by Alec Waugh
‘In February 1944,’ she said, ‘during D-day planning, it became highly important to confuse and mislead the Germans. Some very ingenious devices were employed. You’ve read of the actor who was dressed up like Montgomery and sent to Gibraltar. His presence was reported to Berlin. The Germans couldn’t believe an invasion was imminent when the British Commander-in-Chief was in Gibraltar. There were quite a few plans like that. My chief thought out a very pretty one. We’d drop behind the lines a Commando volunteer whose nerves we had reason to believe would give way under torture. We would prime him with false information that he would believe was true; then we would warn the Germans through one of our double agents. He would be captured at once.
To begin with, he’d be brave enough. When he broke down, his subsequent sense of guilt and of remorse would be so acute that the Germans would be convinced that he had told the truth. The success of the scheme depended on the prisoner’s own belief that he had betrayed his countrymen.’
‘You couldn’t be sure he would break down.’
‘I know, but even so his capture would be useful. That double agent was worth two divisions. The Germans were getting restive. It was high time he reinstated himself with a piece of genuine information.’
Inside myself I shivered. I had known that such things were threatened, I had been told such things were done, but this was the first actual example I had had.
‘I thought I was unshockable,’ I said. ‘I’m not.’
‘How do you think I felt? At first I wouldn’t touch it, but they talked me into it. War was war, they said. You couldn’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. Generals made feint attacks, sent whole battalions to their death. “Suppose,” they said, “you, as a general, had ordered a feint attack upon a certain hill. The attack could only be effective if the regiment making it was convinced that the whole issue of the battle depended on its success. You’d lie to the colonel, wouldn’t you?” That was the argument they used and they were right. War’s basically a crime. Use the sharpest weapon.’
She spoke bitterly in the same tone that I had heard her use at Baghdad all those years ago when she had defended the use of buzz-bombs.
‘What made you suspect he would break down?’ I asked.
‘Did you notice his hands? He told me that he wanted to become a pianist. The artist, in the last analysis, will sacrifice anything, even his country, for his art.’
‘Was that all you went on?’
‘No, of course not. I had to make more certain first. You only heard half the story. It was true about that date when he came back, but there was a whole lot more to it than that. We had a date that very evening. I forced his hand on that one. He asked me where I’d like to dine. I suggested Boulestin. It was underground and there was spasmodic bombing. It was a very cosy dinner. I felt that I had known him all my life. “Now what about a night-club?” he suggested. I shook my head. “My flat’s quite close. I’ve a piano. Let’s go there.” I had it all planned out, you see. I wanted to hear him play.
‘He played … well, he was out of practice and I’m no judge but I watched his hands, the way his finger-tips now struck, now caressed the keys. … I had no doubt at all he had the artistic temperament. He played to me for half an hour. “Now you deserve a drink,” I said. I had an open fire and we sat before it. “I promised not to talk shop,” he said. “But won’t you put me out of my misery. Do I get that job?” “Of course you do,” I told him. Perhaps I made a mistake in telling him. It was just too much for him: pride in his own achievement, the imminence of danger and of parting, the growing intimacy between us, it was too heady a wine. He started to make love to me.’
She paused, she shrugged. ‘He was going to danger and I was sending him—to worse than danger. I owed it to him to make his last hours happy. Women have a sense of sacrifice to men going overseas; they want to give something too. Besides, in my case, how shall I put it, but that side of things … I loved my husband. I was in love with him, but when you’re young and inexperienced and unformed … it’s more general I think than women will admit … the actual act of love meant nothing to me, except for the happiness it gave him. I wondered why there was so much talk about it …. You can be very nonchalant, you know, with regard to something that means very little to you when you know that it means a lot to someone else; so that when Douglas started to make love to me, I thought, “I must give him all the happiness I can.” But then …’
She paused again.
‘I don’t know what it was,’ she said. ‘The moment, the mood, the music, something special about him, his hands perhaps, that sense of touch, but suddenly, deliriously, I knew what all that talk was about in books. It shattered me.
‘He had to leave early in the morning to get back to camp. Can you imagine how I felt as I watched him go down the street; to have found him at last and then to have to lose him and under such conditions? Can you imagine the torture that I went through all that day? I tried to console myself with the thought that I wasn’t sending him to death. I repeated the arguments my seniors had given me, that we weren’t living in the days of the Crusades, of Arthurian tournaments. What was one Commando officer against five divisions? I reminded myself that I had taken on this job, that I was a sailor’s daughter, that I had been trained to believe in duty, that my father had risked his life, my husband given his life for his country. Who was I now to shirk my duty?
‘I believe actually, in the last analysis, that if I hadn’t been involved myself, I’d have called the whole thing off, told my superiors that it was a dirty business and walked out on it, but my own personal happiness was at stake. I couldn’t put that before my duty. I sent his name in. A week later he was in German hands.’
She paused. She smiled wryly.
‘Maybe it was telepathy,’ she said. ‘Maybe we should find if we could get the exact day and hour, that it was at the precise moment his nerve broke that mine did too. It was a complete collapse.’ She shrugged.
I had the explanation now of all in her that had puzzled me, that had puzzled all of us.
‘You know what happened after that, or you can guess,’ she said‘I couldn’t take it any more. I had to get away from all that office stood for, as far away as possible. That’s why they sent me to Baghdad. I might be able to forget in a whole new world. I couldn’t, though. I never have. All the time it’s haunted me, the memory of that small back room and what I did there. I wondered what I’d done to him, but I didn’t dare find out. I made my mother’s old age an excuse for staying where I was, but I had to face up to it in the end. Do you understand now why I came out here? I had to know the answer.’
And now that she knew it, what came next, I wondered. I offered such consolation as I could.
‘You shouldn’t feel too badly,’ I began. ‘There’s every kind of casualty in war. Think of the men who are maimed and blinded, who’ll never know a painless hour till they die. There are many worse lives than a beachcomber’s.’
She made no reply. She leant back against the seat, her hands clasped behind her head. I had no idea what she was thinking.
‘Listen,’ I said. ‘Why not move back on to that boat, come on to St. Vincent with me and let’s beat it up. There’s a lot of fun going there.’
She shook her head. ‘He’s here because of me; he’s my responsibility.’
‘Surely it’s rather late …’
She interrupted me.
‘He’s barely thirty-two, he’s basically strong. He’s not an alcoholic, simply a man who drinks too much. He could snap out of that. If he had a reason; most illnesses are mental. You know that.’
My spirits sank. There it went. That psychopathic jargon. The belief that a man was cured the moment he knew what was wrong with him.
‘Do you really think it’s going to make all that difference to be told that he saved five divisions, that he did perform exceptional services.’
‘Are you mad? How could I tell him that?’ She swung round and her eyes w
ere angry. ‘What effect do you think that would have, to be told he’d been hand-picked for cowardice? If anything would drive a man to drink that would.’
‘What are you going to tell him then?’
‘That I’ve never loved anyone but him, that I’ve tried to forget him but I couldn’t; that I’ve come out only to see him, that I don’t care what he did: that he showed more courage in attempting that kind of mission than ninety-nine men in a hundred. I shall remind him that we’re both young, that we’ve the whole of our lives ahead of us.’
I was appalled; that persistent belief of women that they could reform a man; all those films and novels about the bad man being redeemed by the good woman’s love, and the way it was all confused with the maternal instinct and woman’s capacity for sacrifice. I could see now where it had been so important that the admission should come from him.
‘Do you think you’ll be able to make that sound convincing?’ I asked her.
’Of course I shall. It’s true.’
There was a look in her eyes that I had never seen before. ‘Do you think I’ve come out only on his account? You’re crazy. I can’t do without him. They talk about the one man for the one woman. I don’t say that’s true. I think for some women, certainly for myself, there are a dozen men who might be right. But when they have found a man who is right for them, they’re spoilt for the eleven others. When they’ve found that man, they’ve got to stick to him. That’s what I’ve got to do.’
She rose to her feet. She stood straight like a spear. Her eyes were shining. She was transformed, passionate, vibrant, vivid. For the first time I was seeing the real woman.
‘Do you think I’d have come here, if I wasn’t desperate; if I hadn’t experimented, tried every device, yes, every one. I’m as much a war casualty as he. But we can save each other. We’ve got to save each other. I can save us both.’
Her voice rang like a challenge, like the proud acceptance of a challenge. Behind her the mountains towered in the sunlight, their jagged peaks were sharp against the sky, deep green against deep blue. It was hard to believe that only an hour ago the landscape had been grey with cloud, a symbol of despair and gloom, a fitting backcloth for a beachcomber. There was a sense now of a whole world reborn.
‘I’ve got to make a go of it,’ she said. In her voice there was the glow of victory.
‘You will,’ I said. ‘You will.’
1952
Sources
‘A Stranger.’ First published in Pleasure (Grant Richards, 1921). Copyright Alec Waugh 1921.
‘An Unfinished Story.’ First published in Myself When Young (Grant Richards, 1923). Copyright Alec Waugh 1923.
‘The Making of a Matron’ and ‘The Last Chukka.’ First published in The Last Chukka (Chapman & Hall, 1928). Copyright Alec Waugh 1928.
‘Tahiti Waits.’ First published in Hot Countries (Chapman & Hall, 1930). Copyright Alec Waugh 1930.
‘A Pretty Case for Freud’ and ‘”Ambition” Bevan.’ First published in Eight Short Stories (Cassell, 1937). Copyright Alec Waugh 1937.
’Bien Sûr.’ First published in His Second War (Cassell, 1944). Copyright Alec Waugh 1944.
‘A Luckless Lebanese,’ ‘The Woman Who Knew Frank Harris,’ ‘A Bunch of Beachcombers,’ and ‘The Wicked Baronet.’ First published in Where the Clocks Chime Twice (Cassell, 1952). Copyright Alec Waugh 1952.
‘Circle of Deception.’ First published in Esquire magazine, March 1953. Copyright Alec Waugh 1953.
This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Reader
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Copyright © Alec Waugh 1961
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