The men were fighting fit and the field ambulances had very few occupants. These were allies of whom in a less scientific age we could have been proud, who would have fought over the exploding oil-fields with cheers and laughter if only the Germans had obligingly invaded a year before. I remembered the epic of the Battle of Marasesti—possibly the only folk epic, authorless except for gipsy singers, produced in Europe during the twentieth century—which celebrated the sole Roumanian victory of 1917 when the peasant troops, incompetently officered, half-starved and decimated by typhus, lost their tempers and tore into the astonished Germans with cold steel. We used to ask the gipsy bands to play it whenever there was a party of the enemy enjoying its meal. In the last few months they had sadly refused.
The next day, driving south across the path of the rear guards, we returned through the pass of Petroşani into Roumania proper. I cannot remember why. Probably there were rumours of German units in the south-west which had to be investigated, or information was wanted on troop movements in the pass. After exploring the country around Craiova, we turned north again into Transylvania by a forest track which the map suggested was passable for vehicles in summer.
Hour after hour, congratulating ourselves on avoiding all control posts but increasingly aware that the car could never be turned back, we crept downwards over rutted turf winding so closely among trees that in places we had to manœuvre as if extracting the car from a crowded parking place. Towards midnight this Hans Andersen path led us out into a world that was the dreamed ideal of human beings ever since the Golden Age. It was a world with no government at all.
The Roumanians had gone. The Hungarians had not yet arrived. There was, next morning, a curious sense of apprehensive freedom. Magyar-speaking peasants were pleased, but frankly admitted that in that district of mixed population it was not worth while to upset the peace between neighbours. Roumanian speakers were sad but comforted themselves—for in adversity we believe anything—with thoughts that Transylvania would be isolated from war and politics. Both nationalities walked in the streets or sat outside their cottages waiting, doing no work, savouring the quiet of this strange day without military, without police, without even a post office. Torn papers flapped lazily around the forecourts of barracks and public buildings. Official windows, blank and black, were pointless decorations to the squares which they had overawed. There were no flags.
But it was time to watch the arrival of the triumphant Magyars. We drove north-west, crossing the axis of the advance, and were nearly caught behind it when the wheels dug themselves in on a soft hillside where we were hiding and observing simultaneously—with perhaps a balance in favour of the first.
A small column of armoured cars was advancing below us, with another in the distance on a parallel road. Both were preceded by motor-cyclists in black leather jerkins and with slung carbines. Such modernity was overwhelming after the dust and the ox-carts; but comparison was hardly fair. Had the Roumanians been feeling their way into empty country, preceded by their toy Renault tanks, they would have appeared equally up to date.
The Hungarian advance guards, though fast in open country, were stopping to ensure that all centres of population were clear of the potential enemy and to instal the new administration. We were able to by-pass them and race ahead. We were now in a wholly Magyar-speaking district. The village streets were decorated with triumphal arches. Outside gendarmerie or church were welcoming tables of food and wine.
We were hungry and thirsty; and this air of civic rejoicing, though we were far from invited to the party, was irresistible. My Polish driver made a suggestion of a simple daring which would never have occurred to me. Our Legation car had no diplomatic number-plates but it did possess a Union Jack to be flown from the radiator cap whenever a real diplomat was in it and on official business. This jewel of a chauffeur proposed that we should put it up.
The Legation had its pick of the Poles. On the collapse of their country, any military who could still pass between the Russians and Germans escaped into Roumania. If in uniform, they had to be interned; but if they managed to appear at the frontier in anything remotely resembling civilian clothes, they were treated as civil refugees. The Roumanians, moved by a people they liked and a fate which might well be in store for themselves, gave them all the hospitality they could afford. The British, too, could and did help. Lord Forbes—now the Earl of Granard and then an extraordinarily able boy in his middle twenties—had flown himself into Bucharest in 1939 and bullied the Legation, which had no job for him, into letting him take over Polish refugees. Later he was appointed Air Attaché, but his hobby remained Poles. Whenever a reliable man was wanted for any job, speaking any required language, Forbes could always recommend one. This driver was his own, and a particular pet. He had a most sympathetic disregard for the consequences of his actions. To have no nerves, you need to have no country.
At the next village, flying the Union Jack, we were received with roars of applause and, when we stopped at one of those hospitable tables, overwhelmed with bread, meat, bottles and questions. Who were we? What were we doing? The Hungarians had a bad conscience at accepting Transylvania from the hands of Hitler. They were delighted to see the British flag. It promised that there was still opposition to the Nazis.
I explained that I was the Official British Observer. My speaking of the despised Roumanian aroused only interest. After long experience of the League of Nations and its commissions empowered to report upon the treatment of minorities, they thought it astonishing that any official observer should speak either of the local languages. It is a depressing thought that all international investigations are conducted through interpreters with an axe to grind.
The quenching of their curiosity and our thirst was interrupted by the roar of the Hungarian advance guard coming up the road. We bounded into the car and vanished. Once out of sight behind the nearest kindly contour, panic gave way to the healthy optimism of wine. It was cowardly to go on ahead, skimming the cream of the sandwiches under a false pretence, when duty demanded that we should observe the actual occupation. It seems to me now that duty demanded nothing of the sort, but at the time I was possibly taken in by my own propaganda.
We folded away the Union Jack and drove into the next little town a few minutes ahead of the motor-cyclists, adopting a stern and selfless pose like that of the mounted police officer who rides a quarter of a mile in front of a procession and ignores the premature cheers. Our right to park among other cars opposite the reception committee was not questioned. The public was busy craning its neck, and no officious authority, for another happy half minute, existed.
There was little to see but general enthusiasm and what looked like a brigade staff. Accompanying the Hungarians were a car of German newspapermen and a car of observers, more official than I, with Nazi arm-bands. The hated symbol on that hated, military flesh was curiously unreal. Both they and I were prohibited from wearing uniform in a neutral country, so that I could hardly be considered a spy; nor, however romantically I tried, could I feel that I was anything so definite. On the other hand I had no right whatever to be in Hungary—though the mayor was only now signing his oath of allegiance—nor to take notes of troop movements.
The rejoicings covered a discreet withdrawal. I was far more nervous when we passed through Bistrţa, a sulky Saxon town now flowering with swastikas which had been forbidden by the Roumanian government, where the inhabitants had no immediate excitement to take their minds off the presence of a stranger and nothing to do but stare suspiciously and make futile half-gestures of blocking the road.
There was now little empty space between the advancing Magyars and the angry Roumanians looking down from the mountain-tops into their lovely lost province. We began the gloomy climb, up through the pine forests of the Dracula country to the new frontier. At the top, above the trees, the road was barred. An attempt at bluff, a swearing that I lived in Bucharest and was happy to be able to re
turn to my dear country, merely brought the bayonets forward from a yard to six inches. After all that humiliation the Roumanian soldiery was thirsting for blood, and any foreigner would do.
We were rescued by a young lieutenant of security police who ordered us to return to Transylvania. When I flatly refused and showed him my diplomatic union card, which at least proved that I was normally resident in Bucharest, he jumped into the car and escorted us down to Vatra Dornei for interrogation. He was a pleasant and civilised fellow, and I remarked, with the light-heartedness of a clear conscience, that I hoped I should not be shot. The prospect did not seem to him altogether absurd; he answered that Roumanians shot no one without court-martial. It then occurred to me that I had in my notebook, besides bits of information on Hungarians, details far less scrappy of the Roumanian order of battle. It was just that touch of professionalism which the amateur soldier so enjoys.
Little Vatra Dornei was half garrison town, half holiday resort. In spite of all the excitement across the border, it preserved the peace of Sunday evening. There was laughter to be heard from the cafés and, over all, the song of the water rushing down to the Moldavian rivers. The lieutenant, marching a little behind, directed me to the office of the Deputy Provost Marshal. He did not bother with my Polish driver. Whatever the man had been up to, there was no doubt of his status and political sympathies. The Roumanians were usually generous to exiled Poles.
The D.P.M. was not in his office. His clerk thought he was at home. We went to his home. His wife thought he was at the office. The security lieutenant, seeing in time the pit which yawned at his feet, quickly lied that we had not yet been to the office. In after years when I too was in control of frontiers—though not, thank God, ever responsible to a D.P.M.—I used to remember my Roumanian colleague with affection. I doubt if I myself, in the obstinate pursuit of duty, would have been so quick to anticipate the worst as he.
But there his tact ended. He must have suspected how his commanding officer was spending the evening, but he saw no reason why so commonplace and traditionally soldierly a sport should not be interrupted with as little ceremony as a British officer would interrupt a game of bridge.
He dragged me round the hotels, and at last we ran the D.P.M. to earth. He was upstairs in a bedroom. The security officer knocked and entered, leaving me in the passage. There was an embarrassed female exclamation. The D.P.M.’s voice rose—quite literally, for it started at divan level and continued at the height of a standing man. His eloquence was so fascinating that I never thought of getting rid of my incriminating notebook. The strip torn off that unfortunate lieutenant was the most uninhibited exhibition of discourteous military cursing I have ever heard.
When the lieutenant came out, I suggested a drink. He accompanied me, still silent, to a café table. I did what I could to restore his equanimity—praised his country, his army and even his government, told him that I had watched the retreat and that no other troops in Europe could have effected it on their feet in time. He hardly spoke at all. At last he told me to take my car and driver and go quickly before he changed his mind.
It was not that he believed me innocent; nor was it wholly humiliation that on such a day of national mourning his commanding officer should spend the evening in pleasant dalliance. What shook him, I think, was the taking of amusement so seriously that interrogation of a highly suspicious character in a time of crisis could not be immediately arranged. The D.P.M. might in his defence have pleaded—if he had ever heard of him—Sir Francis Drake and his game of bowls. But he was not a man to explain himself to subordinates. He personified the middle-class bully who is the greatest justification of communism in any peasant country. For the lieutenant nothing was worth while any more, and it was easier to get rid of the patronisingly sympathetic foreigner than to endure his eyes.
A day or two after I returned to Bucharest, the end came. King Carol abdicated. Antonescu and his fascist Iron Guard took over the government. Already one hotel was packed with German officers in civilian clothes. Since Roumania was still officially neutral, the accredited diplomats stayed on. All the more equivocal British organisations were loaded into a ship and despatched from Constanta to Istanbul.
Our last act was to get rid of our store of explosives which could not possibly be left where they were. That was a nerve-racking night, for several cars had to pass through the capital and out into open country while the roads were busy with the disorganised activities of police, military and the Iron Guard. If one of the cars were stopped, and its cargo of gelignite, gun cotton, detonators and the timing devices of the saboteur were examined, the Roumanians would be justified in interning us for the duration of the war. But safely we sank them, punt-load after punt-load, among the tall reeds of a lake, and intemperately, when all was done, we drank the white wine of our bold host who had provided the waterside villa and the boat.
Of the original Roumanian mission some, during the long wait for action, had been claimed by commercial warfare, by the fringes of diplomacy and by other branches of Intelligence. The only simple soldiers left were Stanley Green and myself. He had some right to the name, for he had seen active service, under age, in the first war.
We reported to GHQ in Cairo and began to look for jobs. Egypt in October 1940 was still a preserve of the regular army. If the amateur had not been sent out from England with a definite posting or was not a local resident with special knowledge of the Middle East and its languages, he was nobody’s responsibility and was very sensibly encouraged to raid the military branches for himself and grab whatever work he thought would suit him; a fair parallel would be the seeking of a job in peacetime through the streets of some immense, self-sufficient industrial centre, full of friendliness and short of men. What I had been doing was known; what my training had been was not. So I polished my Sam Browne, attended to my saluting and let them speak for me. I was determined not to be stuck in an office.
First we tried to get into commandos, then still in their infancy, and were frankly told that bath chairs were not included in their transport. They were right, of course, but it was a shock. I did not like being forced to consider the fact that in another month I should be forty. After a year in Roumania I thought myself fully capable of drinking commando or commanded under whatever table there might be, and of carrying on subtle and destructive warfare from any mountain-top. It did not occur to me that I was rather less capable of climbing there than I had been, seven years earlier, upon Hymettus.
Green in his explorations—eventually leading him to control of refugees, for which his imaginative kindness and instinctive understanding of eccentric mentalities perfectly fitted him—discovered the existence of something called Field Security, and recommended it to me. It sounded congenial—the only branch of Intelligence in which a free-lance could enjoy the care and companionship of a unit under his own command.
I called at Field Security Headquarters and was interviewed by the commandant, Robin Wordsworth—an amateur like myself, chosen for his excellent Arabic and his experience of administration in the Sudan, who had been for a year or two before the war a Dorset farmer. He had a welcoming face, burnt by the desert as by his own concealed emotions, which was attractive to men and even more to women. He was in urgent need of officers with languages, and took me on with no apparent hesitation. I was supposed to attend a security course of three weeks at the depot. I never did. Even as a security officer it was my fate to be taught by experience.
A few days after I had, in principle, joined, I was hanging about the commandant’s office and reading all the manuals and directives on the functions of I (b): the defence, that is, of the army against the enemy agent. An exclamatory conversation was going on between Robin and his adjutant on the utter impossibility of finding an officer to take a Field Security Section to Greece at short notice. I proposed myself. At least I knew my way about Athens, could read a menu in Greek and choose from it intelligently. Within a week of lan
ding at Alexandria I found myself back there, but now bivouacked on the sands to the south of the city with my tiny independent command around me in the darkness. Here at last was fulfilment.
To right and left of us were other small units or detachments under other junior officers. We were settling down to open tins when some Poles appeared out of the night and told us that a hot meal was ready in their camp if the men would come up with their mess-tins, and that they would be honoured if the officers would dine with them in mess. That was typical of Poles. I doubt if any British unit would have been so generous. Hospitality to casual visitors was normal, but hospitality to two or three hundred could never be explained on paper. It occurred to me much later that the Poles had impulsively driven a most improper hole through the security of our move. We had not been mysteriously left on the dark sands for nothing.
The next day we were shipped to the Piraeus on the Australian cruiser Sydney, then covered with glory from a successful action in the Mediterranean. I was alarmed to find myself the senior captain on board, and therefore O.C. troops. But the centuries-old routine of this—to me—astonishing organisation, the Army, could deal at once with a situation so preposterous. Where there was an O.C., it appeared there had to be an adjutant. To appoint one who had travelled out to the Middle East in a troopship and had some idea what duties devolved upon an O.C. troops was my first and only responsibility. I was installed with some state in the Captain’s day cabin—he himself sleeping on the bridge—where I learned in peace the lecture notes of the course I had not attended, and at intervals wandered round the mess decks with my adjutant, looking, I hoped, benevolent.
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