Even he had to put up with a lone Field Security sergeant at his elbow, and his tendency to Old Testament ferocity eventually led to his arrest. All his doings were devoutly chronicled in a résumé of the Field Security weekly reports compiled and circulated by Patrick Wilson for the delectation of Intelligence in general. There was no principle in it readily explicable to a magazine editor. Generally speaking, to merit publication an action or event had to be utterly incredible to a peacetime public and instantly and obviously true to us.
Life in Tripoli was made for me pleasantly exotic by the friendship of Fouad Douaihy, a local Christian landowner and head of a small Lebanese clan which gave him the right to the title of Sheikh. He claimed descent from Crusaders, and looked, I imagine, much as his stocky, florid, moustachioed ancestors when, after the fall of Tripoli, they assumed the turban—Sheikh Fouad, like other well-to-do Lebanese Christians, always wore an expensive red tarboosh—and made their peace with the surrounding Moslems.
His winter residence was Zghorta where he carried on the life of the Great Hall, surrounded by relatives and retainers. The Hall was in fact no bigger than a good suburban living-room, but his manner extended it through history. When he spoke Arabic you could see that he was the traditional protector of his clan, by steel or bribery, against the Turkish pashas. When he spoke French—with a bookish correctitude, for he had been educated in France—his spiritual home was obviously the Second Empire.
Such a personage was much to my taste, but what attracted him to me I do not know. It may have been that I introduced him to the Indian Mule Company whose lines were on his domain; thereafter he delighted to sit in their officers’ mess tent and talk horses; or possibly it was my delight in Lebanese wines and cooking, of which he was rightly proud. He even compelled me to acquire a liking for araq, which in Lebanon was made from grapes and much resembled Italian grappa with an added flavour of aniseed.
His men, his table and his advice were mine to command at any moment. I hoped for further feudal privileges; but, though a lusty bachelor of sixty, he appeared to enjoy none himself. Whatever his tastes were, they were never mentioned or even hinted at. Some of his female relatives were very pretty indeed; and after one admirable dinner, at which I had paid marked attention to a young Douaihy who was deliciously pretending to be flirtatious and French, I was surprised by the sudden flowering of an incident straight out of the Arabian Nights.
One of Fouad’s dusty clansmen, whom I knew only by sight, appeared in my office with a secret to impart. When the doors were shut and I had sworn by God that I would never breathe a word to the Sheikh of what he was about to tell me, he took from his sash and offered me a scented note in ill-spelt French—but it was no moment for orthography—which whispered shyly that my charms at the dinner had overcome all virginal resistance and that supper would be laid for me, if I cared to partake of it, at a certain address at eleven at night. Yes, said the Arab boldly, it was indeed she whom I had met and whom my heart desired.
I did not think that my attack, limited as it was by the nineteenth-century conventions of that dinner party, could have been quite so overwhelming, and the note seemed a little out of character. So when the evening came, though I hoped for the best, I slipped a pistol into my pocket and told the sergeant-major where I would be.
At some distance from the rendezvous I dismissed the civilian taxi which I had discreetly hired, and moved cautiously through the back lanes of the sleeping village. I opened the door I had been told to open and shut it quietly behind me. There indeed was the supper laid out, but my hostess was not the slender, doe-eyed girl with water-melon hips. It was Fouad’s cousin—a melancholy, excitable and rather dirty maiden lady in her middle fifties.
I look back with shame upon the ensuing half hour. All chivalry, all the European traditions of the gentleman, even the Christian behest of duty to one’s neighbour commanded a single course of action. Taste and the decadent fastidiousness of the twentieth century commanded quite another. How I escaped from that house with manners I cannot remember. The answer is probably that I escaped without any. I returned in the dead of night to Tripoli, sweating with panic as if I had been delivered from that unlikely ambush which I half suspected.
Our military duties would have been intolerably dull if we had not been the only British unit in the division. That meant a fresh and appreciative audience for our lectures, and unfamiliar difficulties to settle in the relations between troops and civilians. The staff was kind, though touchy at the merest hint of human imperfection, and the troops looked upon us as a mysterious body of men of immense sophistication, fully able to deal with any beautiful spy according to her deserts and attractions.
With the military police, all of them over six feet and the most formidable bunch of sympathetic thugs I have ever met, co-operation was wonderful. On one occasion I was called up by the D.A.P.M., himself capable of disciplining with one hand, should it be necessary, any three of his policemen, in a state of abject terror and embarrassment. They had picked up a sort of human being in a raid on the local brothel—an appalling joint run by the French for their native troops—and would I come round at once and tell them what it was?
I entered the guardroom. Half a dozen vast Australians were standing round a curious object, as nervous as women observing a giant cockroach. It was small, wizened, blankly self-possessed and attired in shirt and trousers and a filthy velvet jacket. They had thought it might be a deserter, but now, said the D.A.P.M., his voice rising to a scream, they were not sure whether it was male or female.
My courage thus challenged, I could only touch and find out. It was female. Gentle interrogation proved that it lived in the dark back closet where it was found. This seemed to be entirely a question for the French liaison officer, but I persisted. Was she an employee of the place? No, she was a friend of Madame. Then was she at liberty to come and go? Certainly, but she was quite happy and did not. She was—didn’t I understand?—the friend of Madame. At last I saw the light, and tried to explain to the Australians. They were extremely shocked.
Soon afterwards all the Australians left for the Pacific fronts, and the Middle East was never quite so full-flavoured again. It occurred to me years later—for the simpler the fact, the longer I am liable to take to see it—that I might have been condemned to heavy military security because I had already proved that I could get on with them. I was always surprised by the mutual liking, since my acceptance of the world as it is makes me impatient with the enthusiasms of Anglo-Saxons across an ocean, and I can relax more completely in the company of European man or woman. But in war that is unimportant. When men are trying to do their best with a simple environment, the ‘best’ is so obvious that there is no room for any difference of opinion as to what the word means.
Here, too, that Spanish background may have counted. I remember once being hailed, late at night and in a deserted street of Tripoli, by two large and aggressive Australians who insisted that I should drink from the bottle of gin which they were waving. Any sensible pommy officer would have vanished round the nearest corner; others, more military than tolerant, might have endeavoured to arrest the pair. But all they wished was to enforce out of season a muddled conception of democracy, and they were enchanted when I pretended to take a cordial pull at their bottle and after some conversation set them on their way to camp. They swore that none of their own officers would have done any such thing. I doubt that—but courtesy is always easier for the outsider, especially if it be after dinner.
Soon after Christmas I took a week’s leave and went down to Jerusalem. I found there a frustrated section—for even on leave we always spent hours with each other talking shop. The officer had been my very best N.C.O. in Greece, and I had left him alone to watch the crossings of the Corinth Canal bridge, a position demanding responsibility and some courage—not, of course, what a platoon sergeant in the infantry would call courage, but the quality is basically the same. Mere
ly because he was half a Jew and had a Jewish name, the Palestine Police distrusted him. The blazing conceit of that brave but incompetent force still infuriates me. As if we did not know a thousand times better than they whom we could trust!
When he told me that he was going to ask for a transfer I decided to apply for the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv section myself; partly from feeling out of the world in Tripoli and unable to use my European experience and languages, partly because I had an immense pride in the curious comradeship which we were achieving all the way from Cairo to the Upper Euphrates. Palestine was the weak spot of our travellers’ club. Field Security was not respected, and the standard of liaison and hospitality was poor.
Early in 1942 I moved to Jerusalem and began the most consistently and consciously happy year of my life. The Intelligence staff at Palestine Headquarters had all changed. My chief was Henry Hunloke, before the war a Member of Parliament—I never heard him speak but he must have been very able in the diplomacies of the smoking-room—and the G III was J. V. Prendergast, who oddly combined an Irish wildness of temperament with an English shyness. It took us only a month of motionless tom-cat watching of each other to decide that our ideas of work, play and the Palestine problem were very much the same.
The duties of Field Security in a country under British civil administration should, on the face of it, have been limited and dull. There could be no interference with internal security, which was the job of the Palestine Police, nor with politics. The local sport of buying and stealing British arms was not so much our affair as that of the Special Investigation Branch of the Military Police. Even the detection of persons immigrating from Central Europe and the Balkans and pretending to be Jews could be undertaken much more efficiently by the Intelligence Service of the Jewish Agency than by the British.
In fact, when I look back on Palestine it seems to me that the most important part of the work was to appreciate what Field Security should not do without orders—a very different position from Syria. But our conception of ourselves as the essential oil in the machinery was still valid, and soon led to all the orders we could handle. It was up to a keen and lively section to sell itself, for the service which it could offer to customers was not always clear till it was demonstrated.
In Jerusalem were several headquarters of the most secret branches of Intelligence, employing aliens whose intentions, movements and indiscretions were occasionally brought to our notice. There was the printing of army maps. There were camps of allies all the way down the coast to Gaza and Rafah and prisoner-of-war camps and the great permanent camp at Sarafand—most musical of names for a spot most desolate in its boredom—where the Jewish companies under training were torn between the desire to go into action against Germans, as eventually they did, and the political necessity for staying at home to fight Arabs or British or both should the war end unexpectedly. Besides these fairly straightforward security problems, there was the eternal Palestine question, upon minor aspects of which we were sometimes engaged and allowed an opinion so long as it was expressed with sufficient humility.
An official opinion, I mean. So far as personal opinions were concerned, all the Army Intelligence officers talked Palestine day and night. It was difficult to make them understand the full force of Zionism since, though they knew the promise and the difficulties of translating it into reality, they could not know the conditions which the promise was intended to relieve. They always had in mind the comparatively prosperous British Jews who were unlikely to want to die for anything but Britain, and so they failed to understand the meaning of Palestine to the Polish or Roumanian villager living precariously on the edge of pogrom or starvation. They set no limits at all to his capacity for tortuous intrigue—indeed there were few to set—but they did not give him credit for being potentially the finest fighting man on earth because it was so much easier for him than for the rest of us, who have begun to complicate our nationalism with wider loyalties, to know beyond any doubt the value of his death.
Among the police and the administration there was a fixed idea that the Arab was a better soldier than the Jew. You could not discuss it with them at all. And that was natural enough, since Arab prowess in the rebellion, such as it was, had been evident to the plain man, and Jewish skill-at-arms only to the imaginative. They saw the coming struggle as Arab raider versus expatriated pawnbroker, whereas a truer parallel was European revolutionary versus an exclamatory native who would far rather gesticulate than die. But they were of course right in considering that any Jewish Palestine would be a soldier’s nightmare. It can, in theory, be occupied by an invader and held, whereas the fertile crescent surrounding it cannot be occupied at all. In war Israel is condemned to defence and savage reprisal.
My new section was a beauty—outrageously merry and loyal. The only weakness—and it was far too frequent in Field Security—was the sergeant-major. He was an ex-guardsman, and so had the normal qualities of a good charwoman; he could be trusted to see that our billet in Tel Aviv was clean. What else he did I never enquired too closely. Administration flowed smoothly and—if we needed comforts to which we were not entitled—expertly from the typewriter and long experience of a former corporal of the Black Watch.
All that year I was caressed by luck. On the evening of my arrival in Jerusalem I called on Haim Wardi to see if my charming whitewashed hovel at the bottom of his garden were free. It was not, but he could do still better. He told me that he was just leaving to join up as a private in the Jewish battalion, and presented his house to me on a peppercorn rent of three conditions: that I would put him up when he came home on week-end leave, that I would look after his dog and that I would do my best to preserve the services of his cook.
The first delighted me, for he had a mind which was incalculable as a peasant’s white wine. According to his mood, it could be dry or bitter or naturally sparkling, but it was never watery. The dog, I fear, was treated somewhat perfunctorily, for I have no pleasure in dogs. Too slavish a devotion embarrasses me, especially when accompanied by an unpleasant smell. To keep the cook, a Polish Jewess of such rigid orthodoxy that she might well consider herself defiled by a Gentile, I did my best; and she responded at once, like any other woman, to greed and admiration. Traditional Jewish cooking is disastrous when dealing with flesh and fowl whole or normally sliced; but given a sharp knife, a mincing machine and unlimited herbs and onions it is worth serious attention.
It was a discreet house for visitors who did not wish to come too openly to my office, and a joyous house for parties. Today the frontier between Jew and Arab must run nearly through the garden. I conjure the ghosts of love and good-fellowship that they may rise and tempt too serious a sentry to lay down his rifle and share beneath the trees an illegal bottle with his enemy.
At the end of May defeat in the desert brought up to Palestine some of the more movable encumbrances of war, such as rich Egyptians, army wives, internees, the naval depots and intelligence organisations so secret that they were unlikely to have any immediate effect on the war. This exodus involved me in an adventure which began as a fairy-tale and ended in futility, thus closely resembling a nineteenth-century atheist’s vision of human life except that it was highly enjoyable while it lasted.
At the outbreak of war it had only been possible to intern or expel the most dangerous of the many thousands of Italians in Egypt. When Rommel’s advance threatened Alexandria, there was a further weeding out of Italians. A party of them was sent up from Egypt to Palestine, housed in a monastery near Bethlehem and given a limited liberty of movement.
Sansom, my opposite number in Cairo—one of the very few of us who really did justify his existence by occasionally arresting an undoubted spy—wrote to me privately that among these Italians was a young lawyer of some promise whom he knew for certain to be anti-fascist, though his contacts had been suspicious. He thought I might find him very useful.
I had better call the man X—since his promise as a la
wyer has been largely fulfilled. He spoke good Arabic and was all in favour of relieving boredom by a little excitement; so I instructed him to mix with the local Arabs and to be more fascist than the fascists. He came in with various small and useful reports, and then produced a story that the German Consul in Jerusalem had, before the war, established a considerable cache of arms in one of the many caves between Bethlehem and the Dead Sea, ready for a rising if the Germans reached the frontiers of Palestine.
We were all, including X, pretty doubtful about the truth of the tale, but it was possible. So he kept his highly intelligent nose on the trail. At last, after infinite coffees and deserts of pointless talk, he was promised by a local notable that he should see the cave. He was taken to several, all empty—except for the unimaginable presence of the Dead Sea Scrolls—by excitably suspicious Arabs at some real risk to his life.
Henry Hunloke, though as sceptical as I, gave me permission to go ahead, so I asked for an N.C.O. speaking Arabic and Italian to help X. That such a request to Headquarters was quite straightforward and could be easily fulfilled is a comment on our usefulness in the Middle East. The commandant sent me a young Englishman of unlimited courage and astonishing and wholly Italian good looks.
He and X together made further progress. The Arab notable was willing to discuss plans for a rising with any German agent whose authority was beyond doubt, but nobody else. I decided to be the local head of the German Secret Service myself.
The loan of a flat for the meeting was not difficult to arrange. Jerusalem had several mysterious inhabitants whose cover was unbreakable and whose connection with the British government was not easily to be traced by the curious—even by an Arab officer of the Palestine Police if, as we had some reason to believe, one of them was near the heart of the business. The gentleman who arranged to be out while we used his premises could very well have been a German agent.
Against the Wind Page 16
