When the parade was over and the troops were filing on board, we reverted from soldiers to customs officers and lined up behind the long counter in the customs shed to deal with the hand baggage of the families. The export of personal jewellery was of course permitted, but ladies who festooned themselves like African queens with heavy gold bracelets were in trouble; so were those who tried to assure a hasty and indiscriminate chalking of their baggage by rubbing themselves, spiritually or in fact, against the weary masculinity of the most sophisticated corps in the British Army. But the woman who was charming, cultured, helpless, assuming at once that she must put us at ease in our embarrassing duty, beat us as completely as she beats professionals. She floated deliciously on board, escorted by a chivalrous sergeant—if the officers were too busy—and there no doubt unpacked with an air of triumph and laid upon the bunk, which waited to enclose within its blushing teak such cool good manners, her insignificant contraband.
Between convoys there were a few free days when the sections could put back some of the weight which they had sweated off on the docks, and I, apart from sittings of the Embarkation Committee, could idle in the luxury of the St Georges Hotel. Then the rush would begin again, starting with the despair of the Vichy staff because all their plans for the movement of troops from outlying stations to Beirut had been demolished by the demands of the Free French for last-minute changes. Every day I was in the offices of the majors of A and Q branch, and mutual commiseration led to friendship—a melancholy and almost emotional friendship in which we wished to heaven that our easy collaboration was for a more martial purpose. Neither of them ever suspected that I was not a regular, and when at a final lunch I told them with what an amateur they had really dealt, their surprise was a most flattering compliment to my anthropoid capacity for imitating the actions of a different species.
On the second convoy we sent off a battalion of the Foreign Legion—magnificent troops with a tendency to grow cinematic beards. When our respectful inspection of their kit was over, the commanding officer, formally and by his adjutant, requested me to report to him. He returned my salute with a glorious French flick of the wrist. We were instantly and obviously transported to the valiant and not wholly juvenile world of the Honours of War. He told me that I was the last British officer he would see, and this was the last chance he would have. He gave me his word that at his order the whole battalion would march off the place d’armes and join the British. But Free French they would not be.
It went to my heart to reply that his offer could not be accepted. The question had arisen a dozen times before, both in the camps and at the final parade. For once our orders were precise. Either the troops sailed for France or they accepted the Cross of Lorraine. The hatred between the two parties of the French was pathological. Vichy could not forgive the Free French for having made their right and gallant sacrifice; and the Free French themselves made reunion so much more difficult than it need have been. In those early Syrian days they were touchy, narrow and unsure of themselves. Among all the historical virtues of France the only one they fully represented was her superb courage.
The Foreign Legion sloped arms and marched off by companies to the dock gates, where they stood easy while the column ahead of them moved forward yard by yard before breaking up into queues for the gangways. I was suddenly hurled into the position of the lonely and dutiful representative of power on the second page of a Kipling short story—which ended, since the craftsman is bound by laws less merciful than life, in knock-about farce.
A crowd of some twenty or thirty Free French marines gathered at the dock gates yelling insults. The Legion began to growl and to return them. I advised the marines to disperse in what I hoped was the true French manner, genial, weary and authoritative. But they could not know that I had any authority; for them I was merely a stray British officer interfering with their fun. I tried an order. They slunk back ten yards and shouted a little louder than before. The men of the Legion instead of staring ahead along the line of the column turned to face the marines.
Roaring up the docks on a motor-cycle, I grabbed Ormsby’s truck and driver and half a dozen tough Australians from the guardroom. The marines still seemed to believe that I was an unaccountable spoil-sport. There was nothing left but to arrest the ringleaders and cart them off to their barracks under guard. I was just about to climb into the truck, congratulating myself that an incident grave, likely to involve the Control Commission in an endless exchange of signals with London, had been prevented, when one of the Australians loosed off his pistol and shot a Free French marine through both cheeks. As he had his mouth loudly open at the time he lost no teeth.
Ormsby’s driver was in civil life an undertaker’s assistant. Though accustomed to death, he preferred it in more respectful surroundings than those provided by the Foreign Legion, Australians, Free French Marines and me. The bullet after traversing those surprised and indignant cheeks continued through the canvas of the truck and the windscreen. The driver’s peacetime training reinforced his panic. Having, as he supposed, a corpse in the back, he proposed to remove it. He trod on the accelerator, and I found myself shouting vainly after a cloud of dust.
I could already hear the accusations. Not content with threatening gallant allies and shooting them down in droves, I had lost control of the situation and given no orders for the disposal of the prisoners and the care of the wounded. I despatched motor-cyclists to all likely spots. I rang up the hospitals. I alerted the military police. No good. The truck had vanished into the shimmering air of the Levant. It was, or seemed to me hours before even Field Security could bring me news of it.
The undertaker’s assistant had driven madly for open country. The Australians and the marines, assuming that he was carrying out orders unknown to them, sat peaceably in the back. They had patched up the cheeks with field dressings and were now on excellent terms with each other.
After a while the driver, meeting neither cemetery nor sudden death, shamefacedly stopped by the side of the road. The guard, joyously discovering the improbable situation, tackled it with Australian versatility. They turned the marines loose in town, took the casualty to hospital, sent the driver and truck back to his billet and then very reasonably enjoyed the opportunity for a slow and pleasant stroll back to the docks through the August evening.
Of course there was a Court of Enquiry to satisfy the Free French howl for British blood, preferably mine. Ormsby’s driver—sportsman that he was—told the Court exactly what had happened and reduced them to unjudicial chuckles. The Australian guard commander swore that his man who fired the unnecessary shot had only recently left the hands of the Corps psychiatrist and had now been returned to him for further adjustment. I played Kipling for all he was worth, and explained in terse phrases, dragged unwillingly from the strong, silent man, what would have happened if the Foreign Legion had drawn those bayonets which the Honours of War permitted them to carry. The evidence, though quite unrehearsed, built up to an effective climax. I was not only cleared, but even congratulated.
When the time came for the last convoy, orders and counter-orders rained upon Beirut from the mountains. The Vichy government were attempting to avoid their obligation to return the few British prisoners-of-war from Salonica; as a reprisal General Dentz and some of his officers were transferred to Jerusalem under open arrest. Another storm blew up when the Free French insisted on retaining in Syria certain key administrators of the colonial service, whether or not they rallied to de Gaulle.
On the Embarkation Committee, however, and at the docks collaboration had grown into a model for NATO. The Vichy staff were friendly and regretful. The Free French, affected by the finality of the parting, had recovered some of that national flexibility which hitherto they had been afraid to use. I myself ascribed the better understanding to Colonel Koenig (later the French commander in the magnificent action of Bir Hachim and G.O.C. in French-occupied Germany) on the worthless evidence—yet
the only evidence which is ever attainable by a junior officer—that he commanded my respect and that he would listen.
The Australians had been ordered to give the last of the French troops the military adieu proper to the Honours of War. Nobody had considered the ceremonial possibilities of Field Security, for which I cannot altogether blame them. But we wanted to say good-bye more than anyone else, and—having little of it in our daily life—we enjoyed good theatre. There was going to be a space to the left of the line. Since it was certain that no one would ever question our presence so long as we did the job properly, I decided that F.S. should fill it.
Ormsby, fresh out from England, at least knew what a section should look like when formally paraded with its motor-cycles. From an ex-cavalry officer I obtained the details of an imposing manœuvre which would enable the four sections to roar up the docks in third gear and peel off to the left into a double line on the narrow quay.
It came off smartly, and we were still as guardsmen—though soaked with the sweat, dust and straw of the customs—when the great, gay ships began to move and the crash of the Australians presenting arms pointed a moment of utter silence before the band swept into the Marseillaise. I remember standing at the salute, facing the widening gap of sea, with tears paying no honours at all to the primitive immobility of my face. I am always inclined to swallow when I hear on any solemn occasion that most glorious of national anthems. But this was good-bye. All of me, the foolish and frustrated boy of 1914–1918, the passionate lover of Europe, even the writer for whom the clarity of the French sentence was sacred, said good-bye for years which I then believed would double that first war to the beloved nation.
In September 1941 I returned to Jerusalem and my deserted section, which had been carrying on, sound and stolid, under the sergeant-major. They were elated over the capture of a dangerous character whom they had cast, somewhat irregularly, into the military clink. He was a recruit in one of the newly formed Jewish companies who possessed in his kit private weapons which had not been issued to him by any quartermaster or even an Embarkation Committee. Visiting him in his unhappy cell, I saw that he was not at all the type of Jewish revolutionary who collected illegal arms in order to use them on the British as a scapegoat for Hitler. He really did want to kill Germans, and thought very reasonably that a fearsome dagger and an obsolete pistol would be of assistance; it was evident, in fact, that, like his interrogator, he was a harmless romanticist. I had to disillusion the section as tactfully as I could. Sections were always over-keen when officerless, for the staff seldom knew how to handle them. Quite half the art of the Field Security Officer was to prevent his men from rushing off after rabbits without spoiling their enthusiasm for the hunt.
It was now that Ninth Army was formed, under General Wilson, to take over the task of forming a defensive front in Syria in case the enemy attacked through Turkey. Headquarters moved up to Brumana, a lovely village strung along the top of the coastal range 2,500 feet above Beirut, with High Lebanon behind. We went with them, as the Ninth Army section, and settled down to a dull round of pure military security, the chief object of which was to ensure headquarters against any such raid as our commandos had just carried out on Rommel. Lighter relief was the investigation of innumerable monks and their cellars, of one Roumanian cabaret girl all violets and fur coat, of the feudal factions of the Lebanese, mutually libellous, and a charming little Greco-Phoenician temple. I myself, putting forward the accepted myth that I ought not to live in a mess, luxuriated once more at the Hotel St Georges and travelled back and forth over the mountain roads by motor-cycle.
I had possessed and quickly smashed one of these enthralling vehicles in my teens. In Jerusalem I learned, or half learned, under the anxious care of the sergeant-major, to ride one again. Indeed I rode it, rejoicing and absent-minded, all the way to Beirut when I went up to take over the security of the embarkation. Oswald Ormsby’s section was then billeted in a house off a steep flight of steps which ran down from the square towards the port. By some astonishing misjudgment of clutch or acceleration I found myself careering down these steps, and stopped in front of the billet trying to look as if I had done it on purpose. That marvellous section was prejudiced in my favour ever after—not that they were taken in for a moment, but they appreciated a sense of style even in suicide.
On these daily trips to and from Brumana I came to no great harm but once, when a combination of ice and the mayor’s brandy caused me to run over my own thumb. I do not know how I did this, for the motor-bike and I parted company without any noticeable period of mutual entanglement. But my casual confidence makes me shudder. For more than a year the roads, the lanes and even the goat tracks of Lebanon and Palestine were for me delight and recreation. My N.C.Os, who lived on their motor-cycles and would no more walk than a cattleman, occasionally ventured a restraining word. They were right. Many sections, including my own, had a man killed, and there was hardly a winter month when none was in hospital. The cause of the casualties was nearly always the same—a military or civilian truck turning left without mirror or hand signal just when the motor-cyclist was committed to overtake.
Ninth Army was only an immensely important skeleton which could, at need, be instantly clothed with troops. It was based on Arab country, friendly but incalculable, yet it was not responsible for administration or internal security; those were the duties of the small, devoted but jealous band of the Free French who, if they had a near revolt on their hands, could be implicitly trusted to keep all news of it from the British and, when that was no longer possible, to believe illogically that we had instigated it. Not only was there danger of a pro-German movement, but agents could slip over from neutral Turkey across the five hundred miles of wild frontier to support any Fifth Column.
Added to these difficulties was the potentially explosive problem of feeding Syria and the Lebanon. The Arab capitalist, Christian or Moslem, is even more immoral than a novelist’s exaggeration of the nineteenth-century American. Profit in his mind is a conception completely isolated from its effects, and a speculator who has cornered wheat can piously give charity to starving children without any sense at all of his own guilt. It was the task of the British politely to conceal their opinions and, by a combination of wheat imports and fines, to force the cornered stocks on to the market.
Either General Wilson or his able son, Patrick, who stretched long legs with deceptive casualness in the I (b) office, perceived that in Field Security the Army had a reliable organisation to hand which could watch and warn. Never had we been employed in quite such a role, nor had such appreciative masters.
Field Security was then at its flowering. In early days, still feeling for its responsibilities, it concentrated on the elementary duties of security police; in the later days of the occupation of enemy territory, temptation and the delusion of self-importance were sometimes too great for common flesh. But in the years between 1941 and 1944 the Field Security Wing in the Middle East preserved a standard of common sense, discretion, tirelessness and gaiety which made me proud to belong to it. Partly this was Robin Wordsworth’s doing; partly it was due to the extraordinary quality of the four sections which arrived from England in the spring of 1941.
There were sections at Beirut and Damascus; at Quneitra among the Druse; across the desert at Deir ez Zor on the Euphrates; in the Duck’s Bill of Syria where the frontiers of Iraq, Turkey and Syria meet and the mountains of Persia are in sight on a clear day. Most vital of all was the Aleppo section whose men, speaking every language of the Levant, rode the trains of the Baghdad Railway which so closely followed the frontier that a passenger jumping from the left-hand window would land in Turkey, and from the right-hand in Syria. All the sections had outlying detachments in the chief villages of their district: sometimes a pair, sometimes a man alone, living on the local food and drink, sleeping in a whitewashed village room on his blankets—if the section had never managed to win some camp beds—and spending his d
ays listening to the village notables or smoothing relations between the civilian population and some unit which considered itself lonely.
De Gaulle in his memoirs writes bitterly of the British agents all over the country, and I presume that, partly, he means us. But we were never anti-French, nor did we ever give advice to the administered against the interests of the administration. We were probably annoying in that it was difficult to keep anything secret from us. One has only to imagine the position reversed—a French Army in, say, the pre-war Sudan, doubtful whether the hard-worked remnants of a British colonial service could ensure its security, and determined that no sudden development should take it by surprise. We conceived ourselves as a modest, necessary oil, permeating everywhere it is true, but helping the cogs of Arab, French and British to interlock as smoothly as possible and thus to relieve the fighting troops of all distractions from their proper business.
My own part in all this was wretchedly small, but I had had more than my fair share of opportunities already. We were moved down from Brumana to Tripoli to look after the security of Ninth Australian Division. There was very little of the more interesting civil security, for the French team in Tripoli was efficient.
On one journey to Latakia I met God. He was sitting in the hotel restaurant wearing a bright brown lounge suit and drinking brandy like any other man. He was also extremely courteous in, as one would expect, the divine language of France, and did not press upon me the First Commandment. He was then giving us a great deal of trouble, for, while we impiously doubted his identity, his own clan did not. It was a country as rich in religions as in Roman days. There were Moslem heretics with fascinating rites of their own: the Alaouites with their priest-king and his sacred wives, the Yezidis who were polite to the devil in the Jebel Sinjar, the Druses whose covens, for most of the year, were respectable as Scottish elders. There were the happy and urbane Bahai, and a few Zoroastrians. And there were four different kinds of native Christians, excluding the sects produced by competitive missionaries ranging in time from St James to the Methodists. God was on a very good wicket from the start.
Against the Wind Page 15
