His Second War

by Alec Waugh

  98

  ARAB DRESS

  When the English tourist returns from the Middle East with a burnous, which he employs as a dressing-gown, the result is not usually fortunate. The square-cut collar on the shoulders makes the neck seem much too long, and the short sleeves give an appearance of discomfort as though the gown would slip off at any moment. But worn with a white head veil and head rope, as the Arabs wear it, the brown burnous, with its gold threadwork at the neck is a dignified and appropriate dress. The long flowing dress with high-collared silk shirt and embroidered bodice gives the whole costume a surprisingly masculine effect.

  99

  EVENING

  Day long the sun beats down out of a cloudless sky. The hard glare of the parched earth dazzles you. But in the evening, shortly before sunset, a breeze will blow from the still snowcapped Hebron. As the car drove back to Deraa he would half close his eyes, wearied by diplomacy, savouring the calm of this last hour when the outline of the hills will be subdued, will merge into a succession of level layers of rich soft colours, dominated by a purplish brown, and the camel-trains will move in slow silhouette against the sunset. The dust of the chaff about the villages will be flecked with orange.

  100

  GOOD-BYE TO THE LEBANON

  It was by a mistake that he had been posted to Spears’s Mission. It was through a mistake he left it.

  With the founding of a Legation, with the reorganization of the country after the campaign, the war establishment of Spears’s Mission Syria had to be reconsidered. Much paper passed back and forth and the words “ceiling” and “paramilitary” were constantly evoked.

  As an outcome of many conferences certain sections of the mission came under the Legation and thereby under the Foreign Office; the Economic Section came under the Board of Trade, the Press and Propaganda Section under the M. of I. By regarding certain activities of the Mission as “para-military” the army ceiling was not thus disturbed.

  The net result, everyone had been assured, would be the same. Only when the final table was presented was it realized that though the military section had been increased by an A.A.Q.M.G. it no longer possessed the services of a Captain “Q”. It was the opportunity he had waited for.

  “I think,” said the previous holder of that appointment, “that it would be as well if I went up to Cairo and looked around.”

  101

  EXTRACT FROM M.E. ORDERS

  “Lt.-(T/Capt.)—Wessex Rgt. R.A.R.O. from Staff ‘Q’ to be I.O. in an existing vacancy and to retain his temporary rank w.e.f. July 17, 1942.”

  102

  “BIEN SUR”

  He had only two days in which to collect his kit and return with it to G.H.Q. It was seven weeks since he had seen Eva. She had broken three successive dates. He had not seen her before he had left for the Hauran. On his return from the Hauran he had only had three days in Beirut before going down to Cairo. Every minute of these last two days was mortgaged. Which was as well, he told himself. He did not like “last times.” It was hard to be natural on such occasions. One was lucky when one had not to recognize the last time as being the last time. “I’ll just look in,” he thought, “on the way to Haifa. With a car piled up with luggage she’ll realize that I can’t stay more than a few minutes.”

  But neither she nor her mother was in the home, only the young brother, the one who used to wait for him outside Saad’s with messages.

  “Eva’s away,” he said, “she won’t be back till Sunday. She’s at Zahlé. She’s on her honeymoon.”

  “Her honeymoon? Who with?”

  “A French man.”

  “The French sailor who was wounded and that she nursed?”

  “Good heavens, no: with Monsieur B—, the man who runs the Cinemas. You must know him. The rich widower with the pretty granddaughter.”

  103

  He had been round the offices taking his farewells. He hesitated outside the Minister’s room. “Why bother,” he had thought.

  Nine months earlier in London, when he had passed the mornings of his embarkation leave reading Liaison and Prelude to Victory, he had looked forward to working under General Spears. But in point of fact he had seen little of him, and that little had been impersonal. The Minister was not one of those who make any attempt at intimacy with their staff. He was affable but impersonal. His Staff Captain “Q” hesitated, he did not want to waste the time of a busy man. “Oh, well,” he thought, “I suppose I should.”

  To his surprise the Minister could not have been more charming. He ordered a cup of tea. He gave the impression that he had all the time in the world to spare. He asked him about his new appointment.

  “I do hope,” he said, “that it’s something that you really will find congenial. I’m afraid that we haven’t made much use here of your particular abilities, but I’m most grateful, we are all most grateful for what you have done for us. Our scope here is, of course, very limited. Our problem here is, as you’ve no doubt realized …” He paused. “My own particular problem …” he began. He talked about that problem, the problem of being here as Minister in this country where there were so many cross-sections of opinion, so many irons heating in so many fires, with an air of relaxed intimacy, not as though he were taking one of his juniors into his confidence but as though he were inviting his advice.

  Thoughtfully his Ex-Staff Captain “Q” walked down the passage. A novelist rarely transports a character straight from life. He borrows one trait here, another there. Himself he never “put” people into books. Even so he did not feel that in retrospect and as a novelist he would regard his seven months at Beirut as wasted.

  104

  G.H.Q., M.E.F., AUGUST 1942

  “When I am old and bald and short of breath I’ll live with scarlet majors at the base … Guzzling and gorging in the best hotel …”

  It was in 1917 that Siegfried Sassoon had written that, and it was as a subaltern in France that he had chuckled over it. Now twenty-five years later here he was, stationed in Cairo, billeted at Shepheard’s, and it really wasn’t at all as he had pictured it.

  On the surface it looked as though it were. At half-past seven every morning the dining-room of every hotel in Cairo would be filled with red-tabbed officers who were completing at their leisure a breakfast of the kind that has been described as typically English, but that you would not have found anywhere in England then.

  At half-past one you would have to wait several minutes before you could get served with your Martini at the Turf Club bar. At Gezira there would be a long queue waiting beside the buffet tables where innumerable different dishes of meat, pie, chicken, fruit, cheese, salad would be set out to await your choice.

  All the afternoon officers would be sitting under the flamboyant trees watching the cricket with glasses of iced coffee at their sides, and small boys parading before them tray after tray of the sweet cakes that are known as “Groppi’s.”

  At the swimming-pool bronzed young men would be drying in wicker chairs beside bright young women.

  On the golf course, unless you got there early, you would have to wait several minutes on the tee before driving off. There would be the smack of squash balls against stone.

  In the evenings there would be cabaret shows on a dozen roof gardens. There would not be a table vacant at any of the smaller restaurants. The lounge of the Continental would be as noisy as a monkey house. And less than a hundred miles away, at Alamein, the Eighth Army was preparing itself for the attack on whose outcome would depend the fate of Egypt.

  That was what it seemed on the outside, that was the impression that would be taken away from it by any journalist on a short assignment. And yet what a very false picture, he reflected, as he lay back in bed enjoying the last five lazy minutes before getting up, how very false an impression those listed details would give of the life of the average staff officer at G.H.Q.

  As he shaved, slowly, for in summer time in Cairo it is hard to hurry over anything, he pictured in advance the
day that was now beginning for him. He would leave the hotel at half-past seven. He would not have had breakfast first. He was better, he considered, in that heat without eggs and bacon. Outside the hotel he would buy a copy of The Egyptian Mail which he would read for the sake of Beachcomber a quarter of an hour later over a milk-shake at a café. He would buy himself a mango and a bunch of grapes which he would eat later in the morning over a cup of N.A.A.F.I. tea. He would arrive at his office at 8.15.

  For five hours he would not leave that building. The work that would be waiting there could no doubt have been compressed into a two and a half hour stretch. It was not by peacetime standards a full morning’s work. But part of his work, as it was part of any soldier’s work, was the being ready to deal with an emergency when it came. A staff captain, like a regimental officer, has to be ready to work on occasions a full twenty-four hour day. At other times he has to keep himself in a state of readiness. The keeping of oneself in that state of constant readiness is both boring and a strain. In the last war he had been bored standing in a trench waiting for an S.O.S. In this war he was bored sitting at a desk turning over a file waiting for the telephone to ring.

  Everyone is happier when he is at work full out. But work that could under pressure be dealt with in two and a half hours represents a fairly solid morning’s work during a period of calm. He would, he knew, be thoroughly relieved when a quarter-past one came round.

  To-day he would be playing golf. He played four times a week, on every day when there was no cricket for him to watch. He would have sandwiches brought up to his office at one o’clock so that he could get away quickly, so that he could be on the tee before the crowd arrived. After his round of golf he would have a short swim before taking tea and Groppi’s on the Club House terrace

  Those three and a half hours at Gezira not only made the day for him, but saved it. “Without them, I’d go mad,” he thought. For at five he would be back again at his office with another three hours at a desk ahead of him. By the time it was eight o’clock he would be pretty tired, in no mood for “beating it up” at cabarets and night clubs.

  Contrary to the opinion that was generally held, most staff officers at G.H.Q. led quiet lives there. If they were living on their pay, and the majority of them were, they had perforce to live economically. The restaurants were always full, but since there were no messes there was no alternative to dining in a restaurant. The cabarets were always crowded, but there were a great many officers on leave, and there were so many officers at G.H.Q. that if the average staff officer had “beaten it up” more than a couple of times a month a whole new cabaret quarter would have had to be constructed. Himself he had on the day he had left England, resolved while in the Middle East to live upon his pay. He had luckily no one dependent on him, for he had no private income apart from what he earned by writing. And though for the first eighteen months of the war a steady, though diminishing, revenue had continued to come in from the stories he had been writing in the spring and summer of 1939, he had, apart from the three stories he had written coming out, done nothing as a writer since the war began, beyond finishing off, during his first spring at Dorchester, the novel he had begun in the previous summer.

  Unless he had some lucky film sale he could not now expect to receive as a writer anything more than an occasional odd cheque for back royalties, or a Penguin reissue or second serial rights. And he had resolved when he had left England to let such odd sums accumulate against the day when he would find himself out of khaki, having to finance the preliminary seven or eight months while he was “getting back” to writing.

  He now found himself, that is to say, living within the limits of the fifteen pounds a month that he was entitled to draw from the field cashier, the two five-pound cheques that Barclay’s allowed him to cash each month against his pay on London, and the allowances that he received in lieu of lodging, rations and a servant, amounting to about sixteen and six a day. He lived, that is to say, on about twelve pounds a week, which was by no means easy in a town like Cairo, when there was no satisfactory alternative to living in a hotel and when there was no official transport between hotel and office and on every side of you there were inducements to spend money.

  The life of the staff officer at G.H.Q. completed in fact a “virtuous circle.” You could not do your work properly in that climate if you kept late hours and even if you wanted to keep late hours you could not afford to. In consequence you went to bed early and woke up fresh.

  He was stationed in Cairo and he lived at Shepheard’s—in a “playground hotel” in a “playground city.” And compared with the life of the desert, his life there was, of course, “great gravy.” But it was not by any means the paradise that he had pictured for himself “in the next war” when, as a subaltern in France in 1917 he had chuckled over Sassoon’s, “When I am old and bald and short of breath …”

  105

  MILITARY SECURITY

  It was the first time he had been employed on straightforward military security. It seemed strange and rather incongruous that he, whose life had been spent in an atmosphere of publicity, should now be occupied in suppressing news. For twenty-five years he had been looking for ways in which to get things done. Now he spent his days thinking of reasons for preventing and ways of stopping things from being done. Perhaps on the principle that the man whom all Ireland could not rule should rule all Ireland, the men who knew the value of publicity, and could judge the effects of good and bad publicity, were the men best fitted to judge what was likely to harm morale and to detect the means by which harmful ideas were spread. But it did occur to him to wonder whether it would not have been possible to have reduced considerably the amount of time that was occupied in suppressing subversive propaganda, if a little time more had been devoted to the production of effective positive propaganda.

  Security was necessarily and properly negative. It was a “thou shalt not.” The security campaign had been extensive and effective. But there had been no parallel campaign of positive propaganda. The conscientious objectors in the last war had complained that the war was being boosted and advertised like a patent medicine. This war, he felt, could have done with a little more of that. How very few of the people who could claim to be experts in the directing and controlling of opinion—the journalists, radio men, advertising agents, novelists, whose whole lives had been spent in learning how to make people feel and think in the way they wanted—were now employed on the very necessary job of making people feel enthusiastic, hopeful, resolute about the war.

  106

  LOST GENERATION

  The terminal circular of his school’s Old Boys’ Society contained this summer for the first time a casualty list whose dimensions bore some relation to those of the last war. Reading down the list he read the names of two men who had gone to school on the same day as he. “That makes more than half,” he thought.

  Forty-two boys had gone to Fernhurst as new boys in September 1911. When he had last read through the list he had noted that of those forty-two, twenty were dead. Now twenty-two were gone. More than half of a generation that was only now reaching the middle forties. The proportion in earlier generations was even higher. And of those who had so far survived, how many had not had their chances of making an effective contribution to the work of their generation ruined by the interruption of their education, the dislocation of their plans.

  And it was the men of his generation, and of the generations immediately preceding his, who should be preparing now to take over the running of the country. And it was in the dearth, in every walk of life, of competent men in the late forties and early fifties, men of experience and tried capacity, that Europe was now beginning to recognize its handicap, the price that it had had to pay for 1914-1918. And in the 1970s there was to be that same dearth again.

  107

  CABLE FROM NEW YORK—RECEIVED 1 SEPTEMBER 1942.

  Officers Lesson Red Book Love Carol Hill.

  108

  POSTED TO PA
IFORCE, 6 SEPTEMBER 1942

  The G.2 of his section came into the office with a letter.

  “How would you like to go to this new Persia-Iraq Command?”

  “I’d like to.”

  “You’d be going as G.3.”

  “Fine.”

  “You needn’t go unless you want to. Bagdad’s a lousy place.”

  “I’ll have been to worse.”

  “Then I’ll ring up the D.M.I. and fix it.”

  And that was that, he thought. He did not particularly want to go there. But an army officer was under orders. One went where one was sent. More than once during this war he had been surprised at being asked whether or not he would like to do a thing. There had been, he supposed, so much talk after the last war of square pegs being forced into round holes that an attempt was now being made to find out what the man himself felt he was best fitted for. But the trouble of this new method was that the man himself did not know enough about the army to know where he could best fit in. It was really more satisfactory for the army out of its knowledge of its own requirements to decide what was the best use that it could make of the material at its disposal.