by Alec Waugh
‘This imaginary German intelligence officer in Berlin is concerned only with the immediate effects of his subversive acts. He has no longer a long-range interest in Iraq, no equivalent for the Kaiser’s dream of a Berlin-Baghdad axis. He does not care what happens there when the war is over. We do, however. We have a very real responsibility towards the future. We want to help our successors. After all, somewhere or other in Baghdad the work of our Centre will continue. When I came here first in the late autumn of 1941, the walls of the Spears Mission were placarded with notices: “Think, plan and act in terms of March 1942.” I should like to placard the walls of our Baghdad Centre with “Your work today will bear fruit in 1960”.’
Nigel Farrar followed Reid. He still looked thin and drawn, but there was vitality, there was animation in his manner. There was no trace of nervousness. He was completely self-assured. ‘I was not in Cairo for the conference last autumn,’ he began, ‘but I read the shorthand transcript of Major Reid’s report to you. I was greatly impressed by it. I have been out here three times as long as he has, but I learnt a great deal from it. I was astonished that he should have been able to catch so quickly the essence of our problems; to distinguish between the essential and the inessential. Yes, I was astonished, but then I reminded myself that...’ he paused, he looked towards Reid, ‘we must remember that our Prof, is really a rather remarkable person.’ A smile lit his face. There was warmth and affection in it. There was warmth and affection in the little ripple of laughter that ran round the audience. He was surprised as well as touched. He had the feeling that they all rather liked him. He had not expected that.
‘Remembering what he said at this conference eight months ago, I was very curious to hear what he would have to tell us now about Iraq. I was confident that he would get inside the problems of that country as he had, in about the same amount of time, got inside ours in Beirut. I was expectant and I was not disappointed. I learnt a great deal from his report. I more than ever realized how different our work here in Beirut is from his in Baghdad and that of you others in Cyprus, Jerusalem and Cairo. The basic difference being this, that you have post-war responsibilities in your Centres. We have none.’
He checked. He looked round him. When he went on, his voice had dropped a tone. He spoke more slowly; he spoke more seriously.
‘The moment the war is over,’ he said, ‘our office will close down. M.I.5’s role will end. M.I.6 will take over in a restricted way. I cannot foresee how the French are going to handle their problems here, but I am convinced that they will insist on handling them alone. And I regret to say that I do not have the slightest confidence in their administration here.
‘I am almost a fanatical Francophile. You remember Josephine Baker’s song: “J’ai deux amours, mon Pays et Paris”? I would not be so provincial; I would go further. I would say: “J’ai deux amours, mon Pays et la France.” France is the cradle and guardian of our culture. And many experts agree that her record as a colonizing power in Algeria, in the Far East, in the West Indies, and more recently in Morocco, is a very fine one. She is trying to work on the Roman Imperial pattern by which colonies become departments of Rome; eighteen hundred years ago a man born in Spain could count himself a Roman, and today a peasant born in Martinique thinks of himself as a Frenchman. Does a Moslem born in the Punjab think of himself as a Briton? That is a significant difference.
‘But here in Syria and the Lebanon the situation is different. Syria and the Lebanon were not colonies. The French only had a watching brief. The French had played a very small part in the Liberation of the two countries. They had only a small cultural stake here. The Syrians and Lebanese did not want them. They indeed appealed against their presence here. Most Arabists are agreed that it was a mistake to grant the French that mandate. It was part of a hurried packaged deal at the Peace Conference with Clemenceau and Lloyd George playing power politics with each other.
‘From the start it worked out badly. Although Syria and the Lebanon were not French colonies, the French here behaved as though they were. Yet because they were uncertain of their tenure here, they did not behave in keeping with the traditions of their colonial past. They tried to get as much out of the country as they could during the period of their Mandate. We British can honestly say that we sent to the various Ministries in Iraq technical advisors whose job was to make themselves expendable. We did not try to make ourselves indispensable. The French did. They were rapacious and they tried to maintain their position by dividing the various tribal interests, playing off the one against the other. In my opinion the best Frenchman did not come out here. There was no equivalent for Lyautey. The French are paying the price now for the bad faith they showed. Perhaps bad faith are the wrong words to use. A mandate presented a new problem to them. They had not an effective technique for it.
‘Perhaps you will say that all this is beside the point. I do not think it is, because it explains why our problem in Beirut is different from that of the rest of you. We are not concerned with France’s position here after the war. We are concerned only with the winning of the war. We do not take a long-term view here; as you others can. We want to avoid trouble between the French and the Syrians and the Lebanese because such trouble would hinder the war effort. I have a hunch that very shortly the French are going to do something very silly and chauvinistic here in Lebanon. I am trying hard to find out what it is; and if possible prevent it, but only because that act will be a nuisance in terms of the conduct of the war. It is no concern of mine whether the action that the French may take will ruin their chances of re-establishing their prestige and power after the war.
‘There is a difference of approach; and that difference can be best exemplified by the action taken by Baghdad when a wireless transmitter was sent there by the Germans. Baghdad felt that this set would be of great value because through it they could discover what forces were working against the government and for what reasons. It will be a slow operation and its fruits will be appreciated in 1950. Baghdad’s decision was supported by Cairo and I do not question the wisdom of that decision. But if a set had been sent to Beirut, there could have only been one reaction: to capture the set, arrest the agents, grill them, find out all we could, keep concealed from the Germans that we owned the set and use it to send to the Germans the kind of information we wanted them to have. We should have taken the short, fast view.’ He paused. He looked round him. His face wore a belligerent expression. ‘As I see it,’ he concluded, ‘we have only one concern here in Beirut; to concentrate all our forces on the immediate objective of the war. Let the French clear up their own mess afterwards.’
His tone had changed during the last few minutes. It had a very odd effect on Reid. When he came to read it in the shorthand transcript, it would seem, he was very sure, entirely unexceptionable. It had been reasoned, judicious; it had been even conciliatory; but to Reid, who knew Farrar so well, that change of voice had indicated a very real change in Farrar. There was an air of antagonism, of defiance, of resentment; the sense of a chip upon his shoulder. Had he fancied it, or was it really there? Later on he would ask Mallet if he had noticed anything.
The meeting adjourned directly after Farrar’s speech. Reid went across to him. ‘Congratulations; that was excellent.’
‘I’m glad they put me on after you. It made it all the simpler.’
‘What you said will make my job a good deal easier in many ways.’
‘I’m glad to hear it.’
‘I wasn’t quite sure if you had got my point about that silly toy.’
‘I’m not sure that I had either, until I heard your speech.’
‘We oughtn’t to be far apart, you know.’
‘I’m glad that you feel that.’
‘Let’s make the most of this time anyhow. Let’s have a meal together.’
‘I’d enjoy nothing better.’
Before they could fix a date, Stallard had come across to them. ‘Congratulations to you both. Excellent. Excellent. You
should be proud of your pupil, Nigel.’
‘We should be grateful to Diana, shouldn’t we?’
‘I’m going to tell her so when I get to Cairo.’
‘It seems more than two years since we had that lunch at Ajalami’s.’
‘A lot has happened since.’
‘A lot can happen in two years in wartime. You wait until you see how London’s changed.’ He outlined some of the ways in which it had changed.
Farrar moved away. Their brief conversation, like the last sentences of his report, had left Reid with the uncomfortable suspicion that Farrar had something on his mind, that he was harbouring a grievance. ‘I must have a real talk with him,’ he thought.
Yet that was the one thing he found it impossible to do. Farrar always had people around with him, or there were people he had to go and meet; on the one occasion when they did find themselves alone, between sessions, on the terrace the of St. Georges, Farrar called someone over. It was a person of no consequence. There seemed no need for him to have been summoned over. Reid could not resist the feeling that Farrar was avoiding him.
One morning he rang up the Amin Maruns. Aziz answered the telephone. ‘I want to see your aunt,’ he said. ‘But I also want to see you. Can you give me a time when you’ll both be there?’ Aziz laughed. ‘There’s not much point in seeing either of us when the other’s there. My aunt’s always in on Friday afternoon, at tea time. Why don’t I see you in that students’ café facing the A.U.B.? Any time that suits you suits me.’
They fixed a time. ‘He’s growing up.’ Reid thought. ‘Eighteen months ago he would scarcely have made that remark about his aunt and himself. And if he had, he would not have made it with a laugh. He would have been evasive.’
Two days later he was to change that estimate. Aziz was not growing up. He had grown up. They met for breakfast at the café. On the previous evening he had taken tea with Madame Amin. She was her habitual phlegmatic self. She asked him about certain of her Baghdad relatives. ‘It is strange to realize,’ she said, ‘that when I was a girl, Baghdad was a city in my own country, as Marseilles is for a Parisian. I wonder if they are happier there the way they are.’
‘You could ask that about any country in the world. Some are better off, and some are worse off. But on the whole there are more people better off than there are people worse off.’
‘I suppose so. I suppose so. Except in the occupied countries at this moment.’
‘I am seeing Aziz tomorrow,’ he told her.
‘You will find him very changed.’
‘How shall I find him changed?’
‘He knows his own mind now; or at least he pays us the compliment of confiding in us what is on his mind.’
‘And what is on his mind at the moment?’
‘He has decided to take the advice of that nice young friend of yours, Major Farrar, and go to Alexandria.’
‘But I thought he was doing very well now at the A.U.B.?’
‘He is doing well at the A.U.B., but he thinks that he could do better in Alexandria.’
‘So you’ve decided to go to Alexandria.’ That was the first thing Reid said to him next morning.
Aziz smiled. ‘It seems a better idea now than it did then.’
‘How so?’
‘The world’s a different place. Two years ago I thought that the Germans might win the war; now I know that they will lose it. Two years ago I thought that the future for someone like myself lay with a Turkey that was a German ally. The old partnership that the Kaiser had in view. I did not want to go to Egypt, because I should then be in the British Raj and I might fare badly when you lost the war, if I was a student in Alexandria, as a British protégé.’
‘So you thought we were going to lose the war?’
‘Didn’t you?’
‘No, never, but there was a time when I thought we might not win it.’
‘When did you think that you would win it?’
‘As soon as America came in.’
Reid was following his own thoughts. If Aziz had believed that the Germans were going to win the war, and that his future lay with a Turkey that was allied with Germany, perhaps he had been spying wholeheartedly for the Germans; had been willing and anxious to be of assistance to them. His father had fought with them against the British. His uncle had been killed at the Dardanelles. He might well have been sincere during those months when Rommel was driving on to the Canal. Had that occurred to Nigel? Of course it must have done. Why hadn’t it to him?
‘Even so,’ he said, ‘I should have thought the A.U.B. now that you’re settled down there, would be as useful as Alexandria. Isn’t it as well to go on with whatever it is one has begun?’
Aziz shook his head. ‘A Turk would stand more chance in Egypt than in the Lebanon. There’s still a great deal of anti-Turkish feeling here. They remember the way the Turks put down revolt. There’s the Place des Martyrs to remind them. Egypt has no anti-Turkish feeling.’
‘You want to make a life outside Turkey then?’
He nodded. ‘Turkey is too limited, too narrow, too constrained. There is a great deal I love, a great deal I respect, but I have very little in common with my family any longer. Now that I have seen the way people live here, now that I’ve met Europeans, I couldn’t go back to that old life.’
He spoke with an assurance that was new. He was a young man now, not a youth; and a rather striking young man at that. He had lost his pimples. His skin was clear. Twenty months was a short time in the life of a mature man, but in adolescence it could be decisive. The change was no less for a man than for a woman. Aziz had found himself. Reid remembered that quotation from the preface to Endymion that Compton Mackenzie had quoted on the title page of Sinister Street. ‘The imagination of a boy is healthy, and the mature imagination of a man is healthy; but there is a space of life between in which the soul is in a ferment, the character undecided, the way of life uncertain, the ambition thick-sighted.’ Aziz had been in that period when he had met him first. It was a period that was familiar to schoolmasters and tutors. When a young man was in desperate need of guidance, when he pestered his tutor with that need for sympathy; he could be boring, tiresome, exasperating, endearing; and then suddenly he found his feet, and no longer needed guidance. And very often in his freedom he reacted against the mentor who had given him that guidance. It was human to resent the people you had wronged; it was also human to resent the people who had helped you. You wanted to assert your independence. Very often the mentor felt aggrieved. He inveighed against the ingratitude of the young. The wise man shrugged. The young used the elderly as stepping stones. And it was a privilege to be a stepping stone. Aziz had needed him twenty months ago. He did not any longer.
‘Have you any definite ideas about what you are going to do?’ Reid asked.
Again Aziz shook his head. ‘I shall find out there. That’s what a university is for.’
‘Did you have any difficulty in getting taken on?’
‘Major Farrar fixed that for me, through the British Council.’
Had Farrar still any design son Aziz? He had said in one of his recent summaries that they would have to see if they could not find some new use for him. But he did not imagine he was any longer thinking of Alexandria as a base for that. Aziz had ceased to be the kind of young man who got into debt and trouble in a foreign city.
‘You are not thinking of making a career in music.’
‘Indeed not. Only very exceptional people can make careers out of music. It will be a hobby; a great and close one, nothing else.’
Which was the practical point of view. Most young Englishmen with literary inclinations wrote reams of poetry in their teens and pictured themselves as Poet Laureates. Young men thought themselves remarkable during that ‘space between’, but very soon the vision faded ‘into the light of common day.’ In three years’ time, he and Aziz would not have anything to say to one another. There might even be embarrassment on Aziz’s side, because they had once
been close.
‘Do you remember that prophecy I made?’ Reid asked.
At that point, Aziz did momentarily lose his self-assurance.
‘Yes, I remember very well,’ he said, and flushed.
‘I hope it turned out satisfactorily.’
‘Very satisfactorily, I thank you.’
And that was that, Reid thought. There was nothing more for them to say to one another; now or ever.
During the morning session, Reid sat next to Farrar. During the first break, he said, ‘I breakfasted with Aziz today.’
‘You did? How was he?’
‘Excited about going to Alexandria. Very grateful to you for having fixed it.’
Farrar laughed. ‘It’s funny, isn’t it, how often something comes to flower and fruit long after it has ceased to serve a purpose. Two years ago, I was very keen to get him to Alexandria. I set the machinery in motion. Now, when I couldn’t care less, the wheels have started to revolve.’
‘That project didn’t work out as well as we had hoped.’