by Alec Waugh
“What on earth are you doing here?” he asked.
“I work here.”
“Since when?”
“Six years ago. When most of our friends were resigning their commissions, I applied to be taken back. I foresaw this. Good idea to get in on the ground floor, I thought. See anything of the old crowd these days?”
They gossiped about mutual acquaintances. “By the way,” Guy said, “I came here for a three o’clock appointment. I’ve been here half an hour. Ought I to do anything about it? I’ve come to see a Captain Otway.”
“That s quite all right, old boy, that’s who you are seeing. Sorry to have kept you waiting.”
“You’re Captain Otway?”
“Yes.”
“What’s the idea of that?”
“We all have alibis in this game. You’ll have one too. Ever read a novel by Compton Mackenzie called Water on the Brain? You haven’t. Well then get it. You’d think it was an exaggeration but it isn’t. I suppose I ought to ask you a few questions, about your languages. There isn’t really any need. But it’s as well to get them down, for record. Then I’ll take you along to see the colonel.”
The colonel looked like a colonel: tall and spare with a black clipped moustache. He had a file of papers on his desk, to which he kept referring.
“You’re Colonel Irwin’s brother-in-law. Very fine officer, indeed. Great pity he retired. Served under him you say. Well, he served under me. Not for long, of course. He was too ambitious. Eye on the Staff College from the start. He’d have gone far if there’d been no war, but he insisted on going back to regimental duty. Fine of him, respect him for it, but if he’d gone to the Staff College at the proper time . . .”
It was the first line Guy had had on that side of his brother-in-law’s career. Rex had never mentioned it.
“Now about you,” the colonel was continuing. “We can’t do anything about you yet: not till the balloon goes up; can’t tell you much about the job we need you for, but you can rely on getting a chit from us within a week of its beginning. In the meantime there’s a course I’d like you to take. Put you in the general picture as regards intelligence. Teach you staff duties too. It’ll take up your evenings, I’m afraid, but I don’t suppose you’ll mind that. It is an interesting course: one starts next week. Several of your friends are taking it.”
The interview lasted only a few minutes.
“Decent sort of guy,” said Jimmy as they walked away. “Fussy: looks on it as a drill; as worried over a misprint in a report as he used to be over an unpolished button. By the way, do you want to wear uniform? Some do, some don’t. It’s up to you. Some fellows seem to think it helps them with their dick. Did too, in the last war possibly. Don’t fancy it will in this.”
Some sixty ‘cloak and dagger’ students assembled in a wing of the War Office for a course that was to last two months and to which four evenings a week were to be devoted. They were at first glance an odd assortment, varying in age between the early fifties and late twenties: some cadaverous, long-haired, bespectacled with stooping shoulders, of a type that you could not picture on a parade-ground; others large, cumbersome, loud-voiced, of a type that you could not picture in a library. Yet they were all handpicked for the same purpose.
Soon Guy was to realize what they had in common: alert, well-informed in the matters that concerned them, men of the world in their separate ways, they were all good mixers. Much of the work was done in syndicates. A problem would be set and in teams of six, each group would work out its own solution. Guy was quick to appreciate how pertinent were the suggestions contributed by each member, and how harmonious the discussions were. No one was piqued if his idea was overruled. All these men would fit well into the co-operative atmosphere of a mess.
It was an interesting course. It was fascinating to discover how the machinery of a headquarters worked. In 1914 he had been trained as a platoon-commander. As a front-line soldier, he had seen war in terms of a battalion. He had barely been conscious of Brigade, let alone Division. Now he was thinking in terms of army groups. He was getting an all-in picture.
He enjoyed playing the role of a G3 (1) at Corps, ‘appreciating the situation’ on the eve of an attack. But afterwards coming out into Whitehall, watching the streams of traffic swing south to Westminster, walking up to Piccadilly, with all the lights of the Circus flashing, the crowds pouring out of cinemas and theatres, hurrying towards tubes and restaurants and buses, all of them intent on their own business, only concerned with being allowed to lead their private lives, it was difficult to believe that the world was headed for the monstrous catastrophic folly of a modern war. In 1914 war had come so suddenly; no one had been prepared, there had been no time for deliberation. Communications had been difficult. There were no aeroplanes by which a hurried conference of statesmen could be invoked. But this time every country was on guard against a danger that every country dreaded. No one wanted war, except a minority of megalomaniacs in Berlin. Surely they could be stopped in time. It was like watching a small bush fire spread. Surely someone could stamp it out before it swept, a forest of devouring flame, across a countryside.
He could not believe that war was imminent, yet everything assured him that it was. The Press, attempting to maintain equilibrium, anxious to avoid a panic, made mock of the alarmists. It had been rumoured, on what authority no one knew, that on March 15th Hitler would invade Czechoslovakia. Punch, wise before the event, printed on March 15th a picture of John Bull waking from his nightmare, with the hobgoblin of the scare vanishing in the morning light, but on that very day Hitler did take over Prague.
That same week Norman, after three months in the ranks, was gazetted to a commission in the Queen Victoria Rifles. A little later, on the eve of Easter, the Italians invaded Albania, and when Britain signed a treaty of mutual defence with Poland everyone was delighted. “That would put a spoke in Hitler’s wheel,” though no one seemed to know where Britain was going to protect Poland or with what. A conscription bill was introduced and the very people who had clamoured for intervention in Spain opposed it as a symbol of ‘militarist, capitalist aggression.’ Committees were organized to help refugees. Volunteers enrolled as air-raid wardens. A cricket team from the West Indies shivered through an English June. On the first day of the Lord’s test match, Hammond broadcast an appeal to join the territorials. At Soho Square Guy increased the firm’s stocks of wine, doubling his orders to Jerez, Oporto, and Bordeaux. The country was slowly getting geared for war.
“This may be our last chance of seeing France for a long time,” Guy said to Renée. “I wish we could get away together somewhere.”
“I wish we could.”
“Is there any chance, do you think?”
She shook her head.
“Roger’s being very busy. He’s rather grand, you know. He comes next to Keynes. He has to do a certain amount of official entertaining now. And then in August there are Eric’s holidays.”
“We are not seeing as much of each other as we did.”
“That’s your fault. You’ve been so busy learning to be a spy.”
“It’s over now.”
“I know. Perhaps everything will be better in the autumn, after Eric’s gone back to school.”
“The Riviera can be very pleasant then.”
“Let’s try and fix it.”
He made a late September booking at the Martinez. He still couldn’t believe that there would be a war. It all seemed pointless and unreal.
It went on seeming that, pointless and unreal. Even during those last days of August when Ribbentrop and Molotov signed their peace pact. It was a bright and sunny week. He went to Lord’s for the first day of the match with Warwickshire. Sitting in the gallery, in the sun, watching Edrich and Compton bat, he thought of that last Saturday at Blackheath in 1914. How many cricketers he had seen play that day for the last time. Would he in fifteen years find himself looking back to this afternoon, in the same way that he was now looking back
to the Rectory Field? As he came down to lunch, he found the Long Room full of workmen stacking away the pictures.
Pointless and unreal.
It still seemed that, even on that first Sunday in September when Neville Chamberlain announced over the radio that Britain was at war. Guy heard it in his mother’s flat. He was spending the week-end at No. 17. Norman had been called-up in the previous week and there was plenty to be discussed. He had walked over after breakfast to see his mother. They heard the Prime Minister’s speech together.
It ended. They sat in a silence that his mother broke.
“This justifies everything that Franklin did,” she said. “He always knew this war was coming. He knew the Spanish war was the prelude. It was the first round, he said. He believed that if that first round could be won, the war might be averted, that it might be won in the first round. That’s what he wrote in one of his last letters. None of you believed him. You let the rebels win. You talked about non-intervention when the Italians and Germans were intervening all the time. Franklin was so bitter about that. Franklin was fighting for his country, every bit as much as any of the young men who will be crossing into France to-night. He died for his country every bit as much as any of them will do. His name ought to appear in the Fernhurst Roll of Honour. I hope you’ll see it does.”
“I will, Mother.” He changed the subject. “Had you thought of moving in with Barbara?”
She shook her head.
“I’ve got used to being by myself. I like it.”
Across the Sunday silence, an air-raid siren shrieked. He felt a momentary qualm. Was this the raid that had been threatened, the 30,000 casualties the first night? Had Goering kept his promise? The landscape looked very peaceful as it stretched below him. The Highgate School cricket ground, the tree-lined streets, the spires of Hendon, the red-roofed villas of the Garden Suburb, the sky a pale aquamarine blue, and the silver lozenges of the balloon barrage glinting in the sunlight. Was all this destined for destruction?
“Have you a shelter here?” he asked.
“I believe there’s one. I don’t know where it is.”
“Shall I find out?”
She shook her head.
“I’m not at my age going to run down to basements. I propose to sleep in my bed. If a bomb’s meant for me, it is.”
“You’re very wise.”
Returning to London later in the evening, he learnt that the warning had been given by mistake. It seemed typical and symptomatic of the day. Nothing seemed wholly real.
Two days later he was summoned to the War Office. He had been appointed with the pay and position of a staff captain to a special combined branch of Naval, Military and Air Force Intelligence. He would work in London. He asked whether he could continue his directorship at Duke and Renton. He would like to be able to attend its board meetings. Nothing could be simpler, he was informed. He would have one day off a week. He could choose that day for his board meetings. “But in point of fact,” he was told, “you will find you are working in a very broadminded outfit. When work needs doing, an officer is expected to work twenty-six hours a day, but when nothing’s doing, he’s not asked to waste his time. As a matter of fact the Controller likes his officers to get around. They’ve been chosen for being men who know their way about. We don’t want them to lose that quality.”
Guy’s office was south of St. James’s Park, near the Inner Circle tube station, within easy walking distance of the Wanderers’. He was given a small but comfortable office, supplied with a collection of ‘Most Secret’ files, and invited ‘to read himself into the picture’.
By the time he had done that, London had relatively returned to normal. The Polish campaign was over. The stringency of the black-out regulations had been relaxed. No one was worrying about air raids. No one out of uniform bothered to carry a gas mask. Theatres reopened. Hostesses began to entertain. For Guy there was indeed very little difference between his life this autumn and the last, except that his morning walk to work took him through instead of along the Park.
He kept in close touch with Soho Square. There was nothing to worry over, so young Pilcher, now in control, assured the board. There was no need to advertise any longer: no need to solicit orders. Wine merchants would have their work cut out filling the orders that came in from regimental messes.
It was not quite so easy to see Renée now that his afternoons were mortgaged, but she was likelier to be free in the evenings than she had been. Roger was one of the top high-ups in the Ministry of Economic Warfare, and was attending constant conferences. He himself had moreover much more time as an Intelligence Officer to talk to her on the telephone than he had as a wine merchant in Soho Square. It was Renée indeed far oftener than he who broke off the call on the plea of ‘things to do’. Renée was doing a half-time job at the Red Cross and was very busy.
Women were in fact far busier than men. It was extremely hard for anyone over thirty to get into the armed forces and London was full of men at a loose end, who could not believe that in a national emergency there was no employment for them. The girls on the other hand were all very occupied, driving cars and ambulances, and typing reports in Ministries. The only idle ones were those in hospitals, who waited in vain for casualties.
Margery was amusingly insistent on this point. Through her connections with publicity she had found herself a position of some responsibility in the Ministry of Information. She was handling radio, a function for which she was professionally equipped.
“Men are such a bore these days,” she would complain. “They keep ringing you up, as though you had nothing else to do but listen to their troubles. The turn of the wheel, I suppose. Before the war men complained that women were interfering with their work; now it’s the other way round. Men interfere with ours.”
Guy was seeing rather more of Margery than he had for some little while. Nobody wanted, in the black-out, to go far afield. You looked round you for friends who were close at hand. He was grateful to have a sister round the corner. She dined with him on an average once a week. It was restful to have someone with whom he had a store of common gossip. The fact that he was working in highly confidential work, reading a great number of ‘Most Secret’ documents, made, he was finding, the maintenance of many of his friendships difficult. He had to watch himself closely when he was discussing any aspect of the war. He found it difficult to remember at a moment’s notice whether he had acquired a certain piece of information from a newspaper, a conversation at Bolton’s, or an intercepted message. For security’s sake he preferred the company of those acquaintances whose conversation was limited to games and gallantry.
It was a genuine rest to be with Margery.
“How Franklin would have hated this,” she once remarked. “He’s the kind of person who wouldn’t have fitted into anything. Do you hear anything of Daphne, by the way?”
He shook his head. Julia’s prophecy had been fulfilled. Already, within a year he had lost touch with her.
“Rex seems to be lying pretty low,” she said.
“He must have been more cautious than we thought. I was afraid he’d be arrested that first week; with all those admirals.”
“Mosley’s still at large.”
“I know, but Mosley’s always been straightforward and above-board. He’s stayed in the open. It’s those retired high-ranking officers who were the danger, the ones who kept in touch with what they called their opposite numbers on the other side.”
One evening when he was duty officer, Guy had as a matter of fact searched the secret files to see if they had anything on Rex. He could find nothing, but that, he knew, told him little. Rex might be entered under a code name with his activities filed under ‘Operation Colonel’. Guy’s branch had carried the process of mystification to an extent where it was not impossible to find yourself double-crossing an activity of a brother officer because you had not the clue to his code system.
His own pseudonym inside the office was Major Ducat—he was
now a G.S.O.(2)—and he was finding it increasingly difficult to remember who he was to whom. His organization had many functions; that of his own branch was the discovery of secret information in neutral countries. He had been put in the Turkish section. Turkey was the only European country he had never visited. He had no trade links with it and no such specialized information about conditions there as he would have had abundantly in Spain and Portugal and to a lesser extent in Greece, Hungary, and Yugoslavia. He suggested that he might be assigned to a different country.
The Controller laughed.
“My dear fellow, that’s the very reason why we gave you that assignment. We wanted you to come fresh to it. Without preconceptions.”
Later on, comparing his experience with that of other officers, he was inclined to attribute his posting to the Turkish section to the natural desire of the professional to avoid being embarrassed by the presence on his staff of an amateur and junior who might know more about a subject than he did himself. There might be something, Guy thought, in the idea of bringing a fresh, unprejudiced view to bear upon a subject, but when he read the various reports submitted from Ankara and Istanbul, he knew that he would have been far better able to assess their value if he could have visualized the scene and the people filling it.
He looked for an English parallel. Suppose for instance a German spy in London were to report that he had observed a member of a fashionable West End Club consuming at six o’clock in the evening in a Lyons Restaurant a plate of sausage and mashed potatoes, the pertinent officer in Berlin who would know at what hours of the day that kind of man would take what kind of meal, would decide from the improbability of any such occurrence that the remainder of the report must be treated with great caution; Guy lacked that knowledge of the Arab world, as he sat in London reading accounts of Iraqi students in Ankara being persuaded by German agents to supply on their return to Baghdad information about troop movements in the Persian Gulf. If only he could visualize the scene. All these endless conversations over cups of coffee. Did it or did it not ring true?