by Alec Waugh
In his own case, if the posting authorities were to ask: “What would you like to do, what do you really think you should be doing?” his answer would be: “I should like to be released from the army for a year. I should like to go to New York and see my publishers and the Editor of Red Book; I should then like to go as an accredited free-lance war correspondent to the New Hebrides and Solomons which is a part of the world that I have travelled in and know, and write a series of magazine short stories that would bring home to the American and British publics the realities of this new type of island warfare. I should then like to make a thorough tour of England and write a serializable novel showing the nature and extent of the country’s war effort.”
He had not the slightest doubt, now, after three years in khaki, that he could make a more effective contribution to the war effort as a novelist and as a magazine short story writer than he was about to do as a G.3 in military security. He had equally not the slightest doubt as to the reception that such an answer would receive from “A.”
109
A FINANCIAL PROBLEM
In the last war an officer was paid monthly in advance. On the day that you were gazetted you walked into Holt’s or Cox’s, cashed a cheque for ten or eleven pounds and proceeded to enjoy your week’s posting leave.
In this war, presumably because it had been found that a great many officers were killed before the month was out and there were difficulties in recovering pay that had been already spent, officers were paid monthly in arrears. In consequence, at the beginning of the war, reservists and territorials who were called up in the last week of August and the opening of September, found themselves for several weeks without any money to meet current expenses.
In the M.E.F., where you could draw an advance of pay from the Field Cashier, this particular problem did not exist. It was allowances Field and Colonial, and—if you were on the lodging list ration—lodging, fuel, light and servant that made your problem. Allowances were as important as one’s pay, and invariably when an officer went to a new appointment there was a muddle over these allowances. In consequence, during his first weeks in a new appointment, when he should have been completely concentrated on learning a new job, he found himself worrying, first as to whether his correct allowances had been applied for, and secondly as to whether those allowances would arrive on the right day.
In his own case there had been a muddle since his posting from Spears’s Mission, his August allowances not having been paid by the first week in September. He had not worried. He knew that they would turn up some time. And he could always let his bill run on at Shepheard’s. He was now, however, due to leave Cairo on the 12th. He could not leave until he had settled his hotel bill and he had no money with which to settle it.
He wondered what was the legal—from the military point of view—position of an officer who was unable to obey a posting order because he was unable to settle his hotel bill. Was it a court-martial offence if the Pay Department was responsible for his predicament? Did any funds exist for the extrication of officers from such a predicament? Was his future C.O. responsible?
It was a series of pretty points. But he was not anxious to put them to the test of a solution. With some concern, and without much hope, he presented himself at Barclay’s. Christmas presents had already taken his monthly two five-pound ration of cheques and the rules were very properly strict on the issues of further drafts. To his relief, however, the manager in question had read and liked a couple of his novels and was prepared to trust him. But as he settled his bill at Shepheard’s he could not help wondering what exactly would have happened to him if he had not had that piece of unexpected luck.
110
LAST AFTERNOON
The convoy left on the 13th. The night of the 12th he was to spend at the Abbassiah Rest Camp. He was to report there at five o’clock.
It was in a sentimental valedictory mood that he sat out under the now blossomless flamboyant trees watching one of the last cricket matches of the season. It was all very pleasant and green here at Gezira and he had never read a word in favour of Bagdad. He had little doubt that many times during the next few months he would regret not having said “no” to this appointment.
He had been joined at lunch by a close, if recent, friend, a Group Captain who wore civilian clothes and ran one of the branches of Intelligence.
“I didn’t know you were going,” he had said. “I’m sorry. I was just going to offer you a place on my establishment.”
“Which is just what I’d been hoping you were going to do for the last six months.”
“It’s not too late.”
“Isn’t it?”
The Group Captain shook his head.
“There’s no point in working against the grain. I’ve a feeling that you won’t much like this thing you’re going to. Get it well started first. Then if you find that you’re not liking it, and you’ve got everything running smoothly so that you won’t leave loose ends, drop me a chatty letter with the phrase: ‘I don’t much like Bagdad’ in it. I’ll know what you mean and start about getting you moved over.”
“Where’d I be working then?”
“In your case, and since you’d be already there—Bagdad.”
So it looked, he told himself, as he watched the cricket, as though it would be quite a while before he saw anything like this again. And though he had not much liked Cairo he felt homesick suddenly for the bathing-pool, and the short fifteenth hole, and the roof garden at the Turf Club, and the coffees and hot cheese cakes in the small Groppi garden on his mornings off.
111
DESERT CONVOY
The departure of the convoy, like all troop movements, was protected by such secrecy as attends a Nihilist plot. No one was supposed to know that they were headed for Bagdad. No one knew the route nor how long the trip would take. No indication had been given as to the conditions under which they would be travelling.
His convoy consisted of some twenty lorries, with seven to eight men a lorry.
As they had been issued with hard rations, and no implements or utensils with which to convert them into meals, he had presumed that they would stop at a series of rest camps along the way and had packed his kit in accordance with such a supposition.
It was a surprise to him on the first night when, shortly after nine, the stream of lorries was lined up in a square in the middle of the empty stretch of ground that surrounded a petrol station, and the troops manning them informed that they were to park down here, make themselves as comfortable as they could, and be ready to start off at five next morning.
112
17 SEPTEMBER 1942
Three years ago, he thought, I was ordering my kit. I was spending my last week of freedom. I was closing up my civilian life. I was excited, hopeful, apprehensive.
He had an accurate memory for dates. He could usually remember what he had been doing in any given week in any given year. Certain weeks, certain whole periods of time he was able to relive day by day, and hour by hour. As the convoy moved slowly eastward across the Syrian Desert he recreated day by day the thoughts and moods of that last civilian week.
He had leisure enough to recreate it. It was a slow, seven-day journey, and—once he had realized it was to be a picnic—a pleasant one. There was the waking in the morning, cold and shivering under the stars. There was the breakfast round the camp fire and the sense of fellowship with the men that went with it. There was the bustle in the half-light to pack his kit. There was the slow thawing of cramped limbs, the shedding one by one of garments as the heat of the day grew heavy. There was the half-hour’s half-time interval on a bare stretch of shadeless desert where nothing was cool except the water in the bag that the driver had hung over the lorry’s side.
There was the long afternoon when to right and left far away into the horizon stretched the blue estuaries of miraged rivers. There was the relief of the final halt, the slow, leisurely unpacking, the shaving and getting washed, the joking with the
men as they made up the camp fire and prepared the evening meal. There was the peace of evening and the rich orange-red of sunset; there was the turning into sleep as soon as the light faded. He had time in plenty to relive that week of three years ago, to relive it in the light of what those three years had brought.
He had visualized this new war in terms of the one he knew. He had asked himself, as he had sat nervous and expectant on that September morning in the train that was carrying him into a life that was at once familiar and strange, what would have happened in 1914 to a reservist of forty-one recalled to his regiment after twenty civilian years. He could not see himself being sent, untrained as he was, to France as a platoon commander. By the time he was trained there would be younger men to take his place. It was ten years since he had given up Rugby football, and when a man had come to feel himself too old for football he was also too old, unless there was a genuine dearth of man-power, for the rough and tumble of front-line fighting. He had pictured for himself garrison duty abroad, some R.T.O.-ship somewhere, a post as a Town Major, as the adjutant possibly of a depot, some dreary but necessary job of the kind for which an “old sweat” was fitted.
How differently it had all turned out.
In a series of pictures during those long, hot days, during the cool evenings, when it had become too dark to read, the essence of those three years crossed his memory: Dorchester and the two-towered gateway at the head of the long, straight street; his Bren-gun carriers churning through the mud, slithering over the ice; the deep terraces of Maiden Castle on a wild December afternoon when he had been caught there in a sudden deluge; the dining at the Perroquet on the last evening before he sailed for France; Belgium in the late afternoon of the first day of the advance, the boughs of lilac tossed into the lorries, the glow of fire over Arras; that long afternoon in the garden of the mess waiting for orders, wondering whether or not they should let the water out and kill the fishes; the grim shambles of the Imperial at Boulogne, the docks at Boulogne, and the ship waiting, and the aeroplanes wheeling overhead; the dull thud of the bombs, the wondering whether it was really worth-while sorting out his kit.
Pictures of England during that strange and sun-soaked summer when names were struck off signposts, when road blocks sprang up at every crossing, when aeroplane after invading aeroplane crashed over the English coastline.
Pictures of London in the blitz, the endless wailing of the siren, the sitting in his Adelphi flat sipping at a glass of sherry while the aeroplanes droned above and every so often the blast of air would blow back the curtains into the room; the sitting there until suddenly the thing got on his nerves, so that he hurried out quickly into the street and across the Strand; the sense of relief as he settled down in Boulestin’s, well under ground at his corner table.
Pictures of London during that second summer when he had found himself doing casual, cosy things that in peace-time he had never thought of doing; eating sandwiches on Hampstead Heath on the warm summer evenings; going out by tube to Richmond, taking a punt out on the river; pictures of one particular long Sunday in the sun at Richmond, and the happy laughing crowd along the tow path, the drive back to London in the sunlight; the dining in the Grill Room at the Café Royal; the view from his flat over Regent’s Park; the luminous twilit glow that had lain over London as they drove back afterwards to Grosvenor House.
Pictures of London in the rain when bars and cinemas were closing and down every street went up the wail of “Taxi,” “Taxi.”
Pictures of London during that last week, nearly a year ago now, when over every day, every hour had hung a last-time feeling; the dining on his last night; the trying to say “goodbye” at Euston.
Pictures of the long voyage out: the broad stretch of the convoy; the Repulse sailing through the line on its way back to duty, signalling: “Good luck, soldiers, and good fighting,” the men crowding to the side to cheer.
Pictures of Cairo and Beirut, the snow on the mountains of the Lebanon, the Arab merchants in the Damascus souks. Picture after picture.
How little he had expected three years ago that such a series of pictures would be turned across his memory. How different from the last war it had been; how different from what, out of his memories of the last war, he had expected this war to be. If he were to write an article comparing this war with the last would he be able to find one point in common?
The last war had been almost exclusively a soldier’s war. Or rather it had been a war for those soldiers who had been within three miles of the line, for by the time one had got back to Division one was safe. When his company had gone into Passchendaele those who had stayed at details had not considered that they had been in a battle. Staff officers had been sneered at then; there had been jibes at shirkers and at “embusqués.” Soldiers had despised munition workers.
To-day there was none of that. In a war of movement, Divisional H.Q. was as vulnerable as a patrol in No Man’s Land. A factory was as important a target as a barracks. Londoners and the men of Bristol, Plymouth, of a dozen cities had been more under fire than a very great many soldiers. There was no longer the feeling that if you were not a front-line soldier you were not playing a man’s part in the war. Indeed to use the words “a man’s part” was a misnomer since, except in actual fighting, women were doing everything that men could do: were serving in forward areas and as the war continued would be doing so increasingly. There was the knowledge too that in a total war with property and personnel conscripted, no one had any real choice as to the form his service took. One was sent where one was ordered. In the last war rude remarks were passed about any young man in “civvies.” This time such a one was regarded with respect, as a person of importance who had had his services specially applied for.
Technical differences, in aeroplanes and tanks, had made too the whole tempo of this war different; had brought to the fore too a new type of leader. It was a technician’s war, and a technician was appreciated at his value. Leadership depended still, in part, on the old public-school prefect system of the man who could give an order with authority. But it also depended on the man who could make a machine do what he wanted. If a lorry or tank broke down it was the man who could get that machine moving again who was going to run a section. This war had seen the birth of a new ruling class: an aristocracy of technicians.
It was in a different spirit, too, that this war was being fought.
During the nineteen-twenties book after book, article after article, had pointed out how the war that had begun with the fire of enthusiasm that had found its expression in Rupert Brooke, had gradually changed its temper to the disillusionment that had found its expression in Siegfried Sassoon. This time the story had been reversed. It was in a different temper that this war had opened. 3 September, 1939, had marked for England the final failure of a policy. Onwards from 1933, year by year, as the clouds had thickened, England had gone on believing that somehow war could be avoided. Treaty after treaty was torn across and still England went on hoping. The National Government advertised itself with the posters: “We have kept you out of war.” England’s declaration of war was the admission that she had failed to do the thing she had set out to do.
It was without enthusiasm that England had gone to war. There had been no cheering, no bands, no troops singing on the march. A tired disillusioned voice had broken the news and the black-out descended, security posters lined the hoardings, petrol and censorship restrictions were imposed. It was in a mood of apathy that England had accepted these restrictions. It was not till later, nine months later when Europe was in ruins, that England had once again heard the note of challenge, had proudly taken up the glove, when a man’s voice over the air had told it: “We shall ride out the storm of war, if necessary for years, if necessary alone. We shall never surrender.”
In Christmas, 1916, after two and a half years of war, after the half-failure of the Somme, there had been in England a strong pacifist party that had grown stronger during 1917. More and more voices were
raised against the waste of war, against the continuation of the slaughter. And even now, after all that had happened since, he was not sure that a mistake had not been made in refusing that German peace offer. The argument had been that if the war were stopped before Prussian militarism had been destroyed there would be another war within fifteen years.
Well, Prussian militarism had been destroyed, overwhelmingly, on the field of battle and within fifteen years German megalomania was once again bullying Europe into war.
It was still possible to argue that it would have been better if the last war had ended then in 1916, before the Russian revolution had raised a bogy that had led as much as anything to the Conservative policy of appeasement; ended before the French army had suffered at the Chemin des Dames a defeat from which—one could realize it now—it had never properly recovered; ended before America, by becoming a participant in the war, had, through a misunderstanding over war debts, found herself through the twenties alienated in sympathy from England; ended before the humiliation of German arms had filled the German nation with that bitter acquisitive longing for revenge in which had lain the seeds of the present war; ended before the deaths of all those tens of thousands of young men whose faith and energy might really have rebuilt a world in which war was outlawed. It was still possible in spite of this present war to argue that peace should have been made in the last war in the Christmas of 1916. It was possible that the pacifists were right.
But this time there were no such things as pacifists. There was no talk of peace. Traitors there might be, one or two. Traitors and a few, a very few, who valued their property and their privileges so highly that they would be ready to accept their country’s inclusion in Hitler’s Europe, if they were left in apparent, if partial, if diminished possession of those privileges. But even in that minute minority there were no pacifists. Even the fifth columnists knew that this time the issue had to be fought out.