by Alec Waugh
Yet even so, implacable though the resolve was to destroy utterly and for ever the things for which the Germany of Hitler stood, there was in this war little if any of that hatred for the individual German—that artificially-fostered hatred—that had, on the rebound, during the twenties tempted so many Englishmen to prefer Germany to France. In every way this was a different war.
Different, too, in its attitude to post-war problems.
In the last war the general atmosphere of civilian life had been undisturbed. Soldiers on leave could contrast their homes with the dreariness of camps, the squalor of the trenches. Seeing their homes unchanged, they had had one wish only, to return to and become part again of that contrasted living.
This time not only had the continuity of home life been broken through air raids, through evacuations of families and businesses, through women having joined the army, so that the home to which the soldier returned on leave in 1941 was not the home that he had left in 1939, but the way of living that he had left in 1939 was not of a kind that he would be anxious to resume.
Whereas 1914-18’s war had come suddenly, dramatically, excitingly out of a sky that had seemed clear, this war had come slowly, drearily, depressingly, crisis by crisis, through the war of nerves. In 1917 a soldier looking back to the last days of peace could look back on happiness, peace of mind, on things for which he could feel homesick. The soldier of 1942 could not. He would not want to return to the world that had closed its books on that first Sunday in September. He would not want to live again through the succession of strained months that had slowly, irrevocably, brought war closer. He wanted to live in a world where that kind of atmosphere could not exist. He wanted a new world.
The older and married men with families might have as their first thought the return to those wives and families. But the younger men, the men without ties and the men for whom life was an adventure still, were concerned not so much with the returning home as with the kind of home they would return to. They wanted, and they were resolved to find, a different world.
So he mused as the lorries shook and jolted their way across the desert.
113
“MOON-DIM CITY OF DELIGHT”
His office in G.H.Q. was situated on the west bank of the river, some half-mile back from it, in what had presumably been designed as a Garden City. He was billeted in a hotel, on the east side of the river, almost exactly opposite his office. His room, which he shared with two other officers, faced upon a blank wall and the smells of the kitchen annexe.
His office was half an hour’s walk from his hotel. That walk each morning and afternoon was all the exercise he got. At lunchtime, when it was too hot to walk, he took a taxi back. In the evening, when it was late, he crossed the river in a row-boat. That return by boat was the sole variety that his routine provided, that it could provide. The half-hour’s walk—twelve minutes along Al Raschid Street, three minutes across the bridge, a quarter of an hour southwards through a semi-residential quarter—represented the limits of his tether. The remainder of the town was out of bounds.
Every morning his nose wrinkled as he walked out into Al Raschid Street. If there was a shabbier city in the world he had yet to see it. Before the day was an hour old the air at this time of the year would be thick with dust. Dust lay everywhere, on trees, on roofs, on minarets. Water had been flung down to lay it, and the streets were puddled. The pavements were thronged, three or four abreast with shabby, shuffling Arabs in long, dirty robes; with black-veiled women, with porters low-bent beneath cumbersome burdens of furniture and brushwood, with dirty bare-legged urchins, with soldiers in khaki drill, with beggars and newspaper boys and dogs and shoe-shine boys. The streets were as crowded as the pavements. If you stepped over the gutter to avoid a group that stood gossiping on the kerb you were likely to be ridden down by a cyclist, a taxi or a gharry.
The shops were in keeping with the streets they lined. They were all of them one-windowed cabins; small hosiers, and tailors and confectioners, displaying behind dirty glass, cheap-looking, fantastically expensive wares. For the greater part of its length the street was protected from the sun by a colonnade, and the air under its roof was stale with heat. No doubt behind the heavily-studded gates, that were interspersed here and there among the succession of window fronts, there were cool and shaded court-yards with balconies and flowers and a fountain with tiled floors and a palm or orange tree. But even there surely the smell and taste of dust persisted.
Bagdad the beautiful … the moon-dim city of delight … well, and it may have been in the days of Haroun Al Raschid.
114
“MESPOT LETTER”
They used to say before the war, that there was a stock letter that every newcomer to the Middle East received from his fiancée after he had been out six months. She would never, she would explain, feel any differently about him, she hoped that they would always be the greatest friends, but three years and fifteen hundred miles were just too much, it would be fairer to both of them to call it off.
In certain messes it was the rule for the recipient of such a letter to post it on the notice board so that his friends could compare his with theirs. After a man had been out six months his friends’ invariable greeting was: “Well, have you had your Mespot letter yet?”
115
SIMPLIFIED FINANCE
People had asked him in 1935, on his return from a short trip to Moscow, how the cost of living there stood in relation to the wages that the equivalent of an English three-pound-a-week workman would receive. It was a question there was just no way of answering.
In Russia the value of money changed according to the shop where you were spending it. If you travelled as a tourist through “Intourist”—and it was almost impossible to travel any other way—your expenses were worked out in pounds on a reasonable sterling basis. When you ordered a car for an expedition you were charged very much what you would be charged in London if you rang Godfrey Davis. If you wanted to buy souvenirs there were special “Torgsin” shops where you could make your purchases in European money. But if you wanted to make purchases in the ordinary Russian shops, or if you wanted to have a meal in a Russian restaurant other than the one to which you were entitled by your inclusive ticket, or if you picked up a taxi in the street, and for such purposes converted your pounds or dollars into roubles, the rate of exchange made the cost fantastic.
You could only afford to buy in the ordinary shops and travel in ordinary taxis by exchanging your money in the black market, which was neither easy nor desirable to do, nor exactly prudent. Unless you were prepared to pay a great deal more than most people could afford, you were forced to rely upon “Intourist.” Which is one of the reasons why visitors to Russia saw nothing that the Russians themselves did not want them to.
That, as regards the tourist; and as regards Russians themselves the situation was at that time complicated—or more accurately speaking, simplified—by the existence of two different kinds of shop: in one kind, though the quality of the goods on offer in both was just the same, the prices were distinctly lower, but you could only make rationed purchases in it and only then if you possessed the appropriate ration book. It was a system which made one’s affluence depend not on salary but on the number of ration tickets one received. It was a system by which the necessities of existence could be acquired at a cheap rate, while the residue of the salary could be spent as the individual wished on a luxury standard of expenditure. It was an admirable system. But it was a system which made it impossible for the visitor to work out the relationship between purchasing power, wages and cost of living.
In Bagdad the serving soldier was to find himself in a somewhat similar position. The cost of everything in the town was quite fantastic. A suit off the peg was fifteen pounds, a bottle of beer eight shillings, a thimbleful of watered whisky half a crown, a small bottle of shaving lotion half a guinea. But a captain’s pay, as its recipient was entitled to make rationed purchases in the N.A.A.F.I. and at the Offi
cers’ Shop—gin and whisky for example at the rate of one bottle a week for eight and six, and stout woollen socks for two and three a pair—was the equivalent of a four-figure income for a civilian.
Bagdad was about the most expensive city in the world. But it was at the same time a place where the serving soldier could economize. Unable to compete with the prices in the town, and forced to concentrate upon the N.A.A.F.I. where his purchases were rationed, he had some difficulty in spending his pay each month.
116
EXTRACT FROM A LETTER TO GROUP CAPTAIN, G.H.Q., M.E.F.
“… No, my dear Pat, my life is not gay at all. I decline to pay six shillings for a Martini made out of Palestinian Vermouth. So I avoid hotel bars and instead drink my weekly bottle of gin in my hotel bedroom in solitary and meditative state, nor is there any inducement to dine anywhere except in my own hotel. The food would be no better nor indeed any different. The atmosphere of unrelieved masculinity would be the same, and such Arab restaurants as might be amusing are out of bounds.
With the exception of a few nursing sisters, and the wives of some of the officials, there is no feminine society at all. The mid-European cabaret girls have been interned and the Arab cabarets are out of bounds. I do not know how many officers there are within a five-mile radius of this town, but their simpler, if grosser needs are catered for by one three-roomed establishment which the proprietress keeps quiet and select by fixing the tariff at six pounds for the night, four for a leisured hour and three for “le petit moment”—which works out at one visit every six weeks for a subaltern: one a month for a major and every other week for a brigadier—those going oftenest who need to least. I have not yet drawn my ration, and though I have a vague idea of a bulk issue to herald the New Year I fancy that I am both too old and too young for that kind of thing…. Moreover there is a rather pleasant Persian picture in a small curio shop that I have my eyes on.
In fact, my dear Pat, I do not think that I much like Bagdad.”
EXTRACT FROM PAIFORCE ORDERS
Lieut (T/Capt.)—Wessex Regt. (R.A.R.O.) from G.S.O. 3rd Grade to be I.O. in existing vacancy w.e.f. 1 Dec. ’42, retaining his temporary rank.
117
ULTIMA THULE
Once on a trip to Kenya he had stopped for the day at Aden. It had seemed an even drearier outpost than Djibouti, yet everyone whom he knew who had been stationed there, had assured him that they had left there with regret. Between Aden and Bagdad there is a parallel.
For the three-day tourist, for troops in transit stationed in its suburbs in tented camps, for staff officers billeted three in a room in third-rate hotels, Bagdad is infinitely depressing. But of those who actually are resident—the Embassy and Consular staffs, the Bank and oil people, the members of permanent R.A.F. stations and Intelligence Organizations such as B.I.S.C.—the majority if given the choice would not welcome a return to Cairo.
Bagdad grows on one. There is a happy atmosphere about the place—an atmosphere that is due in part to its very distance. There is a world’s end, journey’s end feeling about Iraq—it is the farthest country from England that is still a part of England. India is a world of its own, separate and apart. One feels when one has reached Iraq that one has got as far as one can go. There is the distance of the place, and there is its barrenness. One has a shipwrecked desert-island feeling, surrounded as one is on all sides by desert; by a desert that becomes in winter an impassable morass of mud. In the consequent enforced reliance on one’s own devices there is, as its inevitable corollary, the comradeship invariably found among those who are cut off from their real lives, their homes, their personal tastes, the people and the things they care for. There is in Iraq’s case, too, the special link of dangers and of hardships shared—the dangers and hardships of May 1941—the flight to India, the blockaded Embassy, the siege of Habbaniya.
Finally, there is the influence of Bagdad itself—Bagdad that has survived so much, the fact of whose continued life is in itself a symbol of survival; whose long, low, yellow line of buildings against the sky is a perpetual reminder, a constant reassurance of rebirth.
Before he had been a fortnight in his new appointment he knew that very considerable coaxing would be required to get him back to Cairo.
118
BRITISH INTER-SERVICES SECURITY CENTRE
He had been lucky, extremely lucky, in his new appointment. The Centre was housed about a mile down the river, in what had once been a Turkish palace, that with its thick walls, high Gothic windows, stone floors, uneven stairs and sagging balconies had, though it had been built in the middle of the nineteenth century, an air of Elizabethan age.
Its long, high, narrow dining-room, with its length of refectory table, had a monastic air, and it was in truth a monastic life that the staff of B.I.S.C. led in it.
The routine day after day presented little change. He woke every morning stiff and a little cramped on a camp bed in a large bare room, one side of which was windowed like a greenhouse, a room that with two rugs, a few light curtains and a matchboard cupboard he had made almost cosy.
He awoke fresh. He had gone to bed early and clear-headed. It needed little effort, except in January when it was very cold, to get up at five, go to his office and work for a couple of hours on a novel. He had a small partitioned room there to himself. He had arranged a bookshelf. He had bought a small Persian picture. He had hung a cheap Arab cloth over the woodwork. He had made it like a study. S. N. Behrman had once said to him: “If you’ve done three hours’ writing the rest of the day falls into place.” Those two hours at his desk were the framework on which his day was built. When he left his manuscript, he felt he had justified his existence. He felt ready for anything the day might bring.
The Centre opened for work at eight, which left him, after he had breakfasted, with a spare half-an-hour for a walk. There was only one walk that he could take, southwards along the river bank. He would usually take that same walk again in the afternoon. Yet every morning that walk managed to seem different.
There was a café where long-skirted Moslems would be gossiping on their rectangular settees as they shifted their yellow beads. A small shack of a store had its shutters already open. There was an I.W.T. landing-stage where Indians would be loading great black chunks of congealed crude oil. There were mud houses in various stages of dilapidation. Black-veiled women would be scouring out their pans. Small children, their faces blotched with the boils that show disfiguring scars on the faces of nearly all Bagdadis, would be tumbling in the dust. Some of them as he passed would scramble to their feet to give a very tolerable salute. Others would patter after him with a whimpered “baksheesh.” They were engaging urchins.
Scrofulous scavenger dogs would bark at him.
At the turn of his walk there was a large water-buffalo farm: women would be collecting the manure which they plastered in flat, round cakes against the mud walls of their houses, to dry and to employ as fuel. Small boys would trot by on donkeys carrying earth and brushwood for repair work on the river banks.
There was always variety along that road. That half-hour’s walk put him in tune with the day as much as that first two hours at his desk had done.
The Centre opened at eight o’clock. The official hours were eight to one and half-past four to half-past six. On Sunday, work began at half-past eight and Saturday and Sunday afternoons were free. Those were the hours that were kept by the Indian clerks and the junior B.O.Rs. But for the sergeants and warrant officers and officers there was an adult attitude to work. The head of the Centre, a regular-army colonel, who had had five years’ experience in the city between 1934 and 1939, understood both the discipline and reality of work. He expected the work to be done thoroughly. For reasons of discipline he expected punctuality, but he did not expect his officers to sit around in offices after hours if they had no work to do. If they had work to do he expected them to stay up all night if necessary. Occasionally they almost did.
High-grade intelligence, like all
creative work, is a thing of fits and starts. There are periods of calm and pressure. It has been described as “cloak and dagger” and for the layman it has the glamour of “blonde spies.” In actual fact it is a business of files and card indexes and checking lists. It is memory and common sense; putting two and two together, and things that “ring a bell.” Often it is mere routine, though interesting routine. But there are times when it is so exciting that you can hardly bear to be taken away from it for meals, when you work a full fifteenhour day.
And it was in large part because the Centre was engaged in that kind of work that the atmosphere of the mess was so congenial.
It is a rule in every mess that no shop is talked there, but in point of fact, in war-time, shop always is. In B.I.S.C., however, the fact that every member of the mess was engaged on confidential work made the talking of shop impossible. For it is one of the first rules in “I” that you are only told as much of the story as is necessary for you to do your own particular piece of work. You only know just so much as you have been told by the man immediately above. And no one in B.I.S.C. knew quite what the other man was doing. There would be no such thing as “general shop.” The mess consequently was a genuine relaxation, was what a mess should be—a pause in one’s work, a refreshment from it. Which was as well, for there was no other.
One had no personal life. One had no existence outside one’s work. There was little in their lives that any of them four years ago would have described as entertainment. There was nothing to do in the afternoon except walk or take a row-boat across the river to squash or tennis at the Alwiyah Club. There was a little cricket, a little hockey, a nine-hole golf course. In the evenings there was a cinema, an occasional Polish concert or E.N.S.A. show. On Saturdays there was a dance at the Alwiyah Club where the scarcity of women made, for the majority, the Paul Jones the sole opportunity for a dance. There was a certain amount of pleasantly informal entertaining by the civilian residents. But usually, in point of fact, by the time evening came one was too tired for anything but a quiet dinner and an early bed. When one went out in town to dine at one of the half-dozen hotels that were in bounds, it was mainly for the sake of a change, so as not to let the other members of the mess get on one’s nerves, or oneself get upon theirs. There were no cabarets. There was no feminine society.