Against the Wind

by Geoffrey Household

  On arrival in Roumania I went straight to Ploeşti where I stayed with Gwynn Elias, the fields manager of Unirea, ostensibly as an old friend and personal guest, to familiarise myself with oil, its machinery and its men. We had to be so careful not to compromise the organisation that frequent visits to the fields were impossible. Ploeşti swarmed with Germans. The Americans and Dutch were neutral. And some of the bluffer British, while they could be trusted to blow up anything including, if necessary, themselves, were incapable of not talking loudly in cafés.

  My colleagues had much better cover than I. Stanley Green had once been secretary of Unirea and could pretend up to a point that he was on special duty from the London office. Tim Watts, the angel of doom for the refineries, was a chemist from I.C.I. and entitled to take a reasonable interest in oil and its derivatives. But I could only remain as inconspicuous as possible, letting it be known that I was not anxious to return from this pleasant neutral country to an England at war. I spent my days upon Elias’s living-room floor, carpeted with large-scale maps of the Ţintea field, and my nights, when we could all move around more freely, at conferences or bridge.

  Even in South America I have never known anything like Elias’s hospitality to the prisoner in his house. They were the salt of the earth, those picked men of the oil-fields, keen, daring, ingenious and refusing to be beaten by any technical problem. All the essential work was done by them. We merely co-ordinated it.

  But nothing happened. The expected German invasion did not come; the period of phoney war dragged on; the wives of the oil-men, who had been evacuated, returned to Ploeşti. Only one service had any immediate nuisance value, and that was of quite another organisation which took an interest in the aviation spirit shipped from Russia to Roumania and on by rail to Germany. Oil from the Roumanian fields was largely denied to the enemy by economic warfare.

  When the plans, the responsibilities and the methods had been worked out, there was no further point in staying at Ploeşti and arousing curiosity. So we were all taken on to the staff of the legation, following the German practice of giving minor diplomatic status to their professional toughs. Green, Watts and I were installed in an office of dubious propriety between the Military Attaché and the Air Attaché where, when we were not poring over our maps and elaborating still quicker routes and instruments of destruction, we ciphered and deciphered telegrams—an occupation of appalling boredom, since seldom was anything of more than routine interest allowed to pass through our undiplomatic hands.

  The Military Attaché, Geoffrey Macnab, was a master of his art, never allowing his right hand to know too obviously what his left hand was about. Roumania, though it would be an allied country if invaded, was in fact neutral and very anxious to give no provocation. The government was only prepared to look the other way so long as there were no Franco-British activities so open and outrageous that the German legation would be justified in protesting.

  Geoffrey Macnab was responsible for our administration and discipline, but only for such operations as were approved by and concerted with the Roumanian General Staff. At first it must have been a nightmare for him to be encumbered with officers in civilian clothing, of God-only-knew what training, what background and what lack of discretion, playing casually with detonators in the next-door office and drinking very much more than was good for them. But never for a moment did he treat us as if we were anything other than trusted friends from his own battalion. We liked him so much that we tried to be sensitive to the lightest touch of the reins—a handy metaphor, though in fact he normally expressed incipient uneasiness by standing on one leg and wriggling the other.

  During the twenty years’ peace I had not considered the regular officer, when I considered him at all, as any asset to his generation. This was partly due to too much reading of the follies of 1914–1918, partly to personal observation of the fact that if you were capable of passing any examination whatever you could pass into Sandhurst. The War Office, the ship and Egypt had already suggested to me that I was wrong. Macnab, setting an example which I never forgot of how to command imperceptibly, added further evidence. I cannot remember an occasion in five years of war when I met with discourtesy or marked impatience from a regular officer. Professional ferocity, yes. Deliberate stupidity, no. It was always the amateur soldier, with an eye on his own importance, who was difficult. The professional trained between the wars, far from being doubtful and jealous of the amateur, seemed to cherish the new raw material with which the State had supplied him.

  My tribute to him, as from a romanticist, is worthless; but from the security officer, which for most of the war I was, it carries weight. By the very nature of my job I was a nuisance to busy men wanting to get on with the fighting, a perfumed staff officer to Hotspurs. But it was the regular, not the amateur, who always responded with good manners and good sense.

  Our real operational command, oddly enough, was naval. All our detailed planning was directed by Commander Watson, as he then was. I do not know who picked him to lead so desperate and delicate a venture which was military from beginning to end except for farcical sideshows on the Danube, but the choice was admirable. He was straight out of any stirring saga in glorious technicolour—for most exaggeratedly naval characters have an astonishing gift for becoming what seafaring fiction and the taxpayers expect. He was a handsome man with cold, dark-blue eyes, and he had a natural as well as a naval talent for leadership, simple, unquestioning and unquestioned. I felt that my own expansive and only vaguely ruthless fire of duty was in him concentrated to a white flame. I cannot imagine a better leader with whom to go into action, although in following his example one might be offered less chance than was really available to live and fight another day. Had Watson leaned over my dying body I feel that my last words would have been notably patriotic, but to Geoffrey Macnab they would have been profane.

  In February 1940 I was despatched to Egypt on a demolition course. For the first time I put on uniform, obtained a movement order instead of a ticket and was delivered to Dabaa in the Western Desert where the field company of sappers which was earmarked for use in Roumania took over my body.

  I admitted that my military training had been of the sketchiest, and they were immensely kind. It is possible that we who came down to them from Roumania appeared mysterious and heroic figures, in spite of pointing out to them apologetically that our only activities were to eat in two of the finest restaurants of all Europe and to attend a cabaret every evening. Romantic vision—which exists in the eye of the observer rather than of the participant—was more solidly based upon our appreciation of them. These were the men for whose technical skill and ability to fight off interference we were only pathfinders.

  A fortnight under canvas with an efficient unit of high and happy morale made me more confident that the illusion would not be detected whenever I had to play the part of captain in any straightforward War Office production. With growing enthusiasm I blew craters, cut steel, stunned fish and my wrist-watch; and though the company had created for some miles around their camp a desert more formidable than that supplied by nature, they managed to find for the completion of my training a substantial roofless building of mud and stone. I am a most incompetent electrician, and it was one of the triumphs of my personal war when, after laying and wiring the charges myself, I pressed the plunger and the building disintegrated into noise and flame, hurling a large chunk of itself—for overkeenness had brought me a little close—in tribute at my god-like feet.

  Back in Bucharest our unheroic life of luxury continued; we felt like parasites upon the unhealthy back of war. Secrecy was more essential than ever, and we preserved it; but there was no sense of speed or urgency to indemnify us. Ever since the assassination of Calinescu, the Roumanian foreign minister, by the Iron Guard, German influence had been increasing; but the Roumanians believed fairly firmly in the ultimate victory of the French and British. As soon as disaster in the West showed that we wer
e no match at all for the German Army, it was clear that the mission would not be allowed to destroy the oil-fields, and that the field company of sappers would be forbidden to land.

  That brought our third scheme into operation: to do what damage we could with a handful of British oil engineers. Our objective was the high-pressure field at Ţintea. If we could destroy that, Roumanian output would be limited to the bailing and pumping wells. We believed it could be done by four or five small parties running from well to well, laying a heavy charge at the base of each Christmas tree which controlled the flow, and timing them to go off simultaneously. Whether all the wells would catch fire immediately was doubtful, though we had means of persuading them to do so. But in any case those pillars of gas and oil could never again be controlled by anything less than a specialist team from Texas.

  The guards on the wells were still company guards, whose exact movements were known. We reckoned that they could be put silently out of action, partly by bluff from engineers whom they knew, partly by strong-arm methods. It was highly desirable to avoid loss of life. Since we were in a neutral country, killing was murder. When the wells went up, a score of torches lighting the eastern foothills of the Carpathians, we hoped to be racing through the night to Galatz and a waiting destroyer.

  We were convinced that the plan was possible; and in theory it was. But in practice we should have been disorganised by the difficulty, which later and more professional commandos proved again and again, of any exact timing in a night operation. I think we could have sent up enough wells to make the field unworkable, and possibly to exhaust it, but the chance of the parties ever reuniting for escape was nil; so was escape without shooting.

  Twenty-four hours before this spectacular act of sabotage was to be carried out, the Roumanians posted two military sentries on every well. Who betrayed us we never knew. Such indications as there were suggested that the leak was not in Bucharest or Ploeşti, but through the Roumanian Legation in London. It is possible that someone in authority had forgotten that the allegiances of major oil companies cannot, even in war, be too closely defined.

  That was the end of the oil scheme for ever. In July one of our French colleagues was arrested by the Paris Gestapo while carrying a portfolio of papers which gave away much of the earlier and official plot. All the British employees of the oil companies were expelled from Roumania. We clerks at the Legation, though both the police and the liaison officers of the Gestapo who were now with them knew that our clerkliness was highly dubious, were permitted after much argument to remain.

  War, if one has the temperament for it, may be enjoyable; but it is a most unsatisfactory setting for human intelligence. What is planned with infinite pains and care never happens; and what is unforeseen flurries the ant-heap to madness before petering away into unimportance like a short story which the author cannot finish. Success does not seem to depend upon the prudence which claims to control or guard against events, but upon creating an instrument which is not affected by events. The justification for our existence—if in fact there was any—came in Burma, where our techniques proved useful and two of the oil-men, by then commissioned in the Army, were decorated for gallantry.

  Perhaps our studies were also of some use in the protection of oil-fields. Three years later I inspected the Kirkuk high-pressure field, drawn partly by duty, partly by curiosity, and found that the Ţintea plan had been utterly defeated by burying the Christmas tree deep in a bank of pebbles. To reach the vulnerable depths of it, the saboteur would have needed hours without interruption and a platoon of men with noisy shovels.

  Bucharest put on high summer, which I drank in from the balcony of a delightful rent-free flat taken over from one of the most deservedly exiled, high above the boulevards. The monks chanted in the dark-panelled monasteries. The willows continued to cascade over streams racing down to the Danube with the last of the snow water, while the frogs sang and the buffaloes wallowed. The restaurants which jewelled with their flowers or lights the chain of lakes around Bucharest—all marshes when I was young—still offered white wine and gipsy music, while the night air breathing up from roots of rushes cooled the exquisite complexions of the women. Never was such a country as the Wallachian plain for shade and water in savage heat. Those summer months of 1940 were the last blossoming of Byzantine civilisation.

  What could we do but enjoy it? No individual can be affected to more than a sigh and a passing anxiety by public ills so long as he has health, an amply sufficient income and a share of such luxuries as his impatient body demands; and if he has none of them, no perfection of national prosperity will ever persuade him to swing happily from bough to bough. My own enjoyment was little disturbed by the fact that the police seemed to have chosen me out from my fellows for special treatment. Indeed their attentions possibly helped to dispel a sense of guilt.

  What their exact object was I never discovered—whether they hoped to make the Legation withdraw my union card, or whether they wished to impress the Iron Guard or the Gestapo by quite un-Roumanian energy. Probably we had unknown friends in the police who, when ordered to move a pawn, merely fiddled with it convincingly and withdrew their fingers. Sometimes I would be escorted to police headquarters, kept for a few hours in the waiting-room or on a hard chair in the passage, asked a few polite and inconsequent questions and dismissed; sometimes two scruffy plain-clothes operatives would blockade my front door and compel me to unconventional exits and movements which they could easily have prevented if they had had any real interest in arresting me. It was useful to have a second establishment where one did not have to register on arrival.

  The Legation flower garden was at its most spectacular. Unable to assist our country in arms, at least we were propagandists for its taste. The German collection of girls—handsome though it was—could not be compared with the British. One was an active patriot, her lovely eyes burning with the foreknowledge of public and private misery. Another, leaving politics to those who cared for them, had a skin of such individual and improbable texture that any New York beauty parlour, though utterly unable to analyse the cause of the matt velvet, would have paid her merely to stand in the shop. There was a Moldavian dancer, slim and statuesque, whose classic Greek face was the only one I have ever seen which had no sort of severity at all. There was a delicate young night-club singer, whose thirteenth-century perfection madly aroused the proper knightly mixture of chivalry and desire. And that is but to mention those who were above any mere film-star standard of beauty.

  My own part in all this Persian horticulture taught me at last to speak Roumanian: effortless, with fair accent and sentence rhythm, and with little notion beyond the imitative why I was employing any particular grammatical construction. The lesson was too swift, for one Latin language—even when its forms and its loan-words are barbaric—destroys another. My Roumanian has vanished. My Spanish fumbles. I paid no other price for entering that fairy hill where the normal penalty is of shattered emotions or a sense of guilt.

  Meanwhile disasters were falling hard upon Roumania. The Russians, with German approval, annexed Bessarabia. The Germans, with Russian approval, decided to solve the Transylvanian question.

  Imagine a cupid’s bow with the arrow fitted and half drawn. The curve of the bow is the chain of the Carpathians. The string is the frontier between Hungary and Roumania fixed by the Treaty of Trianon. Between string and bow is Transylvania—a glorious, quiet country of hills and woods, not unlike the Welsh border of Hereford and Shropshire on a much larger scale, inhabited by Magyars and Roumanians inextricably mixed.

  Generally speaking and subject to a mass of local exceptions, there were more Hungarian than Roumanian townsfolk and more Roumanian than Hungarian peasants. Before 1914, under Hungarian rule, the Roumanians were treated as a subject race and allowed no effective political representation. Under Roumanian rule, after 1920, the Hungarians had equal rights, but were humiliated by the corrupt and pliant administratio
n of a people whose traditions were Byzantine and whose religion was Greek Orthodox. Further bedevilling the pattern of nationalities were ancient settlements of German blood and language: some of them gentle Austrians, some blond and bumptious Saxons.

  At the end of September 1940 Hitler superbly settled the Transylvanian question by an award which, ethnically, was neither better nor worse than the Treaty of Trianon, but placed Roumania at the mercy of any advance from Vienna and Budapest. A wedge of territory from the centre of the bow, corresponding to the wide shoulder and left arm of the archer, was given to Hungary, and the Roumanians were ordered to withdraw their troops, their administrative staff and all their official possessions within ten days.

  This offered a marvellous chance to enter the cauldron and observe whatever Hungarian, Roumanian and German movements were bubbling within it. We were particularly anxious to know whether any units of the Wehrmacht, in uniform or plain clothes, were involved. Geoffrey Macnab invited me to go with him and try to slip through into the abandoned territory. Even as a much-liked military attaché he could not get permission from the bitter and broken-hearted Roumanians. It was quite certain that I could not.

  The luck was with me. While his car was stopped at the military control post outside Braşov and he was drawing all attention to himself and his arguments, the sentries impatiently waved me on, presumably taking me for someone who had legitimate business in the town. A moment later my Polish driver and I had the freedom of Transylvania. We raced westwards, like a speculative hearse, along the road to dying Europe, and soon began to meet the retreating columns of the Roumanian Army.

  All the roads were jammed with weary divisions on the final stretch of their 250-mile march to the east. Angry and unsinging, under a pall of hot dust, the men moved as the armies of all history, and as armies will never move again. They had only their first-line transport, drawn by oxen and horses, overladen with their baggage and barrack stores. They were forbidden by the treaty to requisition and evacuate the lorries of the abandoned provinces, and all their own motor transport had been used to empty the buildings of the civil administration.