River Of Time

by Jon Swain

  As the days passed, I sensed the mood ease. But I was still faced with the same unknowns, chief among which was how long my captivity would last. There were one or two moments when I was seized by blind terror, convinced by some action, gesture or expression that the guerrillas found me a nuisance and were plotting my death. One day, I found one of my guards reading a letter to Jacqueline. He could not make sense of my tortured squiggles, but it enraged me; in an unusual flash of bravado, I tried to bash his face in. The metallic clunk of a rifle bolt driven home brought me up sharply. I looked round to see an old Lee Enfield trained on my back. Afterwards, I was watched more closely.

  We marched at night for safety. From a village above Zerona, I watched government jets wheel in the sky, hit the town and rake a goatherd on a hill with cannon fire. It was a useless form of warfare which I had seen all too often in Vietnam. The belief behind it was that if you hit the peasants hard enough, they would tire of giving the guerrillas shelter, but the Vietnam experience showed that bombing only alienates the people. I doubted that the Ethiopians would find the result any different.

  The frequent air attacks did have one important effect. They forced the peasants to change the pattern of their lives. Now they slept during the day and worked in the fields at night, when they were assured of empty skies.

  As we marched deeper into Eritrea, I began to study my captors. Some were young members of Ethiopia’s educated élite. I asked them what made them give up bright futures for the rigours of guerrilla life. ‘To struggle for our people,’ was the characteristic reply. I had to stifle the impulse to shout against the wooden communist rhetoric that popped up in nearly every conversation. To have done so would have been disastrous. As the days dragged on, the predictability of these heavy-handed phrases became more and more exasperating.

  The guerrillas – whether Eritrean or Tigrean – led monotonous lives with few pleasures other than smoking and drinking tatja, the traditional drink. Plenty of girls were around, some of considerable beauty, but I saw no evidence of love affairs and divined the reason. New recruits were forced to take an oath of celibacy on joining the movement; the penalty for breaking it was death.

  My future stretched like an endless road, leading nowhere. The days spread into weeks, during which I lost my purpose. We followed the same pattern – waking, marching, resting, waking, marching, resting – and seemed to make little progress. Each day we listened to the BBC World Service news. To my dismay, there was still no mention of my disappearance. I began to wonder whether I would ever be found, whether my family would ever know what had happened to me, and wept with frustration and despair.

  The daily march began at about two in the morning, the five guards who accompanied me and the donkey bearing my canvas suitcase threading confidently through the mountain trails by moonlight. After dawn, the temperature would start to climb rapidly; by 9a.m., it was too hot to make decent progress. Since there was also the danger of air strikes, the guards would call a halt and we spent the heat of the day dozing in readily offered peasant huts. On these stopovers, I was too exhausted to think.

  By and by, our little party reached an Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) field headquarters fifteen miles east of Asmara, the capital of Eritrea. It was set in a broad plain ringed by dark hills. I was fed and left under a bush while my guards discussed me with their Eritrean confrères. I knew it was a decisive moment and hoped it would lead to my release.

  After twenty-four hours, the guerrillas reached their decision. I was to be marched southwards, back to Tigre, for another spell of captivity; not northwards, as I had hoped, towards the Sudanese border and freedom. The EPLF leadership in the camp had decided to wash their hands of my case, which I had been given no chance to argue. With simple finality, I was told I would shortly start the sixty-mile trek back, with my five guards.

  I remained quiet and sullen during the return march, thinking it pointless to conceal my anger. Three days later, I was back at Zerona in a very black mood indeed. I had to convince the guerrillas to set me free. My chance came when I was summoned to see Berhu Aregawi, a founding member of the TPLF and one of the most important brains of the movement. I put the case for my release in the strongest terms I dared.

  The basis of my argument was that holding a British journalist could only bring adverse publicity for the TPLF. The trouble was, he still did not know I was really a newspaperman. However, my arguments seemed to carry some weight. After keeping me in suspense while he discussed the matter with his colleagues, Berhu announced that I would be taken back to Eritrea – and that this time he would accompany me personally.

  So we set off yet again, walking through the hills and dusty plains. Berhu was a strange, taciturn man. He had become a fanatical Marxist at Addis Ababa university. Tall, thin and with a wispy beard, his opinion of Britain seemed to have been fashioned by the sight of the Queen opening Axum cathedral in 1965 at a glittering ceremony during Haile Selassie’s reign. He had been a boy scout at the time. In our discussions, he fiercely defended kidnapping as a legitimate political weapon. He made it clear that the sacrifice of an innocent life was less important than his political ideals.

  I was careful to guard my tongue, but we still had rows. ‘This is not a hotel! This is a guerrilla encampment!’ he shouted at me one day when, exhausted after a thirty-two-mile march, I pleaded for a rest. He was frequently bad-tempered. But we came to respect each other and built a measure of mutual trust.

  Berhu carried more clout than my previous guards. At our first stopping point – the EPLF camp where I had been turned back earlier – just a few hours of negotiation resulted in our being sent on our way northwards.

  One night we skirted besieged Asmara, the echo of spasmodic gunfire in our ears, the moon sliding in and out of the clouds like a beast stalking its prey. Apparently the guerrillas could infiltrate any part of the city and had assassinated a number of Ethiopian army leaders. I associated Asmara’s siege with the last days of Phnom Penh, but this time I found myself observing a guerrilla war from the other side.

  We continued northwards, sometimes just the two of us, sometimes escorted; an odd nocturnal procession under a shifting moon. We marched through the mountain pass at Woki, and finally, on 13 July, after sixteen days on foot or perched on indefatigable donkeys, we reached our destination – the EPLF’s main base camp in northern Eritrea. I hated every step of that march but persisted in the belief that each pace forward was a pace towards freedom; also, I was determined to give the guerrillas a taste of my walking prowess; they did not believe westerners could walk. At halts, I listened to the radio. I heard that a drought was devastating England, the greatest of the century, and laughed bitterly as I looked at the desert furnace around me. Then there was Beethoven, and Lord Peter Wimsey who kept me faintly amused. One night, we camped at a large abandoned Italian home, a simple stone structure, like a southern Italian farmhouse. The owner had left an unforgettable imprint of Italian civilisation – a beautiful orange grove set in a hollow, watered by a gurgling stream. To me it was the Garden of Eden. It was green and cheerful and the guerrillas let me drink the cool water and eat the oranges ripening on the branches. My spirits lifted. A few nights later, dog was on the menu, then donkey. For the guerrillas, the poorest meat was a luxury.

  The EPLF camp lay in a long narrow valley on the edge of the desert. It consisted not of huts but of guerrilla groups, living, working and sleeping on the valley floor, under bushes, or acacia trees or inside lines of caves that riddled the slopes.

  Weeks of despair and loneliness followed. My habitat was a salvadora bush on the valley floor in a landscape so hot and barren that I felt I was at the burning centre of the planet. I exchanged not more than three sentences with my captors in a day. The flies were my early alarm call around dawn. Zeray, the guard, brought tea. As the heat rose I would retreat deeper into the bush, out of the shimmering inferno. Inside the bush it was tolerable. Here, there were snakes, a family of scorpions, a ch
ameleon. I avoided the snakes and scorpions, though more than once in the blackness I felt something caress my skin, lightly, like a leaf, and it scared me. I tried to befriend the chameleon and enjoyed forcing it to change colour. Here the stillness was immense. I had time to rethink my life. On balance, I thought, having made it so far, I would eventually be released. I was no longer so afraid of dying, alone and invisible in this desolate corner of Africa. But I thought how slender one’s hold on life is in such circumstances, and how those circumstances can change. I thought of Commandant Galopin, a French officer who had parachuted into the Tibesti region of Africa, not very far from me, to negotiate the release of Madame Claustre, a French hostage. After nearly a year, her captors changed their minds about Galopin, and hanged him from the nearest tree. If the Tigreans had been the Khmer Rouge, I, too, would have been long dead.

  At such times of isolation, one relies on one’s inner resources for consolation. For hours each day, I rummaged in my past. I would choose a different theme, take it out of the pigeon-hole of my life, dust it, examine it and put it back. To test my earliest recollections, I began with my childhood in the countryside of India, which is the origin of my zest for travel and quest for adventure.

  Vivid pictures of India painted my eyes. Now I saw a small child lying terrified in the darkness while a great pandemonium went on in the garden outside, a deafening banging of kettles, shrieks, shouts and running. Then the soothing voice and kiss of my mother explaining, as she stroked my hair, that a leopard was prowling in our garden and that there was no need to be frightened; my father was up on the flat roof-top, trying to shoot it, and in any case I was safe between the sheets, under the mosquito net and fan. Now I saw myself coming down to breakfast the next morning and finding a leopard stretched motionless on the verandah, weeping blood over its beautiful fur. Now I saw a small boy on the back of an elephant; now the small boy playing hide and seek with the servants in the garden. One in particular, Roti, had loved to amuse me with funny games. I was his baba sahib.

  We lived seventy miles from Calcutta, in a big whitewashed bungalow, Amlagora, famous for the sacred fossilised tree in the garden. I remember the monkeys screaming insolently from the great rain trees. Our nearest ‘white’ neighbour was thirty miles away and often in the hot season we would pile into the car, an old Studebaker, and drive there and back for a swim in the pool. After my ayah had put me to bed, my mother would come and read me a story. It was inevitably one by Kipling. Down below, there always seemed to be a party. So that I was not left out, my father would come upstairs afterwards and kiss me goodnight. Before he left, he would affectionately rub his cheek against my face. It was rough like sandpaper but I learnt to like the masculine smell of whisky and cigars his presence brought and to this day I associate it with my childhood and the strong, fearless man my father was. I remember walking beside him once and holding his leg in fright as he drew his swordstick and slashed in two a venomous snake gliding out of the bushes in our path.

  Another vivid picture was the seaside holidays at Digga in the Bay of Bengal. Now I saw a small boy being driven in a Land Rover through the night, to arrive by the sea at dawn. Then the Land Rover racing to our bungalow across a flat beach turned into a rich carpet of red by millions of landcrabs scurrying to their holes. I remembered swimming with my father, the sea snakes writhing in the fishing nets, the soothing anthem of the crickets, the bears lumbering past the bungalow in the dark. Then, one day, all too soon, my Indian life came to an end. I saw a small boy arriving at his first boarding-school in the west of England just before his sixth birthday, his mother saying goodbye before returning to India for another lonely year without her children. I hid sobbing under the bed in the dormitory. It was an agonising separation for me, and as I realised later, for my mother too.

  My father was manager of a vast estate in West Bengal for a large Anglo-Indian company. It was a life of great isolation but not a dull one. He stayed on and finally came back to England for good in 1957. I had not seen him for three years and he was a stranger to me. He never really settled down, and nor did I. In some mysterious way, even in those early days, I already felt an outsider in England, influenced by memories of my first years in India, a country none of my schoolfriends had ever seen and which I imbued with the wonder of adventure and romance. I wanted to get away.

  My parents settled in the West Country on the edge of Dartmoor. They were keen for me to go into the services, and I did briefly consider the Royal Navy. Primarily to please them, I applied for a naval scholarship which I mercifully failed. I must have been but fifteen when I decided I would be a journalist, and a foreign correspondent at that. From that time nothing dissuaded me, not even the French Foreign Legion in which I enlisted.

  What prompted an apparently normal English boy of seventeen to throw himself into the Legion was quite simply a wish to prove his worth to himself. A love affair with a French girl had gone wrong and a change of life through foreign adventure was the best cure for a broken heart. One chill, grey November morning, I presented myself at the gates of Fort de Nogent on the eastern edge of Paris where, with a sinking feeling in the stomach, I was interviewed by an abrupt adjutant.

  I lied about my age, handed over my passport and, casting an apprehensive eye over a recruiting poster of a splendid légionnaire in white képi and scarlet epaulettes that said ‘Engagez-vous dans la Légion Étrangère. Métier d’homme’, I signed for five years.

  The adjutant changed my name to Jack Summers, born in Epsom. This was to honour the Legion’s contract of anonymity in return for signing on, for a willingness to soldier, and if called on to die for France. At the end I would receive French nationality.

  In place of my civilian clothes which were taken away, I was kitted out in a beret and ill-fitting green fatigues and boots, and henceforth addressed always as Summers, so that soon I was so indoctrinated I no longer thought of myself as Jon Swain, but responded instantly and only to my pseudonym.

  There were other recruits beside myself from all nationalities – Germans, Spanish, Belgian, the odd refugee from Eastern Europe, and a drunken Swedish merchant seaman who had travelled by bus from Copenhagen to Paris to enlist in the Legion for a bet.

  I was the only Englishman and, as such, a source of mild curiosity. In the following days, many of the recruits were found to be unsuitable and discharged, among them the Swede with whom I had become friends; we were the only two English speakers.

  I spent nearly a month at Fort de Nogent, undergoing fitness and medical examinations. We were never allowed beyond the barrack walls. We were given close military haircuts and as soon as the recruits were in sufficient numbers to undergo basic training we were transported in covered army lorries at night through the streets of Paris to the Gare de Lyon. There we were marched onto a train, crammed into special compartments under guard, and emerged early the next morning at the Gare St Charles in Marseilles. The sun was shining, but our reception was chilly – a squad of military policemen and alsatian guard dogs were lined up on the platform waiting for us.

  The following weeks at Bas Fort St Nicolas, a forbidding caserne dominating the Vieux Port, followed an inexorable pattern: drill, X-rays, injections against typhoid, cholera, visits to the dentist, marches, the start of basic training, French lessons. Throughout there was no contact with the outside world. Our universe was the barracks, but sometimes we peeked over the battlements at the girls below, hand in hand with their men. More of us were discharged to a round of half-envious mocking from the rest of us.

  The spirit of the Legion was not yet there inside us, but as we recruits became integrated into this illustrious corps through its training and discipline our national identities were subsumed. A kameradschaft developed and we looked at ourselves with a glow of pride, determined to be among the bravest of the brave. Not without reason is ‘Legio Patria Nostra’ the Legion’s motto; our final loyalty was to it.

  Over drinks in the popotte I listened, in awe, to the old ca
mpaigners who had fought in Indo-China. Tough and seasoned, their skin was burned the colour of leather and their eyes had a far-away look. They talked with nostalgia of the beauty of the petites Tonkinoises and of the Legion’s epic role. They were heroic figures whom I longed to emulate and I knew then, in my inmost soul, that Indo-China would lure me.

  But my destiny lay elsewhere. In the midst of basic training I was summoned one day to an interview by a commandant with the Deuxième Bureau, the French army’s intelligence unit. He wanted to know more of my journalistic aspirations which I had disclosed on my enlistment form. Finally, he bawled, ‘Pas de journalisme ici!’ and dismissed me. I was given a rail-warrant back to Paris, my days as a légionnaire over. I deeply regretted this, but as I later realised a full five years spent in the closed world of the Legion would have been dissatisfying. I have never lost my admiration for the Legion, or a romantic notion about what, at its best, it represents.

  I thought a good deal under my bush about Indo-China, at times falling into a kind of hibernation. There was no Mekong watering the desert, but I had only to half-shut my eyes to forget my arid surroundings and be transported to the lush green panorama of Indo-China. The golden mornings, the infinite vista of rice fields, the consoling greenness of the lands of the Mekong came sharply into focus, blurring my desert surroundings, carrying me back to the adventures of the past. My nostalgic reveries also recalled the trivial things – swimming in the river, opium dreams, the scent of jasmine, and Kipling’s phrase ‘A neater, sweeter maiden in a cleaner, greener land’.

  There I tried to come to terms with my insignificant self, seemingly forgotten beneath the stars. The memories of war were, disconcertingly, quite comforting. ‘If you have survived those horrors you can survive anything,’ I kept reminding myself. I thought of the harm I had done Jacqueline, and I tried to rationalise my headstrong behaviour. I climbed through the vaults of my imagination for hours each day thinking of her; she was my dream throughout my captivity. There were times under that bush when I would have given anything for her passionate embrace. I cursed the idiocy which had made me come to Ethiopia. And I wondered what the Sunday Times was doing about getting me out.