Against the Wind

by Geoffrey Household

  I staged a show straight out of any boy’s story. It would not have taken in an intelligent European—unless he had been reading too many of them—but it was calculated to appeal to the Arab passion for dramatic unreality: a failing which does not lead him into as much trouble as might be expected, since it is balanced by a tiptoe, deer-like quality of caution.

  When X led the notable and his three or four retainers into the room, they were faced by a desk behind which sat a figure in a white suit with a Nazi arm-band, and a black bag over his head pierced by Ku Klux Klan eye-holes. Behind him, standing to attention were three large, silent toughs, also black-bagged—among them, Prendergast, whose appearance of Teutonic stiffness and brutality behind his tommy-gun was wholly terrifying. I rose with courtesy—for the principal German agent would surely have some knowledge of local customs, though unfortunately he spoke no Arabic—and my address of welcome was beautifully interpreted by X. Except for occasional harsh commands, we used French, on the grounds that X did not understand German nor I Italian.

  Our guest was a man of distinction in his middle forties, exquisitely robed and bearded. In spite of the extraordinary spectacle, his face showed only the slightest flicker of surprise, instantly extinguished; he might have been entering the tent or house of some distant cousin whom he had never had the good fortune to meet before. It is that fineness of breeding which has always enchanted the not so rare Englishmen who have loved, pampered and courted the Arabs for the last hundred years. It is impossible not to respect and admire an aristocrat even if you know—or perhaps because you know—that under the perfection of good manners is a childish heart seething with fear and distrust, and balancing the advantage of treachery against the convention which forbids it.

  This minor and slippery Saladin infected me with a chivalry which I am sure my Fuehrer would have censured. When the hour came for the evening prayer, I withdrew the masked chorus, leaving notable and retainers alone with Allah and all our arms. The gesture did indeed impress him, and upon our return relations over the coffee were most cordial. Except for the taking of a solemn oath of brotherhood, the meeting led nowhere. That was to be expected. He sent his regards to the Fuehrer, having in his mind, I imagine, a mere picture of envied power to shed blood noisily, and never perceiving that his daily solitudes with God made nonsense of that intolerable plebeian.

  A second meeting was marked by even greater social ease—especially on our part, for we had at first omitted to ventilate the black bags, and conversation on a hot Palestine night, let alone enthusiastic heiling of Hitler, left us gasping and sweating in our home-made Turkish baths. Confidence seemed to be growing. I bought from the notable an Italian automatic. X recommended the purchase on the grounds that it was a gesture of trust, admitting us, as it were, to the arms-dealing club.

  But trust was still far from absolute. When we came out of the block of flats after giving our Arab guests an hour to get away, their hired car charged round a corner at us trying to illuminate our faces with the headlights. It was a clumsy attempt and it failed; but then there was a half-hearted attempt to follow us. We separated and took to lanes and backyards, making such speed as was possible with tommy-guns down our trouser legs, and reunited over cool drinks in my garden.

  X and the Arabic-speaking corporal who had been lent to me were, however, very nearly in trouble. They were taken out into a barrenness of hills to see more caves, and, once there, were suddenly told that it was known that the principal German agent was a British officer. X, with great presence of mind, replied contemptuously that of course he was. What else could he be and still operate successfully and unsuspected? This answer surprised and delighted the notable—who had only been trying a third-degree guess—and both men reported that it was quite safe to continue the meetings.

  We no longer believed in the cache of arms, and we had established with reasonable certainty that our man was not in touch with any real German agent or network. The notable was ready to commit himself to support of the enemy provided Rommel was near enough to protect him from the consequences; but that was nothing new. Plenty of influential Palestine Arabs were willing to be polite to the Germans—not that they at all preferred them to the British, but they approved their methods of dealing with Jews. The question thus arose what use further meetings could be. We might indeed set up as agents provocateurs, but we had quite enough potential trouble in Palestine without provoking more. For us the operation had no longer any clear objective. For Cairo it might have some. So Henry Hunloke reported what we had done and asked for orders. Cairo replied in effect that if Household and Prendergast had now enjoyed themselves sufficiently to return to their normal routine, nothing would be lost by their doing so.

  I agreed with the verdict thankfully. I felt that I could continue the meetings for some time without embarrassing I (b) or the Palestine Administration, but I could not bear the thought of arresting a man with whom I had taken a very solemnly sworn oath of brotherhood. Honour is a luxury which both spy and security officer must sometimes be prepared to forego; nevertheless to break an oath is a crime against humanity. I see and saw the difference between that and fair deception as resembling the difference between the murder of a civilian and killing an enemy in uniform.

  There were two sequels to this pointless adventure. Prendergast, thirteen years later in Kenya, attended a meeting of the Mau Mau and won a George Cross for it. I have never heard the story from him, but the memory of our parlour theatre, completely without danger, may have, as it were, inoculated him against stage nerves when he engaged in the real professional play with its appalling risk of instant and disgusting death.

  The other sequel is a record of sheer naughtiness. I gave the Italian automatic which I had bought to an officer leaving for Persia at short notice, who had no pistol of his own. GHQ were then in a state of justifiable excitement over the number of captured weapons which were reaching an eager market. All road and frontier controls were ordered to put the possessor on a charge if he could not prove that he had come innocently by his weapon.

  I was sitting in my office one evening with a conscience exceptionally clear when a solemn sergeant of the Special Investigation Branch—the detective branch of the military police—requested a private interview with me. That seemed unusual—for liaison was at officer level—but I saw the light when, after some professional clearing of the throat, he asked me if I would care to make a statement regarding a pistol which Captain So-and-So said that I had given him. The word given was pronounced in the sedate inverted commas of the police, and I could sense a well-controlled enthusiasm that at last the S.I.B. had been able to pin a crime on Field Security.

  Our relations with them were always most friendly but marked by disapproving silences, somewhat resembling those between the amateur sleuth and the inspector in a detective story. For example, it was the duty of the S.I.B. to trace and apprehend a deserter. It might be our duty to watch the deserter’s contacts and even to meet him for an occasional drink without hinting to him or anyone else that we knew exactly what he was. The result was that they considered us irresponsible, while we, more in touch with politics, would sometimes hide our eyes in horror at the constable’s heavy foot loudly descending upon bridges too flimsy for an angel’s toe.

  I pretended embarrassment. I allowed it to be dragged from me that I had indeed bought the pistol for money. I would not say where. I even signed with trembling hand a statement, and murmured that I hoped Palestine Headquarters would be able to clear me. So the sergeant’s captain had a final polish put upon his buttons and called on Henry Hunloke. He, warned by me that the enquiry was on the way, but quite ignorant of my un-Christian behaviour, of course said with his usual humorous and impenetrable courtesy that my arms-dealing had the approval of high authority. Ever after I could see upon the dead faces—when sober—of the S.I.B. a guarded determination not even to hint that the Intelligence staff were selling pistols and spending the pr
oceeds upon alcohol and women.

  Early in 1943 I followed the pistol to Paiforce, a new Command, entirely separate from Middle East Command, which had been formed under General Wilson to hold Persia and Iraq against a very possible German offensive through the Caucasus, and to keep the road and railway open for the American supplies which were pouring into Russia through the Persian Gulf ports.

  I was offered the job of Commandant of Field Security and of course accepted with pride and delight. But between my acceptance and departure Paiforce died—though still preserving an appearance of life from busy movements of the beetles on its corpse. The German threat was obviously over for ever when their armies fell back from Stalingrad and the Volga. Wilson left to take over Middle East Command.

  I arrived in Baghdad in March. The staff, occupying a large housing estate, was to be seen at its very worst. This desert suburbia, coloured yellow and mud upon a plain of mud, was itself enough to rot any generosity of spirit among those who worked in it. The one object of every administrative soldier—he was often unconscious of it and saw it as duty—was to increase the work of his department so that it should not be abolished. And that would be true of the army of any nation, for as soon as a soldier gets into a chair which is not operational he takes on all the vices of a civil servant.

  Having created Paiforce, the War Office could not be expected to put a brutal end to it within six months; and the Command did have an excuse for existence since the Persian Gulf was too far away to be easily administered by Middle East. Just as in the days of the Pharaohs there was only one road from the Nile to Mesopotamia, though ours cut straight across the desert and theirs circled round it through Syria.

  The fault seemed to lie—but here I am out of my depth—in too rigid a system of administration. If war requires a Command responsible, without any intermediary, only to Whitehall, then it must be a General Headquarters; and if it is a GHQ, then it must have all the administrative offices of a GHQ in spite of the fact that there is a bare half day’s work for any of them. Heaven knows what Paiforce cost the taxpayer, simply because established custom prevented Treasury and War Office from limiting a GHQ to the size, say, of an army staff.

  The result was that captains became colonels, and majors, brigadiers, in spite of themselves. Promptly they acquired a vested interest in creating enough paper to give their jobs a semblance of indispensability. Even those who were only too willing to lose exalted rank on condition that they might leave Paiforce for a more active front found it difficult to do so without pulling strings in Cairo or London. There was indeed a small office at GHQ responsible for reducing staff where possible, but to go in there and submit a paper actually recommending reduction was considered as unconventional as preaching pacifism.

  Our living conditions were revolting. Admittedly my own had been sybaritic, but I would not have minded a clean change to canvas and open air. As it was, we were crammed into requisitioned hotels along the Tigris, from which we poured every morning at eight on to the ferries across to our housing estate. The kitchens and sanitary arrangements of these detestable hotels were quite inadequate to deal with us, and drink on either side of the river was pretty well limited to the Baghdad water supply. For my evening relaxation I was reduced to a couple of shots of palm toddy in the privacy, when there was any, of my literally stinking bedroom. There were two beds in it, and the other was reserved for visiting officers. I never knew to what pillowed head I should be compelled to be polite, nor whether it would prefer to snore, to converse or to vomit.

  Not everyone loathed Baghdad as much as I. Down the Tigris was a noble thick-walled house, built by some rich merchant in days when the trader was the only tourist, where mysterious Intelligence officers lived with silver and mahogany. What they did I was never quite sure and, as Commandant, Field Security, I had to set an example by refraining from indiscreet questions. But among them was Alec Waugh, as always on enviably good terms with his surroundings. Occasional meals together reminded me that the hideousness of that squalid city should be easily endurable to the accustomed traveller.

  At the beginning of the hot weather, messes were at last organised. The Intelligence staff was allotted a house with a flowered courtyard and, on two sides of it, a line of whitewashed cells in which one could set up a camp bed and an orange box and enjoy privacy. It was so genial a mess that I wondered if my preference for hotels—excluding Baghdad—had not been entirely wrong. Our mess secretary was a bon vivant who had had some experience of catering for a London club. His duties at GHQ were of the slightest, and he spent his time supervising the issue of rations and the Iraqi cooks. What that man did—I am ashamed that I have forgotten his name—with ration beef, bully, potatoes and onions was incredible. Even on the rare occasions when one could not enjoy the meal, one could be entertained by the ingenuity of the attempt. Liquid supplies became plentiful, for every officer on tour, especially if he were bound for Teheran, was expected to bring back whatever he could buy and carry. I myself had the luck to find a NAAFI about to close down in Kirkuk, and returned to Baghdad with dozens of gin and Palestine wine in the back of the car.

  Once away from Baghdad and on tour among the sections depression was impossible. I never cared for central Iraq, since there is no colour in it but the weary sky, no accident of ground but irrigation ditches and no timber except for the palms along the Tigris. How the human spirit could have flowered in that world of fertile mud is difficult for the European to understand. Jerusalem and Hamadan, Caesarea and Damascus and Aleppo—in all those I could have lived and been content. But in Ur and Babylon and the valley of the Nile no raising of eyes to the glory of ziggurat or pyramid could have prevented me from packing upon my asses such wives as they could accommodate and departing like Abraham to find the God of the hills. Even Nineveh, where rolling grasslands at least feel their way towards the mountains of Kurdistan, would have been home enough. Yet Nineveh contributed to civilisation little but a savage military aristocracy. Perhaps the long, tranquil periods of history can only be attained under the flat sedative of mud.

  North and east of Nineveh and Mosul, Iraq becomes a land of poplar and willow and rushing water, with a distant glint of snow. At Mosul was a splendid section, almost entirely concerned with civil security. Among their responsibilities were the wild Turkish frontier, the Persian frontier where enemy agents were active, the Baghdad Railway and the town of Mosul, always smouldering with the ancient enmity between Kurd and Arab. I found them isolated, grossly overworked, learning the local languages and apparently enjoying every changing month. I could do no more than see they had all the comforts which could be given, and a very fair share of the small secret fund.

  A long tour took me to Basra and Abadan, and twice across Persia. The vital road to Russia was intolerably dangerous. It was only wide enough for two vehicles carefully to pass, and up and down the hills hurtled the lorries of the United Kingdom Commercial Corporation, driven by reckless Persians until brakes and springs fell apart. Added to these terrorists were the American trucks, nearly all with coloured drivers. It seemed to be the American plan to keep the transport in first-class condition but to work the drivers into the ground. There were many cases of these tireless and gallant negroes falling asleep at the wheel. At least they were generally believed to have fallen asleep. There was seldom anyone left to confirm the truth.

  My driver and I decided to take a more ancient road across the mountains and live to fight another day. There, instead of the frantic lifting of supplies to Russia, we caught up the summer migration of the Lurs. It was a scene from the long past of humanity, and by now, except in the heart of Central Asia, it may have vanished from the world.

  I could no more number the tribe than Moses. There may have been ten thousand; there may have been fifty thousand. They were dark, eager-looking men and women, all with the same peculiar nose—a long, delicate instrument with a curiously arched flair to the nostrils and a slight hook whi
ch had neither the beak-like quality of the Semitic nor the solidity of the Roman or the Basque. They were all dressed in black, with little colour. They moved with their herds of sheep, goats and cattle, and all their possessions on the backs of pack animals: ponies, donkeys or camels. It took us a whole day in low gear to get through them, and they were remarkably good-tempered over the intrusion—especially since we had no Persian for politenesses or exhortation and were limited to the common exclamations of soldier’s Arabic, of which they seemed to understand about as much as we did.

  At Kasvin we entered the Russian zone, and at last I was face to face with the almost mythical people whose refugees I had comforted as a youth, around whose frontiers, like a gipsy skirting a park wall, I had roamed as a commercial traveller, whose entry into the war as allies had brought us all the certainty that some time, in years to come, the enemy would be exhausted. To us in the garrison of the Middle East the entry of America was not so immediately encouraging. As our parochial minds saw it, the Indian Ocean was likely to be lost to Japan and the Middle East to become the middle of a sandwich.

  I cannot imagine what my private excitement wanted from the Russians. I knew they had two legs. I was perfectly familiar with their uniforms and their faces. They did no more than salute me smartly as they raised a barrier to let me in, and salute again twelve miles further on when they let me out. But in my imagination—and that is better than nothing—the world of 1913 had returned.

  Teheran was my first taste of civilisation since Jerusalem, for between the two cities there is none except in the eyes of those passionate suitors of the Arab, tragic in their surrender to so elusive a love. The food and wine were superb, for the Persians are among those nations of the world who care profoundly for their bellies. The capital was full of lovely women. I should, I think, have enjoyed myself if fate had led me from the Bank of Roumania to the Anglo-Persian, but the hot-house life of Bucharest would not have been left so far behind as I imagined.