by Alec Waugh
The villages were farmyards, little else. There was no sanitation as Western civilization understood the word. There was a large central pond, usually of Roman origin, where clothes were washed and cattle drank. The houses were gaps in a mud wall. There would be a pen or two for the hens and cattle. There would be a roofed-in pen or two for the family. The village women did not wear veils. They were shapeless bundles of old clothes, with blue tattooing on their chins and lower lips. The children rolled happily in the dust.
Yet in the house of the headman, the moukhtar, in even the smallest village, there was a sense of leisure, of graciousness, of culture, of inherited immemorial manners. His reception room, though it was only a roofed-over cattle-pen, would be high and cool. There would be carpets on the floor and stools and cushions arranged against the wall. In the centre would be the ashes of a fire where coffee had been made and where the coffee-pots still remained. Old men would be puffing at narghiles, very old men who sat there day after day, doing nothing, rarely speaking, but whose age entitled them to be present when the moukhtar received his guests. There was a constant drifting in and out and much shaking of hands. Children would sit in the doorway and stare inquisitively but without offence at their strange visitant.
Reid came during these trips to appreciate Arab dignity. When an English tourist returned from the Levant or from North Africa with a burnous which he employed as a dressing-gown, the result was usually unfortunate. The square-cut collar made the neck seem too long and the short sleeves gave an appearance of discomfort as though the gown would slip off at any moment. But worn with a white veil and head-rope as the Arabs wore it, the brown burnous with its gold threadwork at the neck was comfortable and appropriate. The long flowing dress with high-collared silk shirt and embroidered bodice gave the whole costume a surprisingly masculine effect.
Though he could speak no Arabic, Reid learnt to appreciate Arab oratory. The first piece of advice he had been given when he began lecturing had been, ‘Get a table in front of you. Have something to hold on to, so that you won’t distract your audience with awkward gesturings with your hands.’ He had often heard the old school of actor complain that the modern actor could not use his hands; all he could do was tap a cigarette against a case and light it. The Arabs, in contrast, had mastered the management of their hands. When an Arab was listening, his hands would be busy with his beads. He would draw back the beads in twos with his left thumb, then push them forward with his right. But when he spoke, he would amplify his meanings with a series of effective, eloquent, often unexpected gestures. When he was enumerating a succession of points, he would hold out his hand, the back facing the audience, and draw his fingers one by one into his palm. When he wished to beckon anyone towards him, he would stretch out his arm, his fingers pressed, then draw back his elbow as though he were drawing that person to himself.
He learnt during those weeks to appreciate the ritual of Arab hospitalities. One is always offered something, coffee or curdled milk. The coffee was bitter but surprisingly refreshing. You only took a sip of it. The cup was replenished until, by a turning of it between your hands, you indicated that you had had enough. Though the Moslems did not take alcohol, they usually kept a bottle for their guests. Reid soon learned to decline the offer of it. What might be proffered as a sweet local wine might turn out to be a tumblerful of neat Damascus brandy, and it would be bad manners not to finish what you had accepted.
No matter at what hour he would arrive, he would be offered food. If he had nothing else to do, but only if he had nothing else to do that day, he would accept. The preliminaries were endless. ‘We will go into the fields,’ the notables would say. ‘We will measure off so many square metres of ground. We will pluck the corn, thresh it, weigh it, then you will realize that this land only produces five mouds to each moud sown, and that if we agree to yield you twenty-five thousand tons, we shall run the risk of finding ourselves without any reserve for a bad winter. We will make our examination; then we will return here and you will find lunch ready.’
But lunch would not be ready. The Arabs do not divide time into separate divisions like hours and parts of an hour. Besides, it was bad manners to be in a hurry. For an hour, for two hours, for three hours maybe, he would wait. He would pay elaborate compliments; he would acknowledge and reply to elaborate compliments. On the manner in which he accepted and made these speeches would depend, he was well aware, that particular village’s reaction and response to a scheme on which the welfare and security of a whole countryside depended. The scheme would be judged by his behaviour. It was supremely important that he should make the required effort. But his ears were strained listening for the approach of food. At last was brought the water in which his hosts could perform the ablutions that would precede their prayers. Then the meal could be set out on the floor.
Arabs sit upon their heels, and it is bad manners—it is more than bad manners, it is an insult—to point the soles of your feet at anyone. It is not easy for a European to sit upon his heels. Reid was not particularly supple. He curled himself up as best he could. Fortunately the meal did not last long, though there was a great deal to eat. The moment that food arrived all conversation ceased. Reid soon became accustomed to this kind of banquet. You help yourself, he learnt, with your right hand to what is set before you. There would be two kinds of rice and curdled milk and several sauces. There would be a salad or two soaked in vinegar, with cucumbers stuffed with rice; there would be chicken and possibly a whole roast sheep stuffed with roasted nuts and rice. There would be flat, grey-brown bread with which to scoop up the sauces. The host will help you to the choicest morsels. The eye of the sheep is a great delicacy. As a tribute to your importance, he will extract it for you and pop it into your mouth with his own fingers. It looked repulsive, but it was, Reid found, mercifully tasteless. After the meal a servant brought a bowl of water and soap with which to wash his hands. In the richer villages he was also offered scent for his hands and forehead.
So it went on, day after day. The sun beat down out of a cloudless sky. The hard glare of the parched earth dazzled him. But in the evening, shortly before sunset, a breeze would blow from the still snow-capped Hebron. Reid would close his eyes, wearied by diplomacy, savouring the calm of this last hour when the outline of the hills would be subdued, merging into a succession of level layers of rich, soft colours, dominated by a purplish brown; the camel trains would move in slow silhouette against the sunset and the dust of the chaff about the villages was flecked with orange.
Reid was housed in the town major’s office. There was no furniture in the room he shared with the local transport officer, except a table. He had his camp-bed and a camp-chair. He was living very much as he had done a quarter of a century back in Harrowby Camp, Grantham, as a machine-gunner. There were rarely more than five others in the mess. The food was dreary; the town major sharing the British view that local foods and vegetables were messy and unhealthy and likely to upset one’s digestion. He preferred to open a tin and spread tomato ketchup on its contents. He had access to a cache of whisky and usually arrived at the table with a glazed expression. The conversation was as dreary as the fare; the day’s wireless report, news from England, gossip about local personalities, reminiscences of England. Yet for Reid the final two hours of the day were a reward and recompense for the strains that the long day had imposed. At last he was by himself.
The house had been built before the First War, and on a Turkish pattern; two stories, with all its rooms facing on a square of grass out of which a date palm grew. After dinner, he would sit on the stone pathway under the gallery outside his room, with the Oxford Book of English Verse. At night he slept under a mosquito net, but there were not enough mosquitoes to be troublesome; the bare electric bulb in his room gave him enough light to see the page. He would read a poem or two, or a section of a familiar poem, then he would let the book fall forward on his knees, his mind abrood, thinking over the letter that he would write before he went to be
d. He would write for forty, sixty, ninety minutes—a serial letter that he would mail every third day or so.
He had never written in this tone before, with such an exuberant flow of words, such a wide vocabulary. As a historian he was well aware of the deficiencies of his writing, the lack of flexibility, the absence of warmth, the limited vocabulary. He knew that he could never hope for the large sales that certain popular historians achieved. He did not resent it. He was not that kind of writer, because he was not that kind of man. Writing was not his métier. He was a teacher, not a writer. His special merit lay in the lecture room and in his tutorials; and in the way he contrived that the one should amplify and round off the other. He had no illusions about himself. But just as he had become a new self during his picnics, his dinners, his twilight hours with Diana, so now he became a different writer seated here at this desk, letting pour forth, night after night, this torrent of adoration. He described his day to day events, the places he had seen, the conversations, the bargainings; right through the day he had kept thinking, ‘I’ll tell Diana that tonight.’ When anything amusing happened he had thought, ‘That’ll make Diana smile.’ When anything had occurred pertinent to British or French relations with the Arabs, he had thought, ‘That will interest Diana.’
His whole day was interpreted in terms of his love for her. She was beside him all the time. She was never absent from his thoughts. When she reads these letters, he thought, she’ll understand, she’ll appreciate what she means to me. These letters could only have been written by a man to whom she was the earth and stars and the revolving heavens. During the months when they had been seeing each other all the time, the ‘big words’ had rarely managed to get said. They had not even had an opportunity of talking on the telephone as they had when he was Duty Officer at the Mission. She might very well have thought that for him the whole episode was just a ‘wartime affair.’ She would know better now. The best of their romance lay in the future. He was impatient to return. Yet at the same time he savoured the delay. Every week, every day apart would heighten the thrill of their reunion. He did not, therefore, pester Farrar with inquiries about his return. All in good time, he thought, all in good time.
During the third week of his absence he returned to Deraa to find a message asking him to telephone the Director-General in Damascus. The line was faulty and it was a garbled message that he received. Apparently there was a tense situation in one of the depots, where the British officer in charge was quarrelling with the French Services Spéciaux. Neither spoke the other’s language fluently; the Briton was a major while the Frenchman was a captain. The major was trying to pull rank. This was particularly unfortunate because promotions were not so rapid in the French Army as they were in the British, and the status of a French captain could be higher than that of a British major. The Director-General was not quite clear himself as to the cause of the dispute. It was something to do with the Quimaquam. The Frenchman appeared to be siding with the Syrian. At any rate, what was needed was a bilingual catalyst to smooth out the situation. Would Reid drive over there first thing next morning?
He set off without enthusiasm. Though he was drawing the pay and allowances of a major, he still had three pips upon his shoulder and he suspected that this major would try to pull rank on him. His Second War service experience had warned him that majors in back-areas tended to be touchy. They were often reservists who had found themselves out of date when they were recalled to the colours, or they were men with long service who had been promoted when Hore-Belisha had introduced his army reforms in 1938, who had grown indolent during the long years when the army had been neglected, had been unable to meet the sudden pressure placed on them in the campaign that had preceded the evacuation from Dunkirk and had been by-passed when the army was reformed in England. There were also quite a few younger officers who had been on active service with their regiments when war had broken out, had been wounded in the Western Desert, were not fit to rejoin their units and had failed to play their cards cleverly in the Cairo rat-race; there were also a number of elderly warrant officers who had recently been commissioned, had a sense of social inferiority and were on the look-out for affronts. Altogether majors in back-areas after three years of war tended to present a tricky problem.
It was a considerable relief therefore to Reid to find that the major in question was his old fellow missionary, Johnson. Johnson seemed as relieved that the visiting catalyst should be an old companion. Figuratively he fell upon Reid’s neck.
‘My oath, this is a relief. I was expecting one of those bright young know-alls from Whitehall who’ve never been on a parade ground. Have you seen the objects that they’ve been putting into uniform? Consuls with red flannel, vice-consuls with crowns; makes an old soldier like myself want to vomit; I guess it does you, too. Thank God, you’re Sandhurst; you’ll understand this muddle.’
‘What is the muddle?’
Johnson’s account of it was far from explicit but Reid could read between the lines. Johnson had been in too much of a hurry. He had wanted quick decisions and that was not the way in which a Quimaquam was used to doing business. He had bridled, had made difficulties, had imposed delays. Johnson had got angry, a fatal thing to do with an Arab. With a Frenchman it might work, on the right occasion. If an Englishman threw his hat on the floor and stamped on it, a Frenchman might be delighted because it was so un-English. But with the French officer he had been studiedly polite, addressing him as ‘Mon capitaine’ and thereby possibly stressing the difference of rank. He had assumed that the Frenchman would take his side, but to his indignation the Frenchman had appeared to be siding with the Syrian.
At that point Reid interrupted. ‘He’s worked in this area for eight years. He knows how to treat these people.’
‘That’s just the trouble. He knows how to humour them in peacetime, how to jolly them along. But this is wartime; we need that wheat in a hurry.’
‘It’s wartime to us; it isn’t to the Arabs. Their wheat’s their capital. They’d be just as happy selling it to the Germans as they would to us.’
‘But we can’t afford to humour them at a time like this.’
‘We’ve got to if we want their wheat. Do you mind if I hunt up that Frenchman?’
‘Naturally not. Oil on troubled waters, that’s what you’re here for.’
The Frenchman was petulantly indignant. ‘I have been living and working with these people for seven years. I have learnt to love and trust them; as they have, I hope, learnt to love and trust me in return. They are proud and sensitive, like their own Arab steeds. They can be managed but they cannot be coerced. A pressure of the knee, a touch upon the bit and they respond; but tug at the mouth, stab at their flanks with spurs—ah, fatal, fatal. Such delicacy is needed, such address. We have made our mistakes here. We are not perfect. It has been a hard task that we have set ourselves, we Frenchmen. The Druses for instance: how to reconcile their traditions with the Arabs’; ah, what patience, what finesse; but gradually, slowly, listening, counselling, I have managed to adjust all their differences so that the country can know prosperity and peace. Divide and rule: that is the maxim. Keep the separate tribes separate from each other, sometimes stressing their differences so that they will come to feel that they can only preserve their own identity, their own traditions through our overall authority. “As long as France is here,” I say to them, “you are safe. We will preserve your rights. But if we were to leave . . . Ah, this disastrous tide of Arab nationalism. It will destroy your way of living, it will not tolerate your independence.” That is what I tell the Druses; and they believe me. They know that I am right. But the Sheikhs have to trust me too, and the Bedouins. I tell them that we have our eyes upon the Druses, that France will not tolerate aggression; that we will protect their flocks and grazing grounds. We play one against the other, and it is in their interests that we should; as long as we are here they will know peace.
‘But it is a very delicate mechanism; very, very delicate. It
has to be watched and oiled and tended. Can you not understand my indignation when your compatriot, who knows nothing of this country or these peoples, tries to force his English ideas on us? My machine is geared to a certain pace; it cannot be forced. In two weeks he can ruin the work of seven years.’
Reid let him talk on, till the first flood of invective was spent; then, as with Johnson, he interrupted. Had his colleague—he was sure the captain would not object to the use of the word colleague since they were working to a common goal—had his colleague, he wondered, seen any service in the Far East? No, he had not. Perhaps if he had he would be a little more sympathetic to the British major’s tactlessness—if tactlessness was the right word; obtuseness perhaps was better; or should we make a combination—obtuse tactlessness. Much of the major’s service had taken place in India; he had to deal with a country that contained a servile class, a coolie class; they even used the word ‘untouchable.’ The British major was accustomed to shouting at coolies. He did not appreciate the difference between Arabs and Indian coolies. He was an elderly man, he was set in his ways. In addition, not only was he rather deaf but his French was not nearly as good as his colleague’s English; yet his pride insisted on his speaking French. He did not catch the exact nuance of the discussion, and he himself often used the wrong words. It was altogether a most delicate situation.
‘But I am sure, my dear colleague, that if we could spend a half-hour with the major before our conference with the Quimaquam we shall be able to smooth out all our difficulties. The major understands that the conduct, the strategy, the tactics of the negotiation must lie with you, in view both of your long experience here and of France’s privileged position in this country. The major has not, alas, had what I regard as one of the supreme good fortunes of my life: the opportunity to mix on equal terms with my opposite numbers in your country. As a University professor, I recognize, I proudly acknowledge how much my life has been enlarged and enriched by my association with the culture and traditions of your country.’