The rest of that dance was a nightmare, and it was not far off dawn before I could get away. As I walked through the silent streets the short distance back to my hotel I knew that I had persuaded Daphnis of my innocence and that she still loved me, but that nothing could remove the barrier that lay between us except the ending of the war, and I had no means of hastening that.
Chapter VIII
Divided Loyalties
Twenty-Four hours later I was back with the New Zealanders at Mersa Matruh. They wanted to know if I’d had a good time. I said, “Marvellous!” My special friends, Jack Benham and Toby Spiers, asked for details. It was no good making a parade of my misery so I talked vaguely of swimming and dancing, and girls. They sighed with envy and counted the days afresh until their own leave was due.
The heat was only slightly less gruelling than it had been at mid-summer and the insects were worse; but I took on every job that offered in an endeavour to keep my mind off Daphnis through sheer physical exhaustion.
The Battle of Britain continued with unabated fury. The Germans cut up Rumania, giving Hungary back her lost province of Transylvania, so that with this, the loss of Bessarabia to the Russians and the Drobuja to Bulgaria, Rumania was reduced again to the size that she had been before the 1914 war. In Bucharest there were riots against this arbitrary dismemberment which culminated in a coup by which King Carol lost his throne and had to fly the country, leaving the pro-Nazi General Antonescu as virtual dictator. Clearly it could be only a matter of time before Hitler took over the whole country.
French Equatorial Africa, the Cameroons, Madagascar, New Caledonia and Gabon declared for General de Gaulle, but welcome as was the news that a few thousand Frenchmen here and there still understood the real meaning of the word ‘honour’, that was little consolation for the precarious situation in which Britain had been left by the total surrender of the main French Armies at home and the cowardly inertia displayed by the French generals in North Africa and Syria.
By mid-September the German aerial attack had moved from the ports and airfields in South-Eastern Britain on to London, and from the first reports we feared that if we ever got back there we should find nothing left of the dear old city but a vast acreage of ruins. Then gradually we became a little more cheerful as we learned of the further amazing victories of our fighter pilots, and that the Bomber Command was fighting back, hurling death and destruction down each night on the Continental ports where the Germans were said to be massing their great army of invasion.
On September 21st we were at last given other things to think about than the scanty news from home and our own individual worries. Abruptly our long months of wearisome routine under the scorching sun came to an end. News arrived that Marshal Graziani’s army was on the move and that his advance striking force had crossed the border into Egypt.
At last we had the thought that we might really be going into battle with the enemy to arouse us from the torpid state into which we had fallen through weeks of filling and stacking sandbags and trying to keep the defence works which we had constructed from being silted up by the constantly drifting sand.
We all knew that we were hopelessly outnumbered by the Italians, but all the same we were longing to have a cut at them, and the disappointment was general when, after a few days, the first excitement petered out. There had been some minor clashes up near the frontier, but no serious resistance was offered to the Italian advance and our columns were gradually withdrawn until Mersa Matruh, from outside which my own unit never received orders to move, became the last town on the road to Libya held by the British.
The men who came back from sporadic scrapping with the Italians reported them to be poor fighters, and it irked our fellows sadly to retreat. But we all felt that General Wavell knew what he was up to, as it was obvious that the odds against us would be considerably lessened if the Italian line of communication was first stretched as far as possible, and the Army of the Nile was able to meet the invader on its own chosen ground.
Few of us doubted that would be Mersa Matruh, as the whole area round the small white-walled town had been trenched, sandbagged, wired, revetted and made into a defensive zone of great depth with innumerable cunningly concealed tank-traps, strong points and gun-emplacements. It seemed unlikely that the results of so much labour would be lightly sacrificed and almost certain that within the next few days a major battle would be raging there; but neither eventuality actually occurred.
Having advanced as far as Sidi Barrani, which was seventy miles west of us along the coast road, the Italians halted to consolidate their gains, construct airfields, improve roads, and bring up the vast quantity of supplies and ammunition which they would need before they could launch their main attack on Egypt. The seventy miles between Mersa Matruh and Sidi Barrani became a No Man’s Land in which mechanised patrols operated against each other from time to time, but by the end of the month it was clear that the main armies were not likely to be engaged yet, and we returned rather glumly to our previous routine.
During those days of tension General de Gaulle’s expedition to Dakar had fizzled out like a damp squib. It seemed a most stupid blunder to have allowed him to go there at all unless he was prepared to fight if he encountered resistance. As it was, the British Admiral appeared to have had insufficient authority to take full command of the expedition and order the Free French Forces ashore, and although he went into the action with the obvious intention of trying to pull the chestnuts out of the fire, he was let down and left unsupported. In consequence, this miserable half-hearted affair caused a very great deal of bad blood without having achieved anything at all, and by it we sustained a still further loss of prestige. But early in October we got better news.
The United States Government declared itself ready to hand over to us fifty destroyers in exchange for the bases which they were leasing in our Atlantic possessions. God knows our overworked Navy needed the ships badly enough, but there was much more to it than that. This epoch-making deal showed that at last the people of the United States were really awaking to the fact that, if the British Navy failed to hold the seas, sooner or later they would have to face the whole might of Hitler on their own.
It was early in October, too, that Chamberlain at last passed from office, resigning on account of ill health. The following day those younger, more vigorous men with whom he had striven in vain at Munich, Hitler and Mussolini, met on the Brenner and the whole world proceeded to speculate upon what further devilry they had arranged to undertake between them. But there were signs that Britain was getting her second wind. Many new units were now arriving in the Middle East to reinforce the Army of the Nile and, by the announcement that we intended to reopen the Burma Road, Churchill indicated pretty clearly that he meant to stand no further nonsense from the Japs.
Italy proceeded to adopt a most threatening attitude towards Greece, so it was suggested that one of the decisions reached at the Brenner was for her to attack her small neighbour. While Germany exerted pressure upon Yugoslavia, Italy strongly reinforced her garrisons in Albania. For a week there was terrific tension. The Germans forced a trade agreement on the Yugoslavs which, being interpreted, meant that the Yugoslav Government had given way and decided not to go to Greece’s aid if Italy attacked her. Hitler had a meeting with Laval, then a meeting on the Franco-Spanish frontier with General Franco, then a meeting with Marshal Pétain. There were endless rumours about these comings and goings and what they portended. On October 28th Hitler met Mussolini again, this time at Florence, and on that day the Italian forces in Albania invaded Greece.
When I heard that the invasion was an accomplished fact I gave my thought free rein along a track off which for several days past I had had the greatest difficulty in heading them. This new war concerned me personally. Daphnis was half Italian and half Greek. Now that the two nations were at each other’s throats to which of them would she give her loyalty? It might be that her romantic idealism of her father had secured such a strong
hold on her imagination that whatever the views of her family and friends in secret, she would still remain pro-Italian. On the other hand, she was half Greek by blood and wholly Greek by adoption and upbringing, and she herself had told me that she loved Greece. Italy had attacked Greece, brutally, wantonly, and without the slightest provocation, and in view of that there seemed a good chance that Daphnis had experienced a revulsion of feeling. If so, the one thing which had seemed utterly impossible when I had last seen her over two months before had happened. Without the war between Britain and Italy having come to an end, Fate had smoothed away the apparently insurmountable barrier which lay between Daphnis and myself.
The moment that I could get ‘Long Willie’ alone I asked him if he would grant me forty-eight hours’ special leave to Alex on urgent private affairs.
“That’s a matter for the Brigadier,” he said, but added kindly: “Still, things look like remaining quiet here, so put in your application. I don’t doubt it will go through if I recommend it.”
Having thanked him I wrote off at once to Barbara Wishart to let her know that I hoped soon to be in Alex on short leave, and was most anxious to get half an hour alone with Daphnis. I had developed a regular correspondence with Barbara in which I had told her all about my ill-starred love affair, and that Daphnis would no longer go to any place willingly where she thought she would be likely to meet me; but I felt sure that Barbara would give me all the help she could.
Three days later my leave came through, and once more I took the long dusty coast road to the east. That road was very different now from when I had first seen it in the previous May. It had since been more than doubled in width, and strong concrete bridges which would bear two columns of tanks abreast had been thrown over all the nullahs. For every soldier stationed along it then there were now three or four. With great courage the decision had been taken, while the Battle of Britain was still in its early stages, and invasion a very definite menace, to despatch troops from England to reinforce the Army of the Nile.
After Italy’s entry into the war the passage of the Sicilian Channel had been virtually denied to us by the enemy. That narrow bottle-neck, which connects the two great seas of the Western and Eastern Mediterranean, is less than a hundred miles across, and right in its centre lies the island of Pantellaria, which, in the years before the war, had been converted by the Italians into a military base bristling with great guns. If the French had remained with us Pantellaria and Trapani, the Italian naval station at the eastern end of Sicily, could have been neutralised by the Allied Navies operating from the great French base of Bizerta, while Axis aircraft, based on Sicily, could have been countered by Allied squadrons stationed in Tunisia. But by the shameful complaisance of the French generals in North Africa we were robbed of these measures for protecting our shipping. Every vessel which now dared the channel had not only to dodge the Italian submarines but run the gauntlet of the dive-bombers; so although our warships still made the passage as necessity dictated, all convoys with reinforcements and supplies for our forces in Abyssinia, Egypt and Palestine had had, since the previous July, to be sent right round Africa via the Cape of Good Hope.
Most of us who realised what was happening could cheerfully have shot those French generals for the part they were playing in increasing Germany’s chances of victory. No man can serve two masters, and the issue was plain to all. It is to be hoped that the part these men have played will not be forgotten after the war, but that they will have to answer to an Allied court-martial for their poltroonery and the lives of the countless defenders of Freedom which have been lost through it.
In spite of the many weeks’ delay, which had occurred entirely owing to the above reasons, reinforcements from Britain were now pouring into Egypt, and when I reached Alexandria I found six times the amount of khaki in the streets that there had been the previous summer.
As soon as I arrived I telephoned to Barbara and she said that she would try to get Daphnis to come in for drinks that evening, although normally she did not go to cocktail parties given by members of the British Colony. Half an hour later she rang me back to say that, somewhat to her surprise, Daphnis had accepted at once and that I had better be out at Ramleh myself at six o’clock.
When I got there Barbara told me that she had asked in one or two other friends just to keep us in countenance, but that if I wanted a private session with Daphnis I could either take her out into the garden or into the small sitting-room at the back of the house.
I sank three sherries in rapid succession with Barbara and her sister Dorothy before any of the other guests arrived. The girls were most amused at my state of jitters, and I was both astonished and ashamed at the way my nerves always seemed to let me down whenever Daphnis was in the offing. I seemed to have altogether lost that calm self-assurance which had always been mine until seven months before.
The arrival of a naval lieutenant necessitated the talk becoming general, and I pulled myself together again. Soon afterwards a gunner captain and his wife arrived, and I found myself tied up in a conversation with the wife when Daphnis entered the room. To my fury the sailor pounced on her before I could make my escape, but Barbara took in the situation, rescued me from the gunner’s wife, and to the sailor’s dismay saddled him with her, leaving the field clear for me with Daphnis.
To my intense relief she smiled, and almost instinctively the two of us turned to walk out of the french windows on to the little terrace behind the house.
“Why were you looking so worried just now?” she asked, with an amused glance, as soon as we were out of earshot of the others.
“I was terrified that you might be furious at finding me here,” I confessed.
“How silly of you!” she laughed. “If I hadn’t wanted to see you I could have refused the invitation. I hardly ever visit any of our few English acquaintances in their houses, and after the way that Barbara Wishart planted you in their party for the Life-boat Institution dance I felt quite certain that she could only have asked me this evening at your instigation.”
We sat down in two basket chairs beneath a gaily-striped sun umbrella. It was hardly needed now, although the sunshine was still pleasant, as it had lost most of its force with the decline of the year.
As I lit a cigarette for Daphnis I said with a beating heart, “Your coming here this evening, then, means that you really wanted to see me?”
She inhaled deeply and lowered her long curling lashes so that they veiled her eyes. “I can’t forget what that old Arab fortune-teller said. He’s been so uncannily right in his predictions about other people. For that reason I still feel that it’s out of the question for us to think of each other seriously. But having thought it over I don’t see why we shouldn’t meet occasionally as friends.”
Inwardly I smiled, and something of my old self-confidence came back. In admitting so much, Daphnis had as good as proclaimed her own defeat. She would not, of course, have acknowledged that to herself as yet, but in an effort to square her declared attitude with her subconscious desire, she had adopted the most ancient female gambit of all time—‘Why can’t we just be friends?’
“I’m glad you feel that way,” I said, “because I was afraid that as long as the war between Britain and Italy continued you would regard that as an insurmountable barrier between us.”
She made a little grimace. “I’ve thought a lot about that too, lately, and I’ve come to the conclusion that I was wrong. If we only meet as friends we ought to be able to ignore the war.”
“I suppose the invasion of Greece has helped quite a lot in changing your views?” I hazarded.
“No, it’s not that. I’m desperately sorry for the Greeks, of course; but it doesn’t make me any the less fond of Italy and the Italians. If you were to see two of your friends fighting you would be most unhappy for them both, but it would not make you like either of them less.”
“Oh, come!” I protested. “Not if one of them were a great big husky man of six foot two and the o
ther were a small boy of, say, thirteen and without the slightest provocation the big man smashed his fist into the small boy’s face? You might have liked the big man before but I’ll bet you wouldn’t feel much friendship for him after you’d seen him do that.”
She sat forward and stared at me earnestly. “That’s not fair. You don’t understand. It’s not the Italian people who have attacked the Greeks. They are charming, cultured, home-loving, and have no wish to make war on anybody. It is Mussolini who has done this horrible thing.”
“I thought you were an admirer of Mussolini’s?”
“I was, and you admitted at one time you used to admire him, too.”
I nodded. “Yes. Any number of people did, but most of us saw the red light when he chose Easter Sunday to send his bombers and his Blackshirts against the helpless peasants of Albania.”
“They were brigands—bandits—everybody knows that—just as were the Abyssinians. Mussolini was right to take over both countries so that law and justice might take the place of the corrupt old-fashioned Governments.”
“There’s quite a lot to be said for that,” I agreed, “but do you really believe that the Italian people have no responsibility at all for this war, and that they were forced into it against their will by Mussolini, Ciano and Co.?”
“Yes. It was a tragedy that Marshal Balbo was killed in that air crash because he was a really great Italian, and Count Grandi, who is another, seems to have lost his influence. Ciano, Starace, Faracini, Ansaldo, and the other extremists who were probably in the pay of Germany, must have got hold of Mussolini and, of course, in these days once a war is declared the ordinary soldiers and the people have no say at all. They simply have to do as they are ordered.”
“Daphnis, I adore you,” I said. “But honestly that’s only the superficial, not the basic, cause of the trouble. Just because we call these upstart rulers ‘dictators’ it’s the greatest mistake in the world to believe that they could continue to rule for any length of time without the consent of the mass of their countrymen.
The Sword of Fate Page 11