regret—though I do not know enough of the Mexican Indian character to say whether that was due to the cautious perfection of my manners or to his disappointment that he could not chase me, at the end of one of his numerous fire-arms, back over the sands to Guatemala.
Mexico City was a fitting end to a journey which had begun at Buenos Aires. Both have the feeling of grand capitals; between them are only the lovely cities of the Indies. For the cultured, even the over-cultured immigrant from Europe, Mexico City is the obvious first choice. Yet twenty years ago it was already in a state of transition, and I wonder if now it might not be more attractive to the lover of North rather than South America.
And what a market! It crowned a successful trip. At last I was faced by United States competition, and to cut into their trade, after dealing so long with the careful German tailoring of exports to the requirements of the buyer, was a holiday. The American salesman on his own territory is the acknowledged master of all, but in foreign trade he then seemed rarely capable of adjusting his methods to the social and business customs of the importer.
The stars which assured that in a Spanish-speaking country I could do nothing very wrong were swift to show me that across the border their protection ended. I looked forward to a luxurious railway journey to New York. So often in the past I had watched greedily the diners in the restaurant car but had to content myself with jumping off at a station for a hot dog. Especially I looked forward to breakfast. It is a humble meal, for which I have normally little use, but in its preparation Americans are supreme.
Even the French cannot claim so much. The finest Parisian lunch may be equalled for the unconventional by a Chinaman, for the rice-lover by an Arab, for the amateur of fish by that improbable outsider, a Portuguese, coming up on the rails with herbs and a frying pan. But no one, anywhere, can approach an American breakfast at all.
The train passed through the night into Texas, and I rose prepared for a bowl of orange juice, wheat cakes and maple syrup, and whatever the cook had prepared to go with his admirable bacon. Accustomed to the international trains of Europe where one currency was as good as another in the restaurant car, I assumed that the head waiter would change my Mexican dollars at a head-waiter’s rate. But he would not—and there was I sniffing coffee with a thick wad of money in my pocket and unable to eat. I protested mildly, but he was having no nonsense about international trains. He implied that it was an American train which, averting its eyes from the shame, had been compelled to cross a frontier. He added, politely but inexorably, that guys who wanted American bacon should provide themselves with American dollars. Some forty-eight hours later I reached New York and dashed to the nearest bank, as hungry as I had ever been in the days of poverty.
I sailed from New York to Barcelona and went home by Madrid and Lisbon, appreciating them more than ever as the fountain-heads of all the splendour and good-fellowship I had encountered. In London Marina joined me, and at last we recovered that commonest of human rights, a home. She gave up hers for mine. On the other hand I gave up much of my character for hers. With profound respect for each other, we made the best of what neither would admit was a mistake. For four years, first with John Kidd and then as a writer, domesticity reluctantly endured.
Soldier
IN August 1939 I had all the attributes of peace except any desire for it. Although I was now an interested craftsman and acquiring an incredulous respect for myself, I was always conscious of some futility in the writer’s life. I had watched the gropings of my Europe back towards the lights which had gone out in 1914, and had dared to believe that between the economic depression and Hitler’s occupation of the Rhineland they had again flickered into life, if only for a few hours and in a few most favoured streets. My feeling for Nazi Germany had the savagery of a personal vendetta.
Yet if a smooth surface of life could make content, content I should have been. I had a London flat and a growing circle of friends, which I badly needed. Reviewers had been very kind to my first novel. I had a second in the hands of the publishers and I could see what I was going to live on for three months ahead.
On August 20th I received a telegram from the War Office requesting me—we were not yet on a footing of orders—to report within twenty-four hours. The urgency surprised and flattered me. No one had ever demanded me within twenty-four hours; next week was always enough. I assumed that I was wanted to attend another course, not that the end and object of courses had arrived. As politically uninformed as any other member of the public, I could not believe that Hitler intended to strike eastwards after our guarantee to Poland and Roumania had made it clear that any more playing at soldiers meant world war.
It had been very different at the time of Munich. Then war had seemed to me imminent and in honour unavoidable. What use there could be for an able-bodied commercial traveller of thirty-eight—I was not yet wholly committed in mind to my new profession—I did not know. For active service abroad I was not trained. Both Civil Defence and Anti-Aircraft formations, for which I was easily acceptable, lacked the outlandish touch which I personally felt inseparable from war. Then came an announcement that men of good education and a military standard of health could join the Territorial Army Reserve of Officers. I took my place in the queue which snaked amiably through the courtyards of the War Office.
It was a considerable queue. There must have been at least five hundred of us on that morning of the Munich Crisis. From then on I never had any doubt what the ultimate result of war would be. My certainty was of course the wildest romanticism, growing upon one solid fact. Those hundreds in the queue, by their faces and bearing, were so obviously produced by a training more Spartan than any other country had imposed upon its youth. Many of them, no doubt, would have bored me to the point of any subterfuge for escape; most were still living in a Kipling world of the early nineteen-hundreds; some, like myself, had an extra edge upon their patriotism because war appeared so infinitely more desirable than sitting at a desk or looking for a desk to sit at. But the fact remained that they were a cross-section of a self-confident élite—far from perfect officers from the point of view of handling men, far from a German standard of intelligence, yet with values so simple and assured that they would rejoice the heart of any commander.
Arrived inside the War Office, we sat at tables and filled in forms. I had not expected so many questions which I could answer with a hopeful affirmative. There was even mention of Certificate A, the existence of which I had entirely forgotten though I had acquired it in 1918. Its face value was comic, proving only that its possessor could command a company in the still Napoleonic manœuvres of the parade ground without tying it into a knot, that he could take a rifle to pieces and answer correctly written questions on the infantry tactics of the Boer War. But I have the utmost respect for it, since I never had any other military training and it sufficed. I had learned the first principle of the military life: that if you preserve a smart, alert and intelligent bearing, you will have ample time later to find out wh
at the devil your superiors or subordinates are talking about.
The Munich autumn passed; in the winter I was summoned to have my languages tested. Nothing but life had ever tested them before. My Spanish turned out to be still fluent, profane and idiomatic; my French, serviceable for all ordinary purposes; my German, a wildly individual version of the language which could be readily understood by any person of goodwill.
Soon afterwards I received a letter inviting me to an interview. It was a mysterious letter, for it was not franked On His Majesty’s Service but bore a stamp. Keeping imagination upon all the curb it could endure I called at the War Office and was shown into a room which seemed to me unnecessarily large. At the far end of it were a colonel and an exceptionally lovely girl. I restrained my eyes, fearing that I might be written down, in the too easy judgement of the English, as a man who had more interest in women than duty. The real reason for Joan Bright’s presence was not, I now feel, the primitive separation of honest rams from billy goats, but the value of her snap judgement. Her remarks—if I am right—when each of us had left the room would have been entertaining to hear.
Then came two courses in Intelligence Duties. The subjects of the lectures were utterly unexpected, for there was hardly a mention of the employment of spies or of security against them. Roughly speaking, we were being trained in the strategy of the coming war. We were never actually told that defeat was probable, but it was clearly foreseen that at the very best the meeting of the main armies would produce stalemate, and that victory might be destined for the side which could produce the most ingenious methods of breaking it.
The use and organisation of the commando, the opportunities given by the parachute, the rallying of large local forces by small parties of British, the art of guerrilla warfare—those were the main subjects of the course. All the underhand methods of tying down the enemy and destroying his confidence which began to inspire the public between 1942 and 1944 were prophesied to us and the technique explained in the summer of 1939. British military thinking was revolutionary. It had to be, for the War Office was short of any weapon but cunning. I remember that when a party of us was taken to the Farnborough depot, so that we might be able to recognise and describe the main features of our own or enemy armour, there was only one modern tank in the sheds, and that was a prototype.
Nothing was said of our intended employment—or indeed could be said, for no one could tell where in the coming war the fronts would be. It seemed to me pretty obvious that I should be used in a Spain which was fighting with the Axis, and I dreamed of my partisans in the remote hills from the Cantabrian Mountains to the Picos de Europa.
When in August 1939 I reported to the War Office, the dream of Basque commandos vanished. It was to be Roumania. I had never given the country a thought. When tested for a knowledge of the language, I could not speak a word nor even read a newspaper. At my first visit to the War Office in that eager queue I well remember wondering, pen poised over the form, whether I had or had not the impudence to put Roumanian among my languages. But it was absurd to admit that one had lived in a country for four years and been content to know enough to call a cab. Still hesitating, I scribbled the nine letters. So small and insignificant and unnoticed an act decided the pattern of six years of my life and therefore all the far course of it.
My orders were to leave for Egypt in four days. Startled by the sudden conjuring of a Captain Household out of those gentlemanly courses and the last remains of youth, I went out and bought uniform. Marina, with a prudence which for the first and last time was fully justified, left for America. She remains in my life as a loyal and beloved friend. Out of the raw and passionate material which had forced itself upon her fourteen years earlier she made everything but a husband.
The four long trains stood on the waterfront sidings at Dieppe. Around them, in them, carrying their kit to them were naval ratings in uniform, and officers of all three services barely disguised in sports jackets and grey flannel trousers. I crossed the quay to buy bread, ham and wine for what promised to be a long and uncomfortable journey. The French, appalled, begged me to tell them whether this brisk and purposeful movement, so familiar to the middle-aged among them, was mobilisation. I denied it impatiently. What we were and what our destination was no business of theirs. But the four trains, though they stood in the objective world of 1939, belonged to 1914 in the sad eyes which stared from every shop and café.
I knew their foreboding—the undismissible certainty that one has been at the beginning before and that the end must be the same. To me it had come in 1933 when sitting in a Brussels café I had opened the evening paper and found myself staring at a cartoon of sky darkened by German bayonets. It seems a mere nothing. But for ten years there had been no bayonets in cartoons. We did not think that in our lifetime there ever would be. No man or woman under forty can realise how unimaginable was European war to the casual citizen, the casual European newspaper reader in the years between Versailles and Hitler.
Yet to me and to not a few of us born about 1900 war was in some sort a release. We had been at school from 1914 to 1918, and our education, outside the classrooms and the monotonous games, was directed towards making us efficient officers. Our elders, first so senior as to be gods, then gods who had come down to earth, then near contemporaries, went to France and largely stayed there. We knew very well that the average life of an infantry subaltern in the line was three weeks. It did not bother those who waited any more than those who went. One is always the exception. It did produce, however, an acceptance of death as a possible, even a normal end of youth—the price which might have to be paid for satisfying our overwhelming, burning curiosity as to what it was really like to be under enemy fire, a question as intense as what it was really like to sleep with a woman. Merely to be told, however frequently and vividly, was not enough. Thus when the armistice came and still one was a schoolboy it produced frustration not relief.
So the circumstances in which I landed at Dieppe were a proud fulfilment—though indeed I felt something of a fraud since there were as yet no war and no danger and no doubt at all in my mind that anyone entrusting his life to my military knowledge would certainly lose it. So I had to be satisfied with the romantic pleasure—for such a sybarite as myself—of considerable discomfort.
The four trains were full of naval ratings for the Mediterranean Fleet, of the officers of Wavell’s army recalled from leave, of essential civilians staffing harbours, depots and cables: of everyone in fact who had to be at his post before Germany could close the overland routes to the east, and Italy delay the passage of the Mediterranean. Warsaw and Bucharest might be cut off at any moment, so the Polish and Roumanian military missions were despatched to Egypt whence, by rail or air, they could move to their stations on the declaration of war. We were nearly all amateur soldiers, picked for our languages or special knowledge, and put in the picture—trained is too strong a word—by the same courses. We must have been the very first party of the new armies to leave England on active service. At least two of us did not see it again for five and a half years.
I can claim with truth to have crossed the length of the Mediterranean in an open boat. After two days and a night in the train, much of it spent on sidings within infuriating sight of Paris, we arrived at Marseilles and were taken on board the waiting cruiser. Seventeen hundred of us there were, and the ship could not have been fought and could barely be handled without treading on us. The two military missions, claiming to be so secret that they were not allowed to mix with their fellows, captured and held one of the ship’s boats; and there, beneath the davits, some twenty of us lived and slept during the passage to Alexandria. The only unbearable hardship was the lack of any alcohol. Food, though it largely consisted of bread and marmalade, was happily spiced by the speed of that treaty cruiser, reaching urgently across the Mediterranean at thirty knots.
The Polish mission flew off to Warsaw from Cairo, leaving the Roumanians
at the Metropolitan Hotel—then less well known than later and still able to keep up superb menus for us, its sole guests in August—to wait in extreme luxury for the declaration of war.
We could only enter neutral Roumania secretly and as civilians, for the object of our mission was wholly destructive. Our orders were to deny Roumanian oil to the Germans if they invaded Roumania, and to concert plans with picked engineers of the oil companies and our opposite numbers from the French Army for the utter destruction of the fields and refineries. The Germans, naturally, would be aware that some such plot must be well in hand, but so long as there was no noticeable British activity and no sudden arrival of suspicious strangers they could only guess.
We travelled separately through Palestine, Lebanon and Turkey, with reasonable cover as businessmen. I was forbidden to travel on my current passport which gave my profession as author. Authors, said the authorities, were immediately suspected by every security officer. Compton Mackenzie and Somerset Maugham had destroyed our reputation as unworldly innocents for ever. So I was given a new passport which stated that I was an Insurance Agent. Nobody could know less than I about insurance, but, as I did not have to practise or pretend to practise the profession, that mattered little.
As soon as Poland had been overrun, Roumania was helpless; but she hoped to delay invasion with her own army and such detachments of Weygand’s army in Syria as could arrive in time to hold the line of the Carpathians. We had three plans for the devastation of the oil-fields. No. 1 assumed the active help of the Roumanian Army. No. 2 assumed its complete preoccupation on the frontier, leaving us to do the job with the expert help of a field company of sappers, trained in demolition, which stood ready in Egypt to join us as soon as Roumania was at war. No. 3 called for the utmost possible measure of destruction in spite of the opposition of the Roumanian government and army. A few of the most trustworthy officers of the Roumanian general staff knew all about Plan 1—and of course our identities—something of Plan 2 and nothing at all of Plan 3.
Against the Wind Page 9