One of the villagers unlocked my room with a cordial smile, brought me my haversack which had been strapped to the back of the bike and warm water to wash. He removed the pot from the commode—to which I had contributed rather more than one usually would when sitting still in the peace of the countryside—and then served me a simple meal and lit the oil lamp. After eating I turned it low and remained by the window, looking out on the streaks of faint light from the shutters across the street and listening to the murmur of Arabic, its sharp gutturals suddenly leaping out of the flow. I had reached the point of wondering whether sleep would be possible when the door was opened. Hadji came in, turned up the lamp and ordered me to sit on the bed while he took the chair. He spoke in English with a slight accent which was more Middle Eastern than German.
‘You are Monsieur d’Aulnoy?’ I asked.
‘A friend of his.’
‘We can discuss business?’
‘Later perhaps. I want from you the full story of Khalid.’
‘That is easy—up to the point where he was taken away.’
I told him how I had received a message purporting to be from Miss Ronson-Bolbec, which I had never for a moment believed. Her morals were impeccable, though they would not seem so to an Arab. I therefore telephoned Beirut for a guard to be concealed under the trees close to the place of the rendezvous.
‘To whom did you telephone?’
‘The Defence Security Officer.’
‘Who is he?’
‘He is responsible to Security Intelligence Middle East at Cairo.’
‘And you are responsible to him?’
‘No. To the Ninth Army. But the staff would be unable to provide protection in a hurry.’
Absolute nonsense! I was intent on drawing his attention to Cairo. And the enemy agent always thinks he has important information when he hears the names of departments. They are secret of course, but it makes little difference what particular combination of letters gives the order to shoot him.
‘Why did you not use your own men for a guard?’
‘Because they could not have got to the spot without being noticed. But the Defence Security Officer has his Arab agents everywhere. I have none.’
I stuck to the truth: that I had stopped to talk to Khalid, never dreaming that he had anything against me. After he had made his horse wheel and kick, four men came at him out of the trees. Khalid attempted to put up a fight but was beaten down and his head laid open with a length of lead pipe. I myself was badly bruised but not seriously hurt. Khalid and his horse were quickly removed, and that was all I knew. The affair had been kept quiet in order not to disturb the French.
‘Then why apologise to the French?’
‘Because the Deuxième Bureau had reason to suspect what had happened, and apology was easier than denial. But what has this regrettable incident to do with Monsieur d’Aulnoy?’
‘Don’t pretend to be an imbecile! Your blackmail is hardly likely to succeed if your people in Cairo already know that d’Aulnoy is here.’
‘How could they? Or was he here at that time?’
‘I am asking the questions. Why do you think Khalid attacked you?’
I repeated what Oliver had first said: that it could not be for anything I knew, but because Khalid feared I was about to find something out. Possibly it was to do with a fellow we called Yellow Socks who was behaving suspiciously and seemed to be protected by the gendarmerie.
That touched him on the raw, and his response for once was typically German.
‘If you try to escape, you will be shot.’
‘Why should I try? I see no harm in d’Aulnoy returning. After all, this is the home he planned for himself. And I shall not report his presence if he makes it worth my while.’
‘How do you know he is not an enemy agent?’
‘I know he is—strictly speaking. But I can never consider France as an enemy. That goes for most of us.’
Hadji was on much surer ground when he brought up the mule company. He could not shake my story that their appearance was entirely accidental, for the Indians had never looked like searching the village. But the incident smelt. I knew it, and he knew I knew it. I pointed out that I had no reason to order up troops and certainly not the power; I believed that not even Ninth Army would invade an innocent village without authority from Cairo. More nonsense, but it brought in Cairo again.
Soon afterwards he left me in peace. My statement at any rate agreed with what Ahmed must have reported and with the scrappy bits of conversation I had overheard while outside the farmhouse. What, to my mind, was damned unlikely was Khalid’s long period in hospital before he could be interrogated. But Hadji never questioned it. After all, neither Magnat nor I had any obvious motive for making it up.
Towards midnight I heard Biddy return to her room, accompanied by someone whose voice and cultured French accent had to be those of d’Aulnoy. He sounded considerate but absolutely tired of her. You know the sort of voice—at the limit of human charity and saved from rudeness only by half-humorous disdain. All well so far. If only she continued to keep silent about the facts I had been compelled to tell her of enemy plans and the urgency of action, there was nothing else she could give away.
I slept fitfully through the night, calmed by the splash of water from the tanks. The sun had just risen and the village was throwing black oblongs of shadow across the dust when Ahmed himself came in—not for any menial purposes but to remove the lamp. He looked at me with concentrated hatred which he made no attempt to conceal, and spat out a derisive Bon jour, mon petit! I suppose he resented the subservience he had patiently shown as majordomo. Besides that, he must have been sore with the tongue-lashing received from d’Aulnoy and Hadji for thinking up with Khalid their impulsive and disastrous plot. If it had not been for that, the peace of the valley need never have been disturbed till the orders for the rising went out. He added the insult of showing me my revolver in my own belt round his waist.
The life of the village began. From my window I could see a few men working on the strips of garden along the irrigation channels. Then movement on the top of the ridge caught my eye—a bobbing head on the skyline and a very distant horseman threading his way westwards through the scrub. I was wildly cheered to see that they had put out scouts to give warning of any approach from the plain of Tripoli. Resistance could not be their intention. You don’t defend a secret headquarters when there is a chance of being surrounded; you get the hell out in plenty of time.
The morning wore on. Coffee and flat Lebanese bread were brought to me. About eleven Moustofi Khan called, looking as if he had not had much sleep. All the same he was friendly and asked me if I needed anything. I said I hoped M. d’Aulnoy would soon be able to find the time to talk to me. He replied that Mrs. Ronson-Bolbec had already opened negotiations. Marvellous woman! I could safely bet that she had found some warmth remaining in d’Aulnoy and had at once begun to play for her own hand. That made my story all the more plausible.
Soon after Moustofi Khan left, I heard thuds and bumping down below. As nothing was being carried in from the street which I overlooked, it was certain that the quarry room was being emptied. My very optimistic deduction from the glimpse of two scouts turned out to be true, and I was as elated as if my whole plan were successful instead of merely beginning as it should. That mood did not last long. Now that the move-out was a reality, my assumption that the party would spare a horse for me seemed unwarranted. I had always reckoned that if they intended I should disappear the farmhouse was a more convenient spot for the job than the village, where both the inhabitants and Biddy must suspect what had happened. But did it matter what they suspected?
So when Ahmed came to fetch me and said no more than ‘Outside!’ I had trouble in keeping a stiff and military upper lip. After prison loneliness, the thoughts of any imaginative man are bound to play over the greater lonelin
ess of death. He took me down the stairs and round the corner of the house into the ground floor which was littered with cases and bags ready for roping on to the packhorses. The transmitter was there, lashed to a pallet with shafts so that it could be carried by two horses in single file. It was not large, designed for a range of only a few hundred miles, and powered by a treadle generator.
The entrance to the quarry room was ingeniously simple. No trap doors or hollow flooring or sliding panels. In Yasser’s ground floor four stalls for dairy cows or horses had been excavated, each with a ramp leading down to it. On a raid of the place I should never have spotted anything wrong. If I had asked myself why a farmer should want to dig out the surface rock, loose though it was, rather than build up partition walls with stone and mortar, I should have assumed it was due to some traditional Arab method of building derived from King Solomon’s stables or the pits which are essential for male camels to mount the females.
The back of each stall, at the deep end, was of timber—a reasonable choice for the easy attachment of mangers, rings and hooks and arousing no suspicion. One of these backs, indistinguishable from the others, swung open as a gate. And there you were in the quarry room.
I had visualised something very much larger. It was less than half the size of the little yard above, its walls lined with cupboards and working surfaces all of rough, local joinery. One ventilating shaft must somehow have been concealed by the olive tree; another was a wide conduit leading to the bank of the stream, which one would have taken for a yard drain. There was no luxury of any sort. In fact it was a stark headquarters bunker, possibly imitated from the Maginot Line. There were six bunks in two tiers along the far wall, a long table down the middle of the room, an arms rack full of weapons and enough hard chairs for a conference. Everything else had been removed for packing.
Nobody was in the bunker except Biddy. The purpose of the confrontation was obvious to any security man; our talk would be overheard—more probably by a direct listener than any bugging devices, which were rare in those days. Before she could open her mouth to say more than hello, I rushed over to her as if delighted that she was alive. I remember how she stood disturbed, lonely, large and to a sculptor possibly beautiful. It was easy to throw my arms round my only ally.
I kissed her warmly and whispered in her ear:
‘Quarrel with me!’
She at once pushed me away with every appearance of annoyance.
‘What have you let me in for?’ she demanded.
‘I don’t know. I thought d’Aulnoy had a little flat in one of the houses.’
‘But you should have known! What is he doing?’
I said it looked as if he expected some of his Vichy friends to join him, and I supposed there was some kind of plot against the Free French administration.
‘How long have you been here?’ I asked.
‘They just took me down.’
‘That’ll teach you to suggest getting money out of him.’
‘I didn’t suggest it. You did! I only thought that he might help me.’
‘A lot of help you’re going to get now!’
‘Don’t be so sure!’
‘And do me out of my cut, if you can. Is that it?’
‘I shall never speak to you again,’ she said with splendid, mem-sahib calm.
‘I doubt if you will. Thanks to you I’ll get shot.’
And I turned my back on her and settled down to a week-old Beirut newspaper.
It was now that I saw d’Aulnoy for the first time. He came in with the two Syrians who had ridden up three nights earlier. He looked me over, nodded coldly, had a reassuring word for Biddy and continued a conversation in Arabic. When his companions had chosen a couple of Lugers from the arms rack all three went out, taking Biddy with them.
Valerie’s description of him was very good, but for me he could never have held any sort of magnetism. He was altogether too like some War Office brigadier from the Guards, by which I mean that one could guess he was smooth, efficient, humane, and that he would look majestically commanding in the statue which—if he succeeded—would undoubtedly be erected to his memory in the Place Merj at Damascus. It was perhaps unfair to judge him in the middle of a serious emergency, but one missed any suggestion of joviality. Presumably his little boys and girls saw a more playful side to his character.
I was left to read my newspaper, a zombie of no importance perhaps condemned already but in any case so finally a prisoner that it no longer mattered what I saw. Hadji, Moustofi Khan and the Colonel drifted in and poured themselves drinks from a well-stocked cupboard bar. The Colonel had the decency to offer one to me; for him I seemed to be a prisoner-of-war, to be treated correctly even if I had put myself outside the pale by near treachery to my country for the sake of a bribe. Occasionally he broke off their conversation in German and courteously addressed a word to me in school English. Moustofi Khan must have mentioned that I spoke no other language but French.
They were simply three officers talking, as it were, in the ante-room of the mess, so that their conversation was at first of little interest. The Colonel regretted cheerfully that a horse could not be spared to move the bottles, and Moustofi Khan assured him that he would find plenty at Libwe. I gathered that after their D day, which was very close, Rear Headquarters would be at Libwe anyway, the quarry room with its impossible communications being abandoned. Then my ears started to work overtime at the mention of Youssef Mokaddem. Hadji said that Abdullah el Bessam was checking up on him and would meet them at the farmhouse to make his report.
‘I thought he wouldn’t let the money out of his sight,’ Moustofi Khan said.
‘He hasn’t. He went by car to Tripoli today and took it with him. He should be back at Libwe this evening.’
‘All those paymasters are the same,’ the Colonel remarked. ‘They put a corporal’s guard on five marks and want a receipt for it. What is Abdullah going to do when a guerrilla captain can’t write?’
I could only pray that Abdullah had been too nervous among armed and dangerous strangers to accuse Oliver then and there of being an impostor; but as soon as Hadji had Abdullah’s report he would instantly bring in Youssef Mokaddem for further questioning and eventual liquidation. He would have a few words to say to the dear blood brother in Galilee as well. As for my own position, I was bound to be under fresh suspicion just when I needed to escape attention as a nuisance of no importance.
I was left alone again while the rest of them, I think, were eating under the mulberry tree in the cool of the evening. I poured myself another glass from the cupboard—perhaps an offence for a prisoner-of-war but permissible to a condemned man—and was then myself served something to eat by a villager. At last Ahmed and two other fellows came in to remove the arms and poked me outside at the end of a rifle barrel.
The caravan was assembled in the village street. I looked anxiously at the horses, wishing I had Limpsfield’s eye. I fancied that the chestnut and the grey from Sir were there, but could only recognise for certain the roan with the white star. The baggage train was quite small, most of the load—like that of any other headquarters—consisting of paper and office equipment. We started off up the hill with Moustofi Khan and one of his servants leading the procession; then came the two Syrians, d’Aulnoy, Biddy, Hadji and the Colonel. Last were Ahmed and myself. I was very glad that the baggage was behind us so that Ahmed could not drop back and stage a regrettable accident.
Their night journeys had always puzzled me, for it was hard enough in daylight not to stray off the Hermel track. Damned if they weren’t using cat’s eyes! The little glass reflectors could not be spotted among all those stones and pebbles, and they were not continuous. They had only been laid down in places where one would hesitate. Moustofi Khan of course knew the track inside out, but even he occasionally flashed a torch and picked up the point of light. I was not surprised that I had never noti
ced them. I did remember an occasional glitter which I had put down to quartz reflecting the sun.
There was no moon. Starlight in the clear mountain air was enough to distinguish blocks of black or grey a hundred yards ahead. I shivered sometimes when we rounded a spur and met an unexpected breath of breeze, for I was dressed only in shirt and shorts with a regulation khaki sweater. This delighted Ahmed, who told me that I might well be afraid since he personally intended to cut my throat. All the same, I enjoyed that night caravan in a resigned sort of peace. One way or the other I was going to my death, for I knew that I was capable of sitting down on the pile of rubble and pressing the plunger. I had been through it already in imagination. The certainty itself comforted me. You’ll understand that if you think back over your life and remember how, at rare intervals, you have been forced down to the rock bottom of your personality—down to the deep conviction that I am I and this is what I shall do. It’s what all these youngsters in their early twenties look for and miss and fuss about. They are not very likely to experience it before their thirties. It was never a matter, anyway, which bothered our generation or else we weren’t so articulate about it.
Well, as I say, the stillness of the night, the clink and smell of the horses, the murmur of the German voices ahead of me all combined into the kind of tranquilliser which the nurse shoves into you when you arrive in a panic at the hospital. I had no ill feeling for the enemy. Why should I? One was as gallant as Oliver and more determined. The other was a professional fighting man with the smell of victory in his nostrils. His extensive patch of anarchy between Nile and Caucasus was likely to be the last straw for the besieged British, and he could expect the highest of decorations if he survived. I thought he would rather not have received it at the hands of Hitler—probably romanticising him merely because he had offered me a drink.
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