by Norman Lewis
10TH MAY
A chance encounter in the avenue de Paris with my friend Tennant of the Medjez el Bab section whose hunted expression seems much increased since our last meeting back in the winter. Dive-bombing induces in the end its own special melancholy, as I remember from our short experience of it in Philippeville, and Tennant has been under the bombers for six months. Faith and hope have drained from him, and gloomily he unburdens himself of depressing secrets.
‘I suppose we outnumbered them ten or twelve times,’ he said. ‘In Medjez alone we had about 3,500 troops — British, American, French. In the end the Germans got tired of waiting for us and they sent a battalion of 300 men down the road from Tunis to get rid of us. We made an orderly withdrawal to previously prepared positions — in other words we pissed off as fast as we could. Three hundred against three thousand. Remember the stuff they fed you in the history books? Remember Clive of India? What’s happened to us, for Christ’s sake? Why aren’t we heroes any more? — or perhaps it was all balls and we never were. Did you hear how the Americans lost half their tanks? I can tell you because I was there. They weren’t knocked out. They heard the Jerries were coming, and they turned round and ran off the road and got stuck in the mud.’
‘Never mind, John,’ I said. ‘We’re here at last,’ I said.
‘Do you know why? Only because you can’t go on fighting when you’ve run out of petrol and ammo. They had nothing left to fight with.’
11TH MAY
Action at last. A large operation is to be mounted for the search of the German security headquarters in the rue de la Marne where innumerable documents that have escaped a back-garden bonfire are to be collected and sorted out for study.
Amid huge excitement we prepare to take control. Captain Merrylees, stiffly animated after some hours spent by his batman polishing his leather and brass, leads our exultant convoy to the scene, where something strange in the atmosphere is instantly to be detected. No one has awaited our arrival, and no one seems to notice that we are there. Officers and NCOs, like flying ants in a disturbed nest, rush wildly about with armfuls of documents — some badly charred — dodging or sometimes colliding with us. We are mysteriously excluded from all this urgent activity, which in theory we should have directed. Captain Merrylees wanders away to look for a lavatory, and we suspect that is the last we have seen of him. A moment later a red-faced major comes up, twitching and frothing with anger, and yells, ‘Who the hell are you?’
Leopold explains our business there, and the major runs his eye over us with something like disbelief. He stares down at our brown shoes, then at webbing and belts that have never known blanco, and the trousers that should have been tropical issue, but which in two cases have been made up by a civilian tailor in Philippeville, and now we realize that it is our un-regimental appearance that appals him. Some instinct of self-preservation has saved Leopold on this occasion from wearing his two guns.
It dawns on me that these interlopers must be members of a new section, or sections straight from England, for I recognize them, in their brisk bloodlessness, as men still stunned by their training. They all wear Intelligence Corps badges and caps set at exactly the right angle, where the North African sections have taken to berets, and their equipment is coated by the green blanco insisted on by the Winchester depot. The major stops one of these dazed automata to put some question to him, and the man comes to attention with a crash of heavy boots. He turns his attention on us again. ‘You’re an absolute shower,’ he says, ‘if ever I saw one.’
Coming closer to yank at a loosely hanging shirt button, his fury has sharpened by suspicion. The culprit in this case is Watson, one of our section drunkards, and the major sniffs incredulously. ‘Have you been drinking?’ he shouts at him. Half the section has been drunk up to half the time since our arrival in North Africa, and two members including Watson have been drunk every day from early morning until late at night. With huge concentration and practice they have learned in the end how to walk without staggering while in this state, but they are never free from the special odour of the so-called pure alcohol used in the manufacture of anisette. Watson, a journalist in civilian life and a persuasive talker, manages with practised dignity to flannel his way out of this situation. Fortunately the major’s attention is distracted from our second drunk, Spriggs, who is notoriously incoherent, but who stands perfectly to attention with an expression of extreme alertness.
The major, in charge, it seems, of all the security personnel in the building, now assigns our duties for the day, which consist in opening and closing doors for these earnest, document-laden figures as they dash backwards and forwards from one room to another. The FSO and Leopold make themselves scarce, leaving us to it.
Next day, with excitement everywhere at fever pitch, beleaguered by clamorous citizens who cannot make themselves understood — for there are no French speakers in sight — we are on our door-keeping duties again. All we are allowed to do is to direct enquiries to a bewildered-looking young corporal who waves his arms hopelessly as if trying to disperse smoke while the petitions and denunciations pile up on his desk top, and supplicants try to trap his hands and bribe him by sticking banknotes between his fingers. We, too, are constantly assailed by plausible scoundrels who offer women, boys, gold, the kingdom of heaven if we will only find some way of smuggling them into the presence of the Allied Commander, who they are certain can be corrupted if only he can be reached. Some time in the morning a bomb is allegedly discovered, and everybody rushes out of the building, then back again when it is pronounced to be a harmless Gestapo souvenir. Every so often our enemy the major flings open a door and brays through it into the ruckus and confusion, ‘This must be kept as a pool of silence.’ Watson, immutably drunk, copes with all this imperturbably, but Spriggs manages at one point to go to sleep on his feet propped against a door, and falls over when it is opened suddenly.
Back at HQ for the midday meal Leopold makes a shattering announcement. ‘We’re being shunted into a siding,’ he says, looking as though he has just listened to sentence of death being passed upon him. He goes on to explain that we are being pulled out of Tunis and moved to the port of La Goulette, six miles out of the city. ‘It’s a quiet place,’ he says. ‘Smashed up, with nothing working.’ His theory is that GHQ Tunis may have had reports about Captain Merrylees, causing them to lose confidence in him, and they want to get him — and us — out of their hair.
Chapter Twenty
LANK, SAD-EYED WAREHOUSES dominated the waterfront at La Goulette. The sun had flayed the paint from all the façades, and bleached out all the words where the advertisements had once been, leaving nothing but naked silvered wood, lurching cranes and abandoned tackle; hawsers, pulleys, chains insisted that this was a working port, but the ships had gone elsewhere. Air-raid shelters stood like concrete wigwams among the bomb craters. A Renault car had been sliced almost in half and pushed to the water’s edge, and the once bright red stains on its ripped upholstery had turned black. In the exact centre of this desolation the French had erected a wonderfully decorated iron pissoir and this was visited throughout the day by tattered but scrupulous Arabs carrying cans of water for their ritual ablutions. When not washing their private parts they sat fishing over the edge of the quay for small, obscene-looking fish that crawled rather than swam among the seaweed clogging the piers. Oil from a spill in La Marsa slithered over the sea-water, stifling the waves under its coat of many colours. The place smelt of baked bladderweed, oil and dust. The bombs had torn a gap in the harbour wall and through it Tunis showed its small ivory teeth along the horizon, and when the hot breeze puffed over us from the direction of Rades, which was only four kilometres away, it often brought with it the noise of trumpets and drums. Otherwise the war had passed us by.
The single distraction La Goulette offered was a waterfront café-bar which, although seedy-looking enough, yielded a series of new experiences to those who frequented it. Tunisian Jews formed the backbone of the
local middle class and owned most of the property, including this bar, where customers were waited upon with extreme solicitude by the owner’s three daughters. They were beautiful, though extremely fat, with wonderful complexions of the palest gold and enormous soulful eyes. Their corpulence reflected old-style canons of taste in these matters still surviving in this remote corner of the once Turkish dominions, and, using their fingers with expertness and delicacy, the three sisters stuffed themselves with fattening foods to preserve their desirable fleshiness.
Spanish was their first language, and the family possessed genealogical charts written in old Castilian, tracing their origins back to Cadiz before their expulsion from Andalusia at the time of the Catholic kings. The parents were largely invisible presences but the girls were always within beck and call to cook oriental messes, and sing cante flamenco while we spooned our way through them gingerly. Leopold usually found himself inspired to join in the singing, wailing a few bars about the tribulations of a deserted orphan. This was the only cante flamenco song he knew, and although our Jewish friends received it with wild enthusiasm, we were heartily sick of it.
After the first few days of getting to know each other this relationship began to take an unforeseen direction. First we were informed by our young friends that as evidence of the Jewish community’s huge gratitude in their salvation from the Germans — who were known to be preparing deportation lists — the Grand Rabbi had issued an authorization, considered unique in the history of the race, permitting Jewish girls to contract marriage with Allied personnel who were not of their religion. The next move was a formal invitation to several of the more presentable section members to a tête-à-tête held in one of the family’s private rooms. These were intended as the first tentative moves in the exploration of matrimonial possibilities. One man was seen by each sister at a time and in one instance I was called in to interpret. The small room was densely furnished in oriental style with wall carpets, complex lamps, bazaar leatherwork, and brass-ware, and the inert air was heavily overlaid with the odour of incense. The girl had dressed herself up for the occasion like a Turkish cabaret dancer which displayed much of her substantial body, covered by her normal working clothes, through stridently coloured chiffon veils. The guest — guests in this case — were offered the usual sticky sweets, to be consumed while the girl put on display her dowry — consisting largely of several hundred gold sovereigns and louis d’or. While retaining her normal expression of the blandest innocence she then twisted and turned, rotated her stomach, set her haunches abounce, and produced a few sentences which sounded like ritual Spanish in praise of her amatory technique. There was no possibility of the visitor being spurred on to impropriety, because the mother was always present, only half-concealed behind a curtain, and making her presence all the more felt by an occasional squeal of admiration at the quality of the performance put on by her daughter.
Nobody married a Tunisian Jewess, although I am sure they would have made good, if over-indulgent wives. But they did much to lighten the terrific tedium of life at La Goulette.
We were housed in an opulent villa on the hill at Le Kram, looked after by an Italian couple who performed the daily miracle of transforming Army rations into superb Piedmontese food, but harrowed unrelentingly by the problem of how to kill time. Principally we played poker and waited for the phone to ring to report the presence of a spy. The first of such calls could be counted upon to happen within minutes of nightfall. Spy alarms were a barometer of morale. A unit on the move never saw spies, but as soon as they found themselves bogged down behind the wire in a camp with nothing to do but dig latrines, the spies began to move in. If one of our drunkards answered the phone, he would laugh into the mouthpiece and hang up, but sometimes a man who was bored out of his wits would get on his motor bike, ride a few miles to some desolate encampment and listen with what patience he could to a farcical story of lights flashing in the night. It would never be more, he knew, than an innocent householder lighting his way to a privy at the bottom of his garden. But it was something to break up the evening, a new face, sometimes a fresh and interesting form of mania to be soothed. After Captain Merrylees appeared to come suddenly to life again, and began demanding reports, such an abortive experience made something to put into them.
Captain Merrylees’ personal resurrection followed several incidents which may have combined in their effect to shock him out of his lethargy. Life at the Villa Claudia, as our moral fibre collapsed, took on an almost western-frontier quality. Leopold claimed to have been warned at GHQ that for reasons undisclosed we could expect to remain where we were for the duration. It was a suggestion that gave rise to paranoia manifested in the emergence of a wild sense of humour laced with delusions. Leopold was a man divided down the middle. Half of him was schemer, the other half plain barrack-room soldier, a man who had undoubtedly enjoyed the training process in which he had been not quite reduced to an automaton and who hated the shiftlessness and vagrancy to which we had been condemned.
Now a craving seized him for the simplicities and exactitudes of the old soldiering life, and he proposed to us that — as a favour to him — we should allow ourselves to be drilled. Inducements including local leave with transportation included were offered. To us it was no more than a joke but, under the threat of limitless leisure, we agreed. He longed to put us through complicated manoeuvres of the kind invented by Frederick the Great and reverently preserved like museum pieces of weaponry at the Intelligence Corps depot, but we were too few. There were not enough army boots to go round, so half of us had to march in our brown civilian shoes, and we sloped and ordered arms with rifles borrowed from the nearest military unit. From behind their shutters our Tunisian neighbours must have watched with amazement as Leopold, stick under arm and two guns dangling on his thighs, put us through our paces. After it was over, there was no mistaking his relief, but it was short-lived and in a matter of hours the pressures began to build up.
One of his delusions, or jokes — or perhaps a mixture of both — was a belief that we were still under the risk of surprise attack by the Germans — all of whom were by this time safely locked away in PoW camps. He took to propping a loaded sub-machine-gun against the leg of the table when we sat down to dinner, and on one occasion suddenly snatched it up and discharged a volley through the French windows into a clump of cactus among which imaginary Krauts were in ambush. Twenty rounds hissed down the table a few inches above the wine glasses, and riddled the soft flesh of the prickly pears. Leopold went to inspect the result. ‘They’ve gone. They got away,’ he said, with a disturbing chuckle.
It was something to be laughed off, but within days events took a more serious turn. He had invited the local MPs to the villa, and in the course of the meal Leopold said something to their sergeant-major and they both got up and went to the flat roof together. A moment later we heard a cry followed by a crash in the garden and rushed out to find that Leopold had thrown the MP sergeant-major from the roof.
This was the emergency that brought Merrylees in trousers worn with pyjama top on the scene. He tripped over one of our drunkards who was crawling about the floor wearing the crash helmet put on him to save him from knocking his brains out against the furniture, and rushed into the garden where Leopold, laughing uproariously, stood over the unconscious sergeant-major. An ambulance was called to take the MP to hospital, and a threatened court of inquiry was only evaded through the backlog of business occupying the department concerned.
With Leopold’s sanity in doubt, there was no way out for Merrylees but a return to normality, and his recovery may have been assisted by the removal of whatever hold Leopold, as an assumedly sane man, had had upon him. Merrylees got up in the morning, shaved and dressed himself with extreme care, lined us up in his office at eight o’clock sharp and, as if staring into sunlight, deploying his always alarming smile, he issued his orders. Listening to them, we were plunged again into doubt. Merrylees wanted a full-scale report and Intelligence evaluation
with suggestions as to how security measures could be improved in La Goulette, about which there was absolutely nothing to say, and Carthage — remaining roughly as it was after the Romans had dealt with it in 164 BC. The task allotted to me called for less imagination. I was to make a regular daily count of the vehicles using the La Goulette-Tunis road, under the headings, military and non-military, and if military, whether British, American, French, etc. This fatuous information was to be collated and condensed to form the body of a weekly report to GHQ. I wondered what the G2’s feelings about it all would be after reading the first few paragraphs before it went into his waste-paper basket.
18TH JUNE
A letter from Dr Kessous in Philippeville carried by a member of 84 Section sent on detachment to Tunis. The Senegalese troops have run amok there and massacred the Arabs, with more trouble expected. Can I do anything?
Clearly nothing whatever. For all that, I feel an overwhelming urge to go to Philippeville to learn for myself exactly what has happened.
Leopold has suddenly turned reasonable again, calm and accommodating — even with his ferocious jokes pushed away out of sight. I told him I had to get away for a couple of days, and should I go to Merrylees about it? His answer was, on no account. If necessary he’d cover up for me. I get the impression the two may be taking up positions for their next private battle, and Leopold has made public his suspicions that Merrylees has blocked his application made back in April for transfer to another section.
I thought I had better tell him where I wanted to go, although not why. It was a good thing that I did because he immediately suggested that I should take my FS card to the airfield, show it to an American and try to hitch a lift on one of their planes. The FS identity card, which I had never used to date, is said to be the open sesame to all situations, and really adventurous FS personnel make free use of them to fly themselves back to England for the occasional weekend — a procedure which strikes me as dangerous. At the airfield I produce it with some diffidence hardly able to bring myself to study the American major’s reaction as he reads the endorsement stamped at AFHQ, Algiers. This hints at the possession of huge, secret power. ‘Authorized,’ it says, ‘to be in any place, at any time, and in any dress. All persons subject to Military Law are enjoined to give him every assistance in their power to facilitate the carrying out of his duties.’ Little did the major realize just what these duties have been during the past few weeks.