On the day after we first met I had the sands read for me. You came out most clear, but very plain there lay a sword between us. Already I am injured to my heart. That shall heal because it is not cut too deep, but no way can the sword that Fate place there be turned aside. We are not for each other and it is hopeless for both that we make a war with Destiny. Do not attempt again to see me, please. Our paths lie different ways and this is good-bye.
Daphnis had never told me that she had consulted a fortune-teller on the day after our first meeting, and in view of his gloomy prognostications it seemed that she must have been greatly attracted to me from the very beginning, since she had gone against his warning in order to meet me in her garden; but that was little consolation now. Still half-stunned by the catastrophe which had wrecked our swiftly-blossoming love, I saw no alternative but to accept her decision; although I knew that it would be easier to forget that episode in the past which had changed the whole course of my life than to put her out of my mind.
The days and weeks that followed were sheer hell for everyone at Mersa Matruh, and our outposts which, right up to the Libyan border, provided a screen for the main army. No action took place for the simple reason that the soul-destroying heat made all movement during the daytime, and therefore any sustained military operation, utterly impossible to both sides.
If it had not been for the organised bathing parties at Mersa Matruh, God knows how the troops would have survived through those stifling weeks. The wells there are good and sufficient for the basic needs of a considerable army, but it would have been quite out of the question to provide even the scantiest fresh-water baths and sometimes we changed shirts and shorts that were sopping wet with sweat as many as four or five times a day.
Dust and flies completed with heat the triumvirate of enemies that scourged us during those ghastly summer months. It was risking acute inflammation of the eyes and temporary blindness to go anywhere without goggles as sandstorms occurred with monotonous, heart-breaking frequency. Great waves of sand would beat against the tents and the hutments, driven so fiercely that in a matter of a quarter of an hour they would scour every scrap of paint off the body of a car. While the storms lasted, one seemed to move in a pea-soup fog, and afterwards the fine grit would be found to have penetrated everywhere. Hair, nose and ears were full of it; boots, blankets and baggage were powdered inside and out, and it was impossible to protect even our food and drinks from their quota. To add to the gaiety of nations in this charming campaign, during which neither side had as yet fired a shot, the sandfleas, coming from God-knows-where in myriads and swarms to this desert, which had been virtually uninhabited until the coming of the Imperial Forces, bit us and battened on us relentlessly.
To these physical discomforts was added the by no means small mental strain of wondering what in hell was going to happen in Western Europe. With longer and longer faces we listened to the broadcasts following the French withdrawals south of the Marne, south of the Seine, south of the Loire. Then the ignominious surrender which made us positively seethe with disgust and anger.
The French still had a great army in North Africa and another in Syria. They had their vast Empire, a powerful battle fleet and huge resources lying outside France itself. Why in God’s name, we asked each other, hadn’t they the guts to transfer their Government to Algiers and fight on with us? The Poles, Norwegians, Dutch and Belgians had all done the courageous thing in establishing Governments in London for the purpose of rallying their nationals and their resources all over the world against the common foe. With such admirable examples offered by smaller peoples why should not France, with her far vaster powers to assist in the defeat of the menace to all freedom, have done so too?
At first we were just amazed and puzzled, but gradually the true answer began to trickle through. Two-thirds of the French Army had never fired a shot. In the break-through at Sedan they had suffered practically no casualties and fled, not from the bombs of the diving aeroplanes, but from the noise they made. Scores of French regiments had thrown their arms down at the first sight of the Germans, and refused to fight.
That was the whole awful truth. It was not simply that a little caucus of venal politicians had sold France. It was that the great bulk of the French nation was absolutely rotten. The military leaders, the aristocrats and the rich industrialists were almost all openly Fascists who preferred what they considered the lesser evil of a France under Hitler to Communism, but the French masses were little better and had played every bit as large a part in the betrayal. They had been the two million French soldiers who never fired a shot, and the five million Communist-Socialist workers who thought more of politics than patriotism, and with criminal folly had followed a policy of go-slow in industry so that they could get more out of the masters instead of getting down to the job of turning out the tanks and ’planes.
Quite obviously the French treachery would have such vast repercussions that its full effects could not possibly be measured at once. It was not only the direct threat to Britain through occupation of the French Atlantic coastline by the enemy or the loss to the Allies of France’s man-power which must render the initiation of any fresh land campaign on the continent of Europe foredoomed to failure through disparity of numbers.
There was no sphere of war in which the blow would not be felt. France’s merchant marine could no longer carry for the Allied cause. All the valuable minerals and other resources of her colonies would no longer be at our disposal. In the Near East we had counted upon the French Army in Syria as a solid tangible factor in strengthening the resolution of our friends the Turks to resist aggression. That prop had now been knocked away. Formerly at least six magnificent bases in the South of France, Corsica and North Africa were at the disposal of the Royal Navy, and from these the Allies could dominate the whole of the Western Mediterranean. Now there lay no place at which units of our Fleet could shelter, repair, remunition and fuel between Portsmouth and (three thousand miles distant) Alexandria; with the exception of Malta, where the harbour was now rarely free from attack by enemy aircraft, and Gib., which could be rendered untenable to shipping at any time that the Axis Powers might persuade Spain to come in on their side.
At the outbreak of the war French and Italian naval strength had been about equal. In one short week we had lost the help of one while the other had gone over to the enemy. On the maintenance of our supremacy at sea lay our one solid guarantee of eventual victory. If that went, everything went, and by the French surrender it had been brought into grave jeopardy. The Navy had had work enough before m keeping the Atlantic open; it would now have to be deprived of half its strength there to keep open our almost equally important Empire highway through the Mediterranean. Through lack of adequate protection, caused by this necessary dispersal of its forces, hundreds of our merchant ships must inevitably fall victims of Axis submarines and surface raiders. Therefore, during the coming months, the deaths of thousands of our sailors would be directly attributable to this act by the cowardly swine of Bordeaux.
In North Africa, too, the pusillanimous collapse of France had instantly changed the entire strategic situation to our peril. Had the French in Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia continued in arms, with the British in Egypt, the Allies would have had the Italians in Libya like a nut between the crackers. As soon as the heat lessened, by a simultaneous advance from west and east, we could have squeezed Libya out, and with our sea supremacy cutting Marshal Graziani off from all succour from his homeland, Mussolini’s Number One colony of the New Roman Empire would have been packed up in less than a month.
As it was, with the French immobilised we now had to take on the Italians alone, and they were enormously superior to us both in men and equipment. During the heat we were safe, but directly it eased we knew that we’d have to fight like hell if the Italians were not to smash their way into Egypt by sheer weight of numbers.
During those anxious days in the last half of June I thought much of Daphnis, and the only meagre
consolation that I had was that, although Egypt would not declare war on Italy, she severed diplomatic relations with our new enemy. In consequence, on the 23rd the Italian Minister to Egypt left for home. Obviously his staff would be evacuated with him, so Paolo Tortino must have been compelled to leave Alex, and his presence there could no longer arouse in Daphnis memories of the way in which he had shamed me before her.
Early in July there were the actions which resulted in the destruction of certain major units of the French Fleet at Oran and Dakar; and this demonstration of Churchill’s resolution cheered us all, although those of us who thought enough to analyse the news behind the headlines realised how pitifully weak we really were. In spite of the principle of resistance to aggression for which we were fighting, we had to accede to the demand of the insolent Japanese to close the Burma Road, and Rumania threw our guarantee back in our face, after having been compelled to disgorge Bessarabia, a part of her ill-gotten gains in the last World War, to Russia.
By mid-July there was already talk of the threatened invasion of Britain, and the R.A.F. began to bomb concentrations of barges in the continental harbours. Unrealised by us, the preparations for the Battle of Britain were just beginning, and the Luftwaffe was now making daily raids upon British shipping. The papers were days old when they got to us, so we had to rely for our news almost entirely on the B.B.C. broadcasts. Perhaps it’s as well that we knew as little of the state of things at home as we did, since, being utterly unable to help, we should have been even more worried than we were. We knew, of course, that the B.E.F. had been compelled to leave all its arms and equipment on the beach at Dunkirk, so that there could be little hope of the new output from the factories finding its way to Egypt for a long time to come, but what we did not realise was that, through going to the assistance of Belgium, Britain had thrown away practically her entire mechanised forces and that the great majority of the then “L.D.V.”, who had been raised to resist invasion, had not even as much as a rifle, much less supplies of Mills grenades.
The only sign of war that we saw in the Western Desert in those days was a little sporadic air activity. Our aircraft bombed Tobruk, and the Italians raided Alexandria. Once in a while they put down a few bombs in the neighbourhood of Mersa Matruh, but there was little damage done and few casualties. The raids were not of sufficient intensity to cause us much concern, but each time I heard that Alex had been bombed I suffered the tortures of the damned for days afterwards from the thought that Daphnis might lie crushed and broken beneath a heap of ruins.
The Air Force had then not yet come into its own, and the only things we had to cheer us were Churchill and the Navy. In the last war I gathered that it was no easy matter to maintain an effective blockade although we had six out of the seven most powerful navies in the world at our disposal. Then we had the fleets of the United States, Japan, France, Russia, Italy and several smaller Powers to help us. Now the job had to be done unaided, and with the Italian as well as the German Navy against us, yet somehow our sailors appeared to be not only keeping up the blockade and maintaining the freedom of the seas throughout the entire world, but able to fight one successful action after another. Within six weeks of the opening of the war in the Mediterranean they had sunk a score of Italian submarines and destroyers and the crack cruiser Bartolomeo Colleoni, the fastest ship on the inland sea, in addition.
Hitler’s end-of-the-month peace offensive was treated with the derision that it deserved. The fool seemed to think that because he had stamped upon three or four smaller Powers and smashed the craven French, Britain would be only too glad to come to terms, but we were not falling into that trap. We had seen him at work too often now, and had come to know that he was utterly incapable of telling the truth or keeping an honest bargain. Desperate as our position might be at the moment, we had immense potential strength in the British character and the resources of our Empire. We were in this thing now, and even in those darkest hours I don’t think any of us really doubted for a moment that not only would we pull through, but that, if our politicians let us, we would deal with the Germans in such a way after this war that they wouldn’t dare raise their hands against an Anglo-Saxon, or anyone else for that matter, for another century.
Early August saw an intensification of the aerial warfare over Western Europe, and the real Battle of Britain was on. Night after night, out there in the desert, with a million stars twinkling brightly above us in the purple-dark vault of the sky, we waited anxiously for the nine o’clock news (which, as our time was two hours earlier, we did not get until eleven o’clock) to hear the amazing scores achieved by our fighter pilots each day.
It wasn’t until about then that I began to realise a subtle change in my attitude towards the tragic ending of my affair with Daphnis. After her letter I had considered it as closed, feeling that there was not the remotest chance that she would have any more to do with me; but that perhaps was due to the shock that I had sustained and an awful inferiority complex which I had acquired through slinking about the world during the last three years under an adopted name and always going out of my way to avoid people who might have known me in the past.
I saw now that such a policy had availed me nothing. True, I had succeeded in escaping a certain number of unpleasant incidents, but the cat had come out of the bag when least expected and in front of the one person who really mattered to me before I had had a chance to prepare her for it.
As I lay, during those sweltering afternoons, stark naked and sweating in my tent, a feeling of revolt gradually took hold of me. The damage was done now. Daphnis had heard the worst part of the affair in the worst possible circumstances. Whatever I did, therefore, she could not possibly think worse of me than she must be doing at present. Why the hell should I take it lying down and slink away with my tail between my legs? I loved her desperately; my misfortune had made me bitterly cynical, and she was the only thing in the whole world that I cared a damn about. Why shouldn’t I put up a fight to try to get her back?
It was only after many days of hesitation, black bouts of despair alternating with fresh waves of the urge to act, that I at last sat down in mid-August to write her a long letter.
I told her that at the end of the month I was due for a week’s leave and begged her to let me see her. I said that it was damnably unfair to judge any man unheard, and that if ever again I came across Paolo Tortino I would beat him within an inch of his life for the flat lie he had told in saying that I had betrayed my country. I then went on to tell Daphnis how absolutely, utterly and desperately I loved her, recalling the all-too-brief meetings of which our love affair had consisted. Page after page was covered with my memories of how she had looked on each occasion that I had seen her, and the ever more tumultuous state of my feelings afterwards. I said that I would slave, starve, or, if need be, die for her. There was nothing, save betray my country, which I would not do to prove my love, and I would abide by any decision that she might make about my not writing to her again or attempting to see her in the future if only she would first give me this one chance to repudiate in detail Tortino’s accusations.
For days afterwards I waited in a fever of anticipation for each mail to come in. At first I was confident that she could not possibly harden her heart sufficiently to resist my plea; but as time went on my hopes gradually dwindled until, as the date for me to go on leave drew near, I knew deep down inside myself that she was not going to write, and became once more a prey to black despair.
If it hadn’t been for the acute discomfort of the heat, the dust and the flies in the Western Desert, I shouldn’t have troubled to take my leave at all, but leave would at least mean seven days’ escape from that hell to the almost forgotten joy of being able to bath in fresh water and the well-cooked meals which could be eaten without swallowing several ounces of the Sahara.
Having arrived in Alex I told myself that I must not behave like a weak young fool and just sit about moping and drinking the whole time but get around and force myse
lf to take an interest in such other people as were inclined to be friendly. In consequence I ‘phoned the Wisharts the next morning and Barbara asked me out there for tea and tennis.
That evening Mrs. Wishart was arranging a party she had promised to get up for a dance which was to be held in aid of the British Lifeboat Institution. It fell on the last night of my leave, and on learning this she asked me to dine with them for it; I naturally accepted.
With bathing, tennis, polo, visits to Alexandria’s cinemas and one jolly session at the races the week passed more quickly than I had expected. It was quite impossible for me to be in Alexandria and not to think of Daphnis a score of times a day. As I passed the jeweller’s where I had bought the amulet, or anywhere near her house, or the hospital in which I had been after my accident, memories of her crowded in upon me; but I made a stubborn stand against allowing her to monopolise my thoughts entirely, and when I went out to the Wisharts on the Wednesday evening I was quite looking forward to the dance.
I was well on time and the second man to arrive; the other being a young Air Force officer. Mrs. Wishart had not yet come downstairs, and Dorothy, Barbara’s sister, was talking to the airman. As Barbara took me over to a side-table to give me a glass of sherry, she said:
“I shall expect the biggest box of chocolates in Alex from you tomorrow morning, my boy, and don’t you forget to order them before you set off back to the Front.”
“Of course you shall have a box of chocolates,” I smiled. “I’ll go into Groppi’s tomorrow morning.”
“That’s nice of you, Julian, but you haven’t asked yet what I’ve done to earn them.”
“Asking me to this party is quite enough.”
“Oh no!” she shook her head. “And I really did have to work quite hard to fix it; but, remembering your interest in her, I’ve got the Diamopholus girl coming for you tonight.”
The Sword of Fate Page 9