His Second War

by Alec Waugh

  It was in late November that he went there. The sky was blue. There was an atmosphere of bright, brisk animation under the warm winter sun. The streets were noisy with bustling taxis, piped in red and yellow, with small, low, wicker pony-drawn carriages, with rattling W.D. lorries.

  Every kind of uniform was to be seen. Collaborative Italian police in dapper tunics were edging their way between wide-hatted Australians and red-fezzed native riflemen. British officers had abandoned their habitual uniformity. On a day that was neither temperate nor hot, some were in service dress and some in drill. Some wore open-necked tunic-shirts, others wore sweaters underneath their Sam Browne belts, with shoulder straps embroidered with badges of rank inserted through a slit in the sweater and buttoned below the collar. There were children selling newspapers, and neat Italian women. The shop-windows were gay with articles that had begun to grow rare in England—flowers and fruits and scents. There was an air of prosperity, almost of luxury. Sauntering there in the sunlight, he found it hard not to believe himself back in one of those playground Italian cities that had been so much a part of his life in the 1920’s.

  The whole atmosphere of the place was strange because, in so many ways, it was so familiar. The hotel that he was staying in had been taken over by the army to be run as a mess. But the Italian staff had remained. The atmosphere was entirely Italian, was reminiscent in a hundred ways of those many hotels in Northern Italy, in Pisa, Viareggio, Alassio, in which during the first six or seven years after the last war Englishmen had “lived on the exchange.”

  It had been hard sometimes in those days to realize that the north of Italy and the Italian Riviera were not British dependencies. So many Englishmen had behaved as though they “owned the place,” that the difference was barely perceptible here now in Asmara where in fact they did. It seemed as though the clock had been put back. He wondered what he was doing in a place like this, in uniform. It needed an effort to see the issue in its right perspective, to realize that the question was not “what was he doing here in uniform?” but “what was this town doing here?” What purpose was served, what purpose had ever been served by these broad streets and shops and offices? The country did not need Asmara. Apart from skins and potash the country had nothing to export but salt. The country could not support Asmara. Asmara was supported by the Italian people, out of Italian taxes. It had no justification, even as an assembly point in the war. It was a gesture; nothing more; a piece of window-dressing.

  What, he wondered, was to be its fate. At the moment it was enjoying a temporary boom, with British troops buying up cameras and gramophones, sending scent and stockings to their girls in England. But when the shops have been emptied of their stores, how were they to be replenished? Valuable shipping space was not going to be used to provide Occupied Enemy Territory with luxuries. Shop after shop would close. More and more of the civilian population would be evacuated. The flats would be tenantless, the offices would be shuttered. And even if after the war Eritrea was returned to Italy, what future could Asmara have, what purpose could it serve now that Abyssinia had regained her independence.

  He thought of those derelict mining towns of the west, abandoned overnight when the boom was over. He wondered if that was to be Asmara’s fate, to be left abandoned, neglected, half-lived in, a warning for many years of the waste and folly that can be committed when the imperialism of a megalomaniac runs riot with a totalitarian machine.

  76

  ARRIVAL IN M.E.

  Staff officers leaving U.K. for Middle East depart invariably at a moment’s notice. They are given the impression in Whitehall that an extra day spent in organizing their kit and bank balance will lengthen the war a year. They arrive breathless at the embarkation port, without half the things they want, having encumbered themselves with innumerable things that they will never use, having left behind them a tangle of domestic, financial and emotional loose ends. “Still,” they reassure themselves, “there is a war on.”

  On their arrival in Middle East, however, they find that no one expects them, no one has heard of them, the vacancy that they were sent to fill is closed, the need for which their services were required exists no longer. A new situation has arisen and they join the pool.

  In a sense the seventeen officers who had been sent out to join Spears’s Mission Syria in the autumn of 1941 provided no exception to this rule; in a sense they did. For they had had the originality, so they were to discover on their arrival, of having been sent out, in the first place, by mistake, since Spears’s Mission London having been told that Spears’s Mission Syria would require seventeen officers had immediately set about finding them in London without realizing that Spears’s Mission Syria who needed them in a hurry, had already set about finding them in Middle East. By the time Spears’s Mission Syria realized that seventeen officers were on the way the ship had already sailed, and it was too late to stop them.

  The seventeen new arrivals were welcomed therefore at G.H.Q., M.E.F., with nothing more than the announcement that suitable employment would be found for them as soon as possible, but that in the meantime there were only four vacancies still unfilled. One of these vacancies, however, was the command of the press and propaganda section, and since the general was reported to have expressed keen satisfaction on hearing that a professional novelist was to join his staff, the recorder of this narrative was sent to Beirut forthwith.

  But that, too, was to prove a blunder. He was welcomed on his arrival with affability, hospitality, but a certain diffidence.

  “I’m afraid,” it was explained to him, “that there’s been a muddle. The general has gone back to England and whatever he may have said in Cairo, he said nothing to us here before he left. In the meantime, we’ve appointed another fellow to the post … somebody who, well, somebody who wouldn’t, shall we say, fit in with everyone or in every place and he does seem to have found his niche here now and he is doing the job extremely well. It seems a pity to disturb him, and I do honestly think that someone like yourself, well, it’s not quite … I’m not at all sure that you’d have really liked it: in peace-time after all you’d not have looked at it … And in the meantime there is a vacancy here as Staff Captain ‘Q’. You are after all a regular, and if you would care to take it on you are just the fellow that we’ve been looking for. You have come up here by mistake, of course, and if you feel that you’d rather go back to Cairo and see if you can find something more in your line …”

  “No, no. I’d rather stay here.”

  “In that case then …”

  77

  … OLIM MEMINISSE …

  There was waiting for him at his destination a letter that, posted by air mail after he had left, had caught him, and passed him on the route. It was from the friend with whom he had dined on his last evening, written on her return to her flat, to welcome him on his arrival and to wish him luck.

  The sight of that so unexpected envelope, of that so familiar script, struck him with a sensation of mingled excitement, sickness, dread, anticipation, that was not to be diagnosed in words.

  At the age of twenty-two he had described one of the characters in a novel as having reached the age when the transports and sorrows of love exist in the memory and the imagination. The character in question was in the early forties. He had been surprised when his more elderly friends had laughed at him.

  78

  STAFF CAPTAIN “Q”

  Every staff captain is a dog’s-body. But every staff captain is a dog’s-body in a different way. It depends on the organization one is posted to and Spears’s Mission Syria was unlike any organization he had met before.

  As a schoolboy, learning his catechism for confirmation, he had found it difficult to understand the Trinity. As a staff captain “Q” he was to find himself similarly puzzled by the ramifications of General Spears’s activities. There were at this time three main branches to the problem. In the first place there was No. 20 B.M.M. rechristened as Spears’s Mission, which was a straightfor
ward military mission under the War Office, appointed to liaison duties with the Free French Forces. There was secondly Spears’s Mission Syria which had been formed at the conclusion of the Syrian campaign to fulfil liaison duties between practically everyone and everything in Syria within the complicated quadrilateral constructed between the local and Free French civil administrations, the Minister of State’s office in Cairo, the Free French Forces, and the British Military Forces resident in the country. To fulfil these duties Spears’s Mission Syria was equipped with a military section which contacted the Free French Forces on questions of policy as opposed to problems of supply and tactics which were dealt with by No. 20 B.M.M.; an economic section with an establishment of three colonels, eight majors and six captains; a political section which in addition to controlling a number of political officers, enrolled and placed in uniform the officials of the various British consulates. There was a press and propaganda section and there were certain civilian advisers.

  There was, thirdly, and housed in the same building, a Legation of which General Spears was Minister. While, fourthly, as a final complication, there was the Hadfield-Spears Field Ambulance, a unit which had nothing whatever to do with any of the General’s three main branches of activity, but which (as Lady Spears was in part control of it) was accepted as part of the Mission’s work. The Staff Captain “Q” of the Military Section Spears’s Mission Syria was, so it seemed, the pivotal administrative point in this intricate machine. “By the time I’m through,” he thought, “I ought to have learnt how to pass the buck.”

  His work was inevitably a succession of odd jobs: the kind of work that can be dealt with only in one way, by keeping a pad at your side on which you jot down each fresh chore as it comes up, with a star against those that claim priority.

  The chores were varied, that was the least, as it was the most, that could be said of them. There were the sudden rushed visits of important personages, for whom air passages had to be booked, cars ordered and trains met. There would be diplomats in transit with a retinue of prams and nurses. There were innumerable Lebanese complaints about houses that had been bombed or looted in the campaign, about lorries that had been requisitioned and abandoned. There were photographers applying for permission to develop snapshots for the troops. There were officials who claimed that their loss of office under the Vichy regime was due to their pro-British sentiments. Everyone who had a grievance felt that Spears’s Mission was the right audience for it. And every Beirut branch when faced with a conundrum said: “Oh, try Spears’s Mission, they may know the answer.”

  In addition to all that, there was straightforward military liaison with the French; the clothing and equipping of the local troops; the taking over of the various stores that had been left behind by the Vichy Forces; the finding out exactly what had been left behind; the problem of restarting the French workshops, of combining the British and the French war efforts.

  Most of this work was highly technical. Not only was his technical French vocabulary extremely limited, but his mind had no technical bent whatever. He was not interested in machinery. Required as the interpreter at conferences between the French and the British staffs to interpret a situation, the key point of which was the reconstruction of a certain type of wheel, he could only answer that he did not know what the thing was in English. In Whitehall, six months earlier, he had been puzzled over indents for “conical canisters.” He now had to translate the equivalent for conical canisters into French. He only hoped that the French preferred to deal with Englishmen who did not speak French too well, that they mistrusted the Englishmen who prided themselves on being mistaken for Frenchmen. But he could imagine few occupations for which by taste and training he was worse equipped.

  79

  D.A.Q.M.G.

  A dog’s-body’s life is made pleasant, boring or intolerable by the major immediately above him. Staff Captain “Q” Spears’s Mission Syria was lucky in having over him in “Hammie”—an abbreviation for Hamilton—a man whom he liked personally and whose efficiency he could respect.

  Hammie was in the later thirties. He was small, very small, dark and foreign-looking. He was English, from the north, but he had lived so much of his life abroad that he spoke with an accent that might not have been an English one. He was in the R.A.S.C. and had earned his crown for the skill and enterprise with which he had provisioned an Army Corps during the retreat in France. Where other staff officers had requisitioned cattle, he, after a show of bargaining, had given signed receipts. He had got what he wanted and in half the time.

  He had been with Spears’s Mission from the start. And it was hard to picture what the Mission would have done without him.

  In an organization such as this one, where the front lines of each man’s work are casually defined, there is always the danger that an important issue will be neglected because each man thinks another man is tackling it, like a catch hit high between the covers. Hammie always went for the ball.

  Seeing him at his desk, a short neat figure, barricaded behind files, it was impossible to find a simile more appropriate than the obvious one of the spider’s web. He was ambitious. But he did not want prominence or prestige. He preferred to be behind the scenes. He was the centre for how many threads. He had brought issue after issue under his control. He lived for work. He would work through the heat of the afternoons, he would work late at night, he worked on Sundays. He had an admirable sergeant-clerk and an efficient staff. Others—and senior persons—were aware of how much power he was getting within his hands; they were aware and they resented it. More than one Palace revolution attempted to depose him. But when it came to the point it was always found that he was indispensable.

  Some men make themselves indispensable by keeping the work within their hands, by putting nothing upon paper, by keeping files which only they can understand. Hammie put everything on paper. Everything was filed and referenced. Had he been run over by a car, anyone could have picked up his work and carried on with it, or at least any section could have. For more than one man’s work was contained within those files. Its bulk was indeed the rock on which the Palace revolutions broke. When it came to the point, no one was ready to take on quite all that.

  Hammie was conscious of his power, his growing power, and enjoyed it. It was the custom at the end of the day, round about half-past seven, to slacken off a little, to sit and discuss one’s work over a whisky. A self-confident smile would play under his moustache as he explained his theory of liaison.

  “There are two ways,” he’d say; “you can be hail-fellow-well-met with everyone. You can play about with the French, go on parties with them; get things on such a basis of friendship that people more or less have to do the things you ask them. That’s one way, but it’s not my way. I don’t believe in being intimate with either side. One’s a go-between. One must remain impartial. One mustn’t put oneself in the position of having to do something of which one doesn’t at heart approve. One must stand apart. I don’t say that the French like me. I don’t think they do. But they know that they can trust me. They know that if I think I’m justified I can get things done for them. They were stand-offish with me at the start, but they’re coming to me now in the way I want them to. Two different men have started off in the same way this very week. ‘J’ai besoin de vous,’ they’ve said—and that’s the way I want it.”

  He paused. His smile was one of victory. He repeated the words slowly to himself, as though he were savouring the bouquet of a heavy wine. “J’ai besoin de vous. J’ai besoin …”

  80

  DAILY ROUTINE. WINTER 1941-1942

  Officers in Spears’s Mission did not live in messes. It was considered that for reasons of liaison they needed to entertain French officers and local notables with a greater intimacy than would have been possible in a mess. They were placed, therefore, on the lodging list, which meant that they were paid various allowances amounting to the equivalent of a captain’s pay and left to débrouiller for themselves.
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  Himself, he took, in the old part of the town, a top-floor flat, or rather two rooms in a top-floor flat that had the convenience of a separate entrance. Through one window as he lay in bed he could see the high minaret of a mosque, through the other at the end of a long vista of houses he could see the sea.

  Every morning, while it was still dark, he would be woken by the voice of a Muezzin. Always an early waker, in peace-time an early riser who had finished his morning’s writing by ten o’clock, he would lie back among his pillows, brooding, while the quick dawn broke.

  On the balcony of the house across the street two girls in long, white dressing-gowns, with their black hair flung loose over their shoulders, would hang their mattresses over the side of the balcony and beat their carpets. By six, tramcars would be running in the streets. By seven the honking of car horns had started. When he left the flat, breakfasted at eight, the shops were open and the streets were crowded, with veiled Moslem women; with Lebanese girls, their black Brylcreamed hair worn long upon their shoulders; with Moslems walking two and two in fezzes, swinging their beads, sometimes their little fingers intertwined. Along the sidewalks would be vendors of hollow bread, shaped in crescents, and shoe-blacks with their little brass-bound caskets.

  His twenty minutes’ walk to the Spears Mission would mark in a sense the tether of his routine. It was along this walk that his life in Beirut was lived. For a hundred yards or so it took him up the main and noisy street down which the buses ran. At the pivotal traffic centre a policeman stood under an umbrella: the road that ran south from it to the sea was the town’s main shopping street. The book-shops and the libraries were there; at its head was “Tanios,” a Fortnum and Mason kind of place where, on mornings when you were duty officer, they made you up picnic sandwiches. Kassab’s, the Liberty’s of Beirut, was there, and there was the Indian silk shop and Terses where you bought brocades.