We left Athens in the late afternoon. The road from Megara to Corinth, cut into the escarpment between hills and the sea, was a first taste of war. There was no cover, and plenty of evidence that it was visited by enemy aircraft. Our little convoy of a truck and thirteen motorcycles lost no time in reaching the flatter coast beyond, and bivouacked for the night.
In the morning I left detachments at the embarkation beach and the canal bridge, and took half the section to Nauplion. On the way we passed the ruins of Mycenae and, since our timetable was our own, it seemed a pity not to visit them. The official guide was delighted to have work. As a servant of history, he was entirely undisturbed by transient accidents upon the distant road and in the sky. Far too overwhelmed by the present was a party of Greek air force mechanics and ground staff who cowered in the beehive tomb of Agamemnon. They too were living in a world of their imagination, but he who had only the lions upon the grey gate to guard him was the happier.
Late that evening I was back at the beach, to learn that the Australians had come and gone without embarking. All that was left of them was a mad private who, it was said, had chased the beach-master over the sands and caused some alarm to his staff before it withdrew to launches and the horizon. The private was still firing shots and chasing the ghosts of beach-masters through the scrub, but that was no reason for not getting some sleep.
I shall never forget the quality of peace in that still night as I lay on soft gravel in my sleeping-bag. I cannot explain it. Rest in the open air of April Greece? An awareness of romance due to too much reading of boy’s stories at too early an age? The feeling that as a close-knit unit we were equal to anything which routine duty or own safety might demand? It was peace such as a shepherd might feel when the dust had settled, and the raiders who had dismounted and drunk at his well were gone.
At dawn the mad private, delighted to find that his peace, at any rate, was shared, disturbed us with random fire. It was difficult to know what to do with him, for he did not seem amenable to my scientific and Marina-like approach. One of my sergeants, rising hastily from his blankets, had stuffed his .38 pistol into his trousers pocket. Endeavouring to draw it—an unnecessary gesture since my own was already backing up psychiatry—he shot himself through the foot. Bloodshed seemed at once to recall to the soldier his normal life of the previous weeks, and he willingly consented to be handed over to some passing compatriots.
The vital bridge was now in the hands of the sappers who were to blow it up, so I collected my detachment and took the road to Nauplion. Memory refuses to distinguish between this and the previous day, offering only random events. A Greek youth shot clean through the middle of the neck from right to left, and apparently none the worse for it. Mile after mile of burning and abandoned transport. A formal request from the section that they would be vastly obliged if I would stand up in the truck and spot for them since they could not hear the noise of planes above the roar of their motor-cycles—a point which would have occurred to any properly trained soldier. The dive-bombing of my truck outside Corinth when the driver and I took refuge beneath it and he, who was a regular soldier, remembered too late that it was the worst place to be. The wish, unique in my life, that I had filled my immense and irregular bottle with water instead of whisky and water. It was a fair sample of life, a rushing eagerly hither and yon to objectives which in reality were of such little importance that memory rejects any logical sequence for them.
The whole section was reunited at Nauplion, a little town still shivering from the unexpected impact of war where the main street was a gravel-bed of broken glass which crunched under foot. A plume of smoke rising above low hills marked where the S.S. Ulster Prince had gone aground in the channel and was burning. The troops which should have embarked in her were scattered around the town, and their officers were summoned to a conference which I attended. I knew none of them, nor the commander of the force.
The conference was told that there was no longer any hope of getting off from Nauplion, and that the ultimate destination would probably be Kalamai in the south of the Peloponnese. This seemed to be a good tip for masterless men, though I doubted if our worn transport would stand some eighty miles of night driving over rough roads.
I returned to the lane where the section was waiting for me and explained that we had finished our duties—unless something unexpected turned up—and that our return to Egypt depended on our own endurance and ingenuity. We destroyed all our baggage, and started off with the truck empty except for the impulsive sergeant. He was in good enough form for the journey, since his bullet, by astonishing luck, had passed between two toe bones without shattering either of them.
The road was mountainous, and as we were driving without lights the surface seemed worse than it really was. One by one, like the ten little nigger boys, either a man or his motor-cycle gave up. The first went into the truck, the second into the ravine which was always on one side or the other of the road. We did not meet or pass a soul, and how I found the way I cannot imagine. Possibly my mind was so concentrated on map-reading as to exclude my usual optimistic turnings; more probably the road led to Kalamai and nowhere else. The last motor-cycle was hurled to destruction, and then we were all in the fifteen-hundredweight truck with enough petrol but very little oil. It crept gallantly on until we ran into the tail of an Australian convoy, hopelessly jammed outside Kalamai with dawn an hour away.
An Australian Field Security Section was helping the military police to sort out the traffic. I learned from my opposite number that this was the Australian division which should have been taken off from the Megara beaches, that it was trying to disperse under the olives before dawn and that if it could not and the movement was spotted by enemy aircraft, heaven help any ships which tried to evacuate us! Our own fighter squadrons had been finished long since.
Nose to tail, in two lanes, the vehicles crept up the main street of Kalamai. It seemed an interminably long street. Seeing a narrow gap between two houses where it was unlikely that a truck could be spotted from the air, we turned into it and stopped. It was broad daylight, but the stream of traffic had now thinned to small convoys racing for cover. It cannot have been more than five minutes after the road was clear and innocent that an enemy plane came over and circled like a hopeful vulture. The entire division held its breath lest some fool of a battery commander should open up. There was in fact one single shot. It sounded like the beginning of a conversation suddenly suppressed. The German observer must have seen that there was a scattering of troops, but nothing to suggest the presence of a division.
We slept for a couple of hours in a ploughed field behind the houses. The behaviour of the Greeks reached an unbelievable ideal of allied conduct. Neither here nor on the road did we hear a word of reproach. They were confident that we should return victorious, having as little forethought as ourselves of that commonplace of folk-lore that when the devil is down he merely changes, Nazi to Communist, his shape. A kindly villager brought us bread hot from the oven; another brought wine. Those who had nothing—and they were many, for there would be little food in Greece when our abandoned rations were finished—gave praise and sympathy.
I set out refreshed to explore the area, and discovered a considerable British force—base units which had gone straight from Athens to Kalamai some days before—with many officers whom I knew. They were pessimistic. Since they had no arms but rifles and the Germans were already in the Peloponnese, the only prospect was ignominious surrender. They seemed to know little or nothing of the presence of the Australians.
Under the circumstances it was the obvious duty of the section to take to the hills or find its own transport to Crete. We disliked capture as much as anyone else, and the prospect of being interrogated rather more—though in fact it turned out, when in later campaigns the occasional Field Security N.C.O. was put in the bag, that the enemy treated us correctly and as any other prisoners-of-war. I went down to the port with a Gre
ek-speaking N.C.O. who was a master of the long, unhurried negotiation of the Levant, and we found a tug-boat captain who himself was willing to run for Crete rather than work for the Germans, but warned us that his engineer would never agree.
This was a challenge to the section’s enterprise. Continual contact, on the tug and in the cafés, kept up the captain’s courage and prevented him changing his mind. Another Greek-speaker investigated, without arousing suspicion, the opinions of the engineer and the harbour-master. A third detachment circulated among the British troops with orders to find one or two who could stoke and run a marine steam-engine, and to be professionally mysterious about their motives.
I still mourn for my requisitioned tug-boat upon the high seas—although, to judge by what happened to those who escaped in boats which offered a still smaller target, we should have reached Crete in the dinghy or not at all. Later in the day my sergeant-major, who always believed in comfort, discovered the top-secret information that the Division were to be taken off after dark. He suggested that we should do a little port security work and be taken off as well.
My conscience was not altogether happy about this. I felt that we ought to stay with our own people. On the other hand I could not deny that I was perfectly prepared to leave them by tug. Manifestly my attitude stank of pretences, especially since I had permission to get the section away when and where I could. So, with a sense of anticlimax, we patrolled the quays and, as soon as there seemed to be a shortage of Australians, embarked in the tender ourselves.
The next night there was an attempt to evacuate the British which failed because the Germans were already in the port. It was certainly wise to give priority to a first-class fighting division, whether British or Australian, but I see no reason why some of those defenceless base units on the hillside could not at least have stood in a queue. On our own ship, a liner of over ten thousand tons, there was room to spare.
I had expected—having heard of such things in the first war—to have some trouble on paper with my sergeant’s self-inflicted wound. But of course there was none. My statement that it was an accident was at once accepted and recorded. When we were all comfortable I went to my luxurious bunk in a cabin for two. And there were only two in it.
In the morning I saw that we were one of a convoy of four big ships with destroyer escort. I do not know whether the other three had embarked their troops at Kalamai or elsewhere. For the rest of the forenoon I was somewhat preoccupied by the reverberation of metal. While dreaming in a delicious bath, walls, pipes and tub were suddenly turned into a cacophonous iron drum. Leaping into the passage, I found myself among other naked, soapy and enquiring officers. We were on the whole reassured to be told that the shock to our innocence was only a near miss from a bomb. The same thing happened after breakfast when again meditating, though now not prostrate but enthroned, the pipe connecting me with the outer world appeared to be hit by something the size of a minor planet. I decided to spend the rest of the day in whatever softly padded saloon there might be.
On deck the Australian machine-gunners were having the time of their lives. I saw them bring down one bomber, and they claimed two more. So far as small arms were concerned, the fire power of that ship was terrific and must have startled the enemy pilots. But those of us who were not serving a weapon were not allowed to watch; when the next wave came over, we were lined up in an alleyway, three decks down, to stand and listen. Although my conversation was cool and my face, I trust, casual, I found that my knees were gently and imperceptibly knocking together and that the cliché of the fiction writers was true. Ever since I have considered that the highest courage is that of engine-room staff who go about their business when the enemy is kettle-drumming upon the thin steel which separates them from the sea.
One of the convoy broke her back, but the destroyers saved every man on board her before she split in half and sank. The rest were hardly damaged and, next morning, out of range.
Back in Cairo it was considered that our escape not only accorded with standards of common sense but with those of military panache. As I wished to be credited with the first and nothing would have induced me to confess, at the age of forty, to a preference for the second, that was satisfactory. I spent a few lonely days of leave at Port Said, missing the section and looking forward with the eternal hope of the predatory male to sentimental companionship—which did indeed surprisingly offer itself, but I could not find a word to say to the girl. There is nothing so destructive of desire as to be bored by the artificiality of one’s own conversation.
The next job was the most exhausting upon which I have ever had to concentrate. Thousands of refugees had escaped by sea from Greece to Egypt—civilians, military in civilian clothes, foreigners of doubtful antecedents, Sephardic Jews resident in Salonica whose ancestors had been expelled from Spain, Aschkenazy Jews driven on from country to country by Hitler’s advance, policemen with democratic sympathies or now frantically pretending them, cabaret girls, honest peasant families who had fled in such momentary hysteria of panic that they were distressingly vague as to how they had managed it or at what port, or country even, they had arrived. Some ingenious and original organiser had housed the Cairo herd in the Agricultural Hall. Each stall, intended for prize cow or Arab stallion, held a group of men or women or an entire family. The building was immense and—for Egypt in May—cool. It was designed for the tidy distribution of rations and medicaments, whether by stud grooms or by the Army, and water was laid on in every stall. The sanitary arrangements, though quite satisfactory for animals and the smaller refugees, were all that had to be improvised.
To sort out this mass by preliminary interrogation into individuals with a name and a past was my job. It went on for a fortnight in which the shortest day was twelve hours. I had the loan of Greek-speakers from the Field Security depot, and I myself worked through relays of interpreters chosen from such Greek soldiers and police as were obviously reliable and spoke one of my languages. I could understand enough Greek to appreciate the main points of a story and to ask a very simple question, but no more.
Hardest to bear were the well-meaning efforts of British business and diplomatic wives, determined to be angels of mercy and always making pets of the more plausible and doubtful characters. But that is one of the curses laid upon security officers; I had already experienced it in Athens where my efforts to prevent society women whom I knew to be pro-German from visiting British hospitals and soldiers’ clubs were pilloried as narrow-minded. I have no doubt that in a time of emergency and among any cultured and merciful people security must give way to charity; but one should also put a penny in the box for the security officer who will not forgive himself nor be forgiven if the enemy agent slips through too easily.
That done, I was invited to run a Greek bureau in Security Intelligence Middle East. I did not feel, however, that I had charged into this fascinating life in order to sit in an office and file the political aberrations of Greeks. I wanted to be out and about again with a section. My choice, from the point of view of military ambition, was foolish. But I was determined to enjoy my war in my own way.
Robin Wordsworth offered me the Jerusalem section, which was a little uncertain what it was doing or why it was supposed to be doing it. When I had been in the Holy City a couple of weeks I was uncertain too. I (b) was unique for jealous stupidity. If I wanted information from headquarters files, I could only get it by persistence. The alternative was to get it from Palestine Police—if one did not mind being suspected of intending to sell it to Jew or Arab.
But certainly the section had not created confidence around itself, and was not to be compared with my brilliant Greek section. It was one of the first to be formed and contained too many ex-regulars who had transferred to Field Security at a time when we were ready to accept anyone with a trustworthy record but few other qualifications; and it was influenced by the military police, who always judged a man’s keenness on his ability to
‘bring cases.’ There was, however, one compensation: the best sergeant-major I ever had. He had been a Lincolnshire gamekeeper, and only wanted an employer who knew his own mind. That section, when we had trimmed it to shape, began to resemble in tone some remote English village. It was cunning rather than intelligent, cynical, outrageously cheerful at parties or under stress, and rich with hidden tenderness in unexpected places.
Meanwhile, expecting a long stay in Jerusalem, I made myself comfortable. A Field Security Officer, unless with a formation, was not obliged or encouraged to live in a mess. It was a preposterous ruling, founded on the idea that he might be called upon to investigate the indiscretions of a brother officer. If he ever did, the mess and the brother officer would have been the last persons to know anything about it. But of course we fostered the delusion for all it was worth, since it allowed us to live on a civilian standard. A safe rule for the traveller was to choose the hotel where the Field Security Officer stayed. It was sure to be cheap and to have food which, however exotic to British tastes, was highly edible.
I quickly discovered that Jerusalem hotels, with the exception of the too expensive King David, were dull. Those with Jewish proprietors were too redolent of Central Europe. Those with Arab proprietors ran to hot sweet puddings, suet and other delights of the colonial service. There was nothing for it but to take a flat, and so, answering an advertisement, I fell in with a delightful person of about my own age who had come as a child from Poland to Palestine, studied philosophy under Croce in Italy and spoke the only Hebrew I ever heard which was not harsh to the ear. Haim Wardi had converted an old Arab stable into a cool one-room house, packed with books. At the bottom of his garden was a much smaller one-room house. This I took, and furnished it with the barest necessities, painted grey, and two Bokhara rugs. It successfully combined military and aesthetic severity.
Against the Wind Page 13