Evelyn Waugh
Page 30
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Before joining his new unit in Ayrshire, Evelyn spent his leave at Pixton and visited Piers Court, which he found ‘over-flowing with refugees’ and the garden ‘rapidly relapsing into jungle’. He also went to London at height of the Blitz, staying with his parents at Highgate, where he also saw Alec who had been evacuated from Boulogne after the fall of France and was now taking the opportunity of his family’s absence in Australia to pursue a love affair with a tall, bosomy, much younger woman, whom Evelyn had first met at their writing retreat in Devon and christened ‘the Chagford giantess’.
In mid-November Evelyn travelled north to Largs on the Ayrshire coast where 8 Commando was stationed, with the town’s Marine Hotel serving as their officers’ mess. There he found various friends and acquaintances, including the former Reuters correspondent Robin Campbell, whose father had been ambassador to Paris until France fell.43 There was also Harry Stavordale, whom he knew from Oxford, whose spectacular family home, the Jacobean Holland House in London’s Holland Park, had just been destroyed in the Blitz; and Randolph Churchill, the prime minister’s spoilt and rumbustious son with whom Evelyn had had a love-hate relationship since they had both been made godparents to Diana Guinness’s son Jonathan. These plus a few others led by Earl Fitzwilliam’s ill-fated heir Peter Milton* – ‘very agreeable but a bit much for me’, Evelyn told Laura – made up 8 Commando’s ‘smart set’, a group of rich playboys whom Evelyn could not afford to join yet looked upon with indulgent amusement. ‘The smart set drink a very great deal,’ he told Laura, ‘play cards for high figures, dine nightly in Glasgow, and telephone to their trainers endlessly.’ Having reverted to the pay of a lieutenant, Evelyn was meanwhile obliged to live in ‘dignified poverty’.44
Evelyn relished the smart set’s unconventionality and thought their ‘gaiety and independence’ would prove an asset in action.45 To begin with he served as liaison officer with Campbell and Stavordale. ‘I have done nothing so far except take a cuckoo clock to pieces & play a lot of ludo,’ he told Laura. ‘All the officers have very long hair & lap dogs & cigars & they wear whatever uniform they like.’46 A week later he reported that life in 8 Commando was growing ‘more like a house party daily & I think a minor operation might be salutary to check the lotus eating … Today there was a grand inspection & I walked behind with the staff detecting, with my trained, Marine eye many imperfections which escaped the foot guards.’47
At the end of November Evelyn was to have undergone training in field-craft at Inverailort Castle in the Highlands, accompanied by Randolph Churchill, who had been expelled from the previous course by Lord Lovat for heckling one of his NCO instructors, several of whom were ghillies or stalkers on his estate at Beaufort.48 (Another instructor was Shimi Lovat’s cousin, David Stirling, later to found the SAS.) In the event Evelyn did not go because on the evening of Saturday, 30 November Mary Herbert telephoned from Pixton to say that Laura had gone into labour early with the baby she had been expecting since that spring.
Evelyn caught the sleeper the next day, arriving at Tiverton station at 10.30 on the Monday morning. ‘Laura’s baby was born prematurely on Sunday and lived for only twenty-four hours,’ he wrote to his mother later that day. ‘She was baptised, Mary, before she died & will be buried in Brushford churchyard tomorrow.’ The letter then bizarrely went on: ‘It was an easy birth and Laura is in excellent health … I have got three days’ leave & return to my commando on Friday. Life is more easygoing there than in the Marines; many old friends and acquaintances are with me, and I find the life highly enjoyable …’49
Arthur, who had always longed for a daughter, was shocked by Evelyn’s apparent lack of concern at losing one of his own and additionally hurt by the fact that the news had not reached him until after the funeral. ‘There seems something quite pathetic in this little star of life,’ Arthur wrote to Alec’s wife Joan in Australia, ‘which just flickered and went out. She wasn’t wanted and she did not stay. Evelyn announced her coming as “to the regret of all and the consternation of some”. Well, she didn’t trouble them for long, and she is spared a great deal.’50
Evelyn’s grandson later attributed his strangely dispassionate reaction to an instinctive compulsion to ‘prove his immunity to Arthur’s worst fault – sentimentality’, as a result of which Evelyn ‘struck attitudes of immoderate detachment, exaggerated often to the point of absurdity. The more emotional Arthur became, the more Evelyn vaunted his sangfroid.’51 This seems perfectly plausible, although Evelyn’s account of the loss of his daughter in his diary was also curiously unemotional, apart from the sorrowful admission: ‘Poor little girl, she was not wanted.’52*
By 7 December, Evelyn was back with the commandos in Scotland and soon off to the Isle of Arran to train for an assault on the Italian island of Pantelleria. He had been ‘very sad leaving you alone’, he told Laura, but doubted he would be able to make it back to Pixton for Christmas: ‘You well know how glad I am to avoid that.’53 He was glad too that Penguin had agreed to publish his unfinished novel under the title Work Suspended. There was, he told Laura, ‘too much good material there to let it disappear’,54 and he thought it the best thing he had written as far as it went. With its first-person narrative and descriptive, nostalgic prose, Work Suspended is the stylistic precursor of Brideshead Revisited and may conceivably have become the better novel had the war not intervened.55
In the event, Christmas Day was spent aboard the troopship Glenroy, whose captain enlivened dinner by setting the tablecloth on fire and then being sick where he sat. Evelyn spent most of the day asleep. Not long afterwards the planned Pantelleria raid was cancelled, much to the exasperation of Keyes, who knew that his commandos had been brought to a peak of readiness for action and that it would become far more difficult to keep them motivated if they were continually stood down. It was against this background in late January that Evelyn’s unit was suddenly told to pack their bags for North Africa as part of ‘Force Z’ (later renamed Layforce) under the overall command of Bob Laycock.
Keyes, whose son Geoffrey was serving with 11 Commando, saw them off himself and afterwards wrote to Churchill that they were ‘the envy of all those who were left behind. I gave your love to Randolph, who is delighted to be one of the lucky ones. So many of our mutual friends have sons in that splendid party. It is the flower of my striking force.’56
Evelyn had been appointed acting brigade major and on the long voyage out round the Cape of Good Hope shared a small cabin with the prime minister’s son and Harry Stavordale, ‘both of whom have brought luggage enough for a film star’s honeymoon,’ he told Laura. While Churchill grew a moustache, Evelyn attempted a beard. ‘At present it looks peculiarly repulsive,’ he admitted to Laura, ‘a mass of isolated, coarse hairs of variegated colouring, but it gives me an interest as they say, like a pet or a pot flower.’57 Two weeks later he wrote: ‘As the voyage goes on the commando gets more & more like the Russian cavalry of Tolstoy’s War & Peace. At the last settling day for gambling poor Randolph was £800 down. Poor Pamela will have to go to work.’58 (This proved to be the last straw in the Churchills’ already unhappy marriage; they eventually divorced in 1946.) Evelyn, meanwhile, made do with ‘a little poorer game with the poor’, he told Laura. ‘All my gaming winnings are for you. There is another pound or two coming to you at next settling day.’59
Before leaving, Evelyn had written to his butler Ellwood asking him to be his batman but got no reply and a nineteen-year-old archaeologist called Ralph Tanner had volunteered instead – ‘very high brow,’ Evelyn described him to Laura, ‘a pleasant young man’. Scarcely credible though it seemed to Evelyn’s would-be detractors, Tanner found his new employer equally pleasant. When, years later, an interviewer from Punch magazine suggested that Evelyn had been ‘so unpopular that he had to be protected from other soldiers’, Tanner replied: ‘Absolute rubbish. He fitted in very well. He was everything you’d expect an officer to be.’ ‘A bit of a tyrant, you mean?’ asked t
he doggedly sceptical interviewer. ‘Not at all,’ said Tanner. ‘He didn’t exploit you the teeniest, weeniest bit?’ ‘I’d say he behaved as a model employer to a servant’. ‘Oh …’60
Evelyn’s reputation for rudeness was ‘totally alien to the Waugh I knew’, Tanner added, recalling that he was ticked off only a couple of times when he served hot gravy with cold meat and when he got polish on the wrong side of his Sam Browne belt so that it came off on his uniform. In another unpublished interview, Tanner also recalled having had ‘some absurd idea that if you went into the tropics, you had to have flannel spine pads, and I remember saying to him, “Do you wish me to make spine pads for you?” He looked a little bemused, but said, “No, I don’t think that will be necessary.” He wasn’t at all sarcastic.’61
So considerate was Evelyn that Tanner recalled ‘waiting up for him with some hot water, just to return the courtesy’. The only gossip Tanner heard about him among the troops, meanwhile, was that he was ‘a bit fond of the honourables’62 and that he had insisted on sharing a cabin with Randolph Churchill and Lord Stavordale. The implication is of course that Evelyn was a snob, which was perhaps not an entirely outrageous assessment, yet in fairness to him both of these were old friends of his and in any case he would have been hard pushed to find cabin mates among the officers of 8 Commando who did not, broadly speaking, fit the ‘honourables’ description.
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Layforce eventually entered the Suez Canal in early March with promises that they would soon have a ‘bellyful of fighting’.63 But just as they began serious training for yet another abortive mission – an attack on the island of Rhodes – the Germans reoccupied Cyrenaica and General Wavell felt he could no longer spare the air cover and destroyer escorts that would allow them to strike in the Dodecanese or anywhere else.
Layforce was ordered to Alexandria, but while their commanding officer strove to get his men into action, his commandos were repeatedly called back from operations on which they had been sent out. One wag suggested they be renamed ‘Belayforce’ and some mock-Churchillian graffiti appeared on the troop deck: ‘Never before in the history of human endeavour have so few been so buggered about by so many.’64
On 19 April they at last went into action with a night raid on the Libyan coastal town of Bardia, which reports suggested was held by 2,000 of Rommel’s Afrika Korps. The aim was to disrupt the enemy’s lines of supply and communication and cause Rommel to ‘look over his shoulder’ and divert his troops away from the front line. But as they crept ashore it soon became apparent that the town was deserted apart from a solitary motorcycle patrol, which evaded their clumsy attempts to shoot it down and was thus fortunately able to relay news of the raid, with the result that a German brigade was diverted from the front line at a crucial time. In almost all other respects the operation was a shambles: one boat failed to get into the water; another ran aground and had to be destroyed; an officer was shot and killed by his own men; another man was injured by his own grenade; a party of sixty commandos returned down the wrong wadi and was left ashore and later captured. Evelyn later obligingly portrayed the raid as a success in a propaganda piece he had lucratively been contracted to write for Life magazine – ‘it seems that you are being asked for a piece of fiction rather than an article,’65 his agent told him – however he knew perfectly well that it had been botched. In his diary Evelyn recalled that some of the officers complained to him that their commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Felix Colvin, had behaved badly. However, Evelyn thought that ‘no one had behaved well enough for them to be able to afford a post-mortem’ so did not pass their criticism on to Laycock. ‘Perhaps if I had we might have been saved some shame in Crete,’ Evelyn reflected.66
Crete was to be the scene of Layforce’s next action, their arrival on the island coming six days after the German airborne invasion of 20 May. Before leaving Alexandria Evelyn recalled hearing that ‘the Maleme aerodrome garrison was hard-pressed’ but that otherwise the situation ‘well in hand’.67 This misinformation owed much to the reluctance of the Allied Commander-in-Chief on Crete, Major-General Bernard Freyberg VC, to admit to Wavell how quickly the airport had fallen and to warn him that the island could no longer be held.
In any event by the time Layforce reached Suda Bay on the island’s north coast close to midnight on 26 May, the battle was already lost and they were greeted by scenes of apocalyptic chaos. The lighters which came to take them ashore were full of wounded and a bedraggled and hysterical naval officer burst through the captain’s door with anguished cries of: ‘My God, it’s hell, we’re pulling out!’ The commandos all stared at him aghast and Evelyn was contemptuous of what he saw as the man’s cowardice, desperate as he was to have a proper go at last at the Germans.68 Laycock later recalled telling the wretched man to shut up.
With very limited time to land, they had to dump most of their kit before going ashore. Once on the quayside, Laycock and Evelyn, acting as his intelligence officer, then left their brigade major, Freddy Graham, to get the men into defensive positions while they went off in search of the commander of British troops on the island, Major-General E. C. Weston, whom they found asleep on the earth floor of a rustic hovel serving as his headquarters. There they were told the full extent of the retreat and that, far from raiding aerodromes and seaports as promised in Alexandria, they were to assist in the rearguard covering the withdrawal over the White Mountains to Sphakia, a small fishing harbour on the south coast. It was getting light by the time they reached ‘Creforce’ headquarters, where Laycock asked Freyberg whether they were to hold the defence ‘to the last man and last round’, to which the general replied: ‘No, a rearguard. Withdraw when you are hard pressed.’69
Back with his commandos, Laycock drew up instructions for a timed rearguard action lasting two days and Evelyn set off with Tanner to deliver the orders to Lieutenant-Colonel Colvin, the officer he had shielded from criticism after Bardia. Driving through no man’s land, Evelyn appeared oblivious to the Stukas circling overhead and later dismissed their sorties as ‘like German opera – too long and too loud’.70 When the truck could go no further, he left his companions and proceeded on foot, walking for half an hour through scrub and rock before eventually coming across a commando officer who took him to a farm building and pointed under a table. There was Colvin, as Evelyn recorded, ‘sitting hunched up like a disconsolate ape’.71 Evelyn saluted the shell-shocked colonel (who was to serve as the model for Major ‘Fido’ Hound in Sword of Honour), gave him his orders and eventually took him back to headquarters, where, by Evelyn’s pitiless account, every time a plane went over the wretched man ‘lay rigid with his face in the gorse for about four hours’. At sunset Colvin went back to his battalion, only to return a few hours later ‘with a confused account of having been ambushed on a motor cycle,’ Evelyn wrote. ‘His battalion was fiercely engaged he said (this was balls), and without explaining why he was not with them he gave us the order to withdraw. It all seemed fishy …’72 They nevertheless obeyed and marched all through the night, with Colvin telling them ‘We must get as far as we can before light’. The moment daylight came the colonel ‘popped into a drain under the road and sat there’, recorded Evelyn. After an hour’s sleep, Evelyn decided to assess the situation for himself and walked back across the hills through various villages they had passed in the night to within half a mile of where the enemy was being held, where he eventually found Bob Laycock. They drove back to Colonel Colvin, still in his drain; ‘Bob as a politely as possible relieved him of his command’73 – this was later repeated with some ‘good round swearing’74 after the colonel was found to have ordered his men to retreat from its position covering the redeployment of another Layforce battalion.
That night Evelyn and Laycock took the truck and fell back as far as Imbros, on the southern side of the White Mountains, from where the road descended 2,000 feet down a deep ravine to Sphakia. After resting up in a vineyard, at noon they continued on down a series of sharp hairpins
past caves full of ragged stragglers in vain search of an embarkation officer. That evening they eventually found the cave now serving as General Freyberg’s headquarters, where they were given half a cupful of sherry and a spoonful of beans and told: ‘You were the last to come so you will be the last to go.’75
Their return journey in the dark proved far more difficult and ‘after an hour or two’s scrambling and a bad fall for Bob’ they spent the rest of the night at a little shrine on the hilltop, from where they could hear the shouts of Royal Navy sailors embarking troops on the coast below. Layforce spent the next day and a half protecting the Sphakia gorge before Evelyn and Laycock returned to the Creforce cave in the afternoon for further orders ahead of what was to be the last night of the evacuation. At around three o’clock that night, they and just over 200 members of Layforce were evacuated on the last ship to leave the island.
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Over the past twenty-five years, Bob Laycock has been widely accused of lying and acting in direct contravention of orders and jumping the queue for evacuation from Crete, while Evelyn has been charged with falsifying the Layforce diary to cover up for him. These allegations were first made by Antony Beevor in his highly acclaimed and prize-winning book Crete: The Battle and the Resistance (1991), and with added vigour in an article he wrote for The Spectator – punningly entitled ‘The First Casualty of Waugh’ – shortly before the book’s publication. His thesis has been has been almost universally adopted since. Leaving aside for a moment the direct evidence for the alleged wrongdoing – which is less compelling than one might imagine – one can see why the theory has caught on, stemming as it does from the strong sense of disillusion that permeates Evelyn’s fictionalised account of the retreat from Crete in Officers and Gentlemen, the second novel in his Sword of Honour trilogy, and in particular his depiction of the discreditable flight of Ivor Claire, whose Hookforce diary is later burnt by Guy Crouchback to remove the only evidence of his questionable conduct. Officers and Gentlemen was published in 1955 and dedicated ‘To Major General Sir Robert Laycock KCMG CB DSO. That every man in arms should wish to be.’