Against the Wind

by Geoffrey Household

  From a professional point of view the place was a maze of Intelligence activities. Complications wound in upon themselves, and a move on the board had to be thought out as far ahead as in post-war Vienna or Berlin. There were two sections in the city, and the work of one of them was so secret that I could hardly fathom it myself. Some of the best men had disappeared into Lord knew what back streets upon what duty, and I could only impress it upon anyone who was not too deep in plots to listen that they were, after all, soldiers, and that I was responsible for their welfare.

  We returned to Baghdad by Hamadan and Kermanshah—a routine journey marked only by the cliff-covering inscription of Darius and the sight of a big, gaunt wolf tearing unconcernedly at the carcass of a dead donkey. We, too, had halted for lunch, and I watched him for about a minute without realising that he was not a dog. As soon as I did realise it and had merely conceived—not moving hand or eye—the unkind and atavistic thought of taking a shot at him, he loped away. I have read, like all of us, of African game permitting well-fed lions to stroll through their midst. I have seen in Dorset a vixen and three half-grown cubs walk through grazing rabbits which barely raised their heads. Smell seems insufficient to explain this knowledge by one animal of another’s mood. It would be less mysterious, less vaguely telepathic, if around each individual were a field of force, visible to the animal as, reputedly, it is to the mystic, and changing its appearance according to intent.

  All through this tour and in Baghdad I was in close touch with the Indian Army. The British officers sometimes seemed to be trying too hard and obviously to conform to our easier disciplines. What I saw of the Indian officers I liked, for by temperament I tip my hat to any man or woman who possesses effortlessly two completely different cultures. But the Hindu soldier puzzled me. Some of the sections engaged on straight military security were half Indian and half British, and it was my habit—borrowed from Robin Wordsworth—to interview every man at some length. I could not enquire after their families, since that might be considered improper, and the right approach was hard to find. They on their part seemed to ask for little but promotion—generally for the odd reason that some relative had been promoted. The excuse to Western ways of thought seemed insufficient. No doubt the poverty of India accounted for the begging; the difference of pay between lance-corporal and corporal meant far more to them than to British troops. But why so little dignity below the rank of havildar, and such impressive, bewhiskered swordsman’s swagger above it?

  I managed to extract myself from Paiforce by temporarily exchanging jobs with Oswald Ormsby, then second-in-command in Cairo. That gave him two months of freedom to wander through unknown lands, and to decide if he would like the job of commandant himself. Meanwhile I occupied his chair and flat. How good or bad I was as commandant I do not know—probably very acceptable to the men and less to the officers, since I have never enough patience with a man I consider an ass; and that is unfair, for he can be a willing and excellent ass and may be used as such. With the ‘I’ staff I collaborated easily enough except on the one point of wasting Field Security sections. While active commands were calling for them and the invasion of Sicily was about to begin, our men were employed on work which could be done as well by local gendarmerie or the British Consuls and their expert agents.

  While I was away the Middle East had become no more than a busy and indispensable base, heavily engaged in Balkan politics and waiting for the chance to follow up its commandos. The most interesting security job I could find was to take over the Haifa section. That permitted me to retain my rank of major, since a long campaign by the commandant to get field rank for a few of his officers had at last succeeded. For a few weeks I wondered at my lack of ambition, but self-questioning was soon forgotten in the joy of being independent again with a sound and most affectionate section, most of whom were old hands at the game.

  Our bread-and-butter jobs were control of the Port of Haifa with its trade, its trickle of Jewish immigrants and its commando base; the Lebanese frontier post of Ras Naqura; and the naval depot which had been hurriedly removed from Alexandria in 1942 and ever since, in spite of barbed wire and a desperate effort to catch up with the stock-taking, had supplied the Jews and Arabs with all the explosives they required. We also kept an eye on the coast as far south as Nataniya, on the Arabs, largely Christian, of Upper Galilee, and—though the prospects of decisive battle had evidently been postponed—upon the Plain of Armageddon.

  Another important duty was to stay in close touch with the excitements of expatriate military. The Greeks, as usual divided unforgivingly between monarchists and left-wing republicans, had a mutiny on their hands. The Yugoslavs, who seemed to be near-communists to a man, were indiscreet as any boasting bourgeois, and if I had been an officer of their own political police—and not on British territory—I should have shot half a dozen of them to encourage the rest. The most time-wasting puzzle of all was caused by a mere three Albanians. They were expelled from the Greek Brigade as incorrigible criminals, and were promptly sacked from every civilian job we obtained for them. The military police refused to lock them up on the grounds that they were civilians. The civil police claimed they were military and would have nothing to do with them. So they became the problem children of Field Security, and camped in the section yard crying loudly in Albanian for a non-existent Consul. Sometimes we would chase them down the street with oaths. Sometimes, worn out by their importunities, we would give them old shirts or a drink. I should be responsible for them still if some fool of an Albanian in Cairo had not suddenly declared himself honorary Consul. I instantly despatched to him his three compatriots. If they ran true to form, they fully justified his appointment.

  With the French, except for genial and routine liaison on the frontier, we had little to do. There was, however, a charming, middle-aged French officer who boldly stole his young sister-in-law from a Palestine convent, tried to smuggle her over the frontier into Lebanon and was caught. The scandal was enough to convulse the police and the religious. Satisfied that he was most respectable and that it really was at his wife’s request that he so suspiciously travelled with her pretty sister, I mentioned a weak spot in the military control of railway passengers and thereafter—except in a verbal report to Henry Hunloke who could always be trusted to appreciate any illegalities which contributed to the smooth running of our world—denied all knowledge of him.

  Russians entered our orbit when the prisoners-of-war freed in Italy were despatched through Haifa on their long journey across the desert and Persia. They were given several opportunities to declare whether they wanted to return to the Soviet Union or not. Most, like any other soldiers, wanted to go home; but some were pitiable in their indecision, fearing that the invitation to declare their sympathies was a trap. I saw the conducting officer on his return to Haifa and was appalled by his story—for our admiration of Russian victories led us all, with no evidence but wishful thinking, to believe that their intransigent politics had been greatly exaggerated. He had handed over his batch of prisoners in Persia. They were welcomed as if they had been deserters. Their salutes were not returned. Their badges of rank were torn off. Under cold, armed escort they were herded into the waiting transport. It was clear that Stalin had meant exactly what he said when he announced what would happen to any Russian who surrendered.

  Civil security work was quieter and deeper than in the Jerusalem of 1942. Field Security had no executive powers and paid no agents, but inevitably we were very well informed. The Haifa office was sometimes comparable to a provincial newspaper office, with thirteen fascinated and unconventional reporters under myself as editor.

  The Arab rebellion had been suppressed in 1938. The German menace had been removed. So the Jewish extremists were at last free to attack the British. In Haifa they blew up the income tax office—the most completely satisfying use for gelignite that I can imagine—and part of Police Headquarters. The position of the Jewish Agency, which was respo
nsible under the Palestine government for the administration of the Jewish National Home, was extraordinarily difficult. The Agency was willing to use the Hagana, its not very secret army, to help us against the terrorist organisation, the Irgun Zvai Leumi; but that policy, at the best of times half-hearted, was far from rewarded by the Palestine Police who twice allowed their bag of interned terrorists to escape. History, so far as I know, has not yet revealed what the Agency’s policy really was in 1944 and 1945.

  Inevitably the Hagana had close contacts with Military Intelligence. There was the question of the Jewish battalions, the real object of which both we and they courteously pretended to ignore. There were the desperate bargainings with the Gestapo across the Turkish frontier. In Haifa I was on most friendly terms with Emmanuel Wilensky, reputed to be the chief of the Hagana Intelligence, who was interrogating refugees, sending invaluable information direct to London and protecting us against the infiltration of enemy agents far more efficiently than could we or the police immigration authorities. Friendship with the Jewish officials was easy and profitable, for each side precisely understood which duties we had in common and which we had not.

  I remember so well—and remembered especially in the bitter year of 1947—the monthly conferences of Defence Security Officers and Field Security Officers. There we were, the pro-Jews balancing the pro-Arabs, without a policy or even the hope of a policy except to keep the peace while the government at home made up its mind. We could see no solution to the Palestine problem but partition, and we were certain that peaceful partition was impossible without a powerful British garrison destined, by guerrilla warfare and assassination, to crowd the cemeteries already over-populated by the gallant dead of the despairing Palestine Police. To evacuate Palestine and to allow Jews and Arabs to fight it out was a solution which only occurred to us in moments of exasperation with both contenders, and we were ashamed of the ill-tempered thought. I cannot believe that Bevin would ever have accepted so savage and irresponsible an end to the British mandate if Americans had then realised that, outside the movies and the Seven Pillars, Arabs really existed.

  We loved Palestine and the great ideal, and the Jews knew we did. It was the question of unlimited immigration which divided us. The British insisted that it was politically impossible. So it was without another Arab rebellion. We also said that it was economically impossible. So it was without a miracle. Our fault in Palestine was that we could never believe that we had laid the right foundations for a miracle.

  There cannot have been many of my Jewish colleagues who rejoiced at the death of a British soldier. Their eyes were too clear to be taken in by their own propaganda. From their point of view, once they were prepared to face independence and its consequences, there may have been no other solution but armed revolt. Yet, if it was necessary that the experiment, the patience and the partnership should end in blood, the taste of it must sometimes have been indistinguishable from the salt of tears; and hatred easier to scream when reaching for a cheque book in New York than when the foresight of a rifle covered the enemy and creator, and the finger had to move.

  In the course of 1944 it was brought to the notice of the War Office that some of the regular troops had been in the Middle East for seven years, and some of the amateurs for five. So far there had been little loud complaint, for it was obvious that there were not the ships to move us nor the men to replace us. But when the Mediterranean was again open, neither the soldiers nor the few Penelopes who had remained faithful were any longer prepared to take absence for granted. In January 1945 my own turn came, and I committed, with some misgiving, my wife, my two children and myself to the squalid and lavatorial accommodation of a troopship.

  That I had been able to remarry I owed to the loyalty and understanding of Marina, herself since amply comforted. That as a security officer I was permitted to choose a Hungarian subject, whose history and sympathies only I could guarantee, was due to the astonishing help and trust of Henry Hunloke and my commandant. Even so the difficulties were nearly insuperable; and that youthful practice in stubbornness which had led me only to great friendship where there should have been great love was at long last justified and rewarded. Whatever power displayed for me on the hills above Jerusalem the sight of the full moon rising and the sun setting, both simultaneously poised upon the horizon—I did not then know it was a familiar omen—preserved us and granted an end to all those emotional wanderings which are more tolerable to read of than they ever were to live.

  It is a story more idyllic and less bitter than the other, but too full of private sanctities. I can write of the self which was a past guest in my body, not of the self which is, for he is only half mine. The motives which I have ascribed to him in the limited context of war are those he really had, yet of course there were more which I cannot attempt to interpret. Love must have a poet for its author and narrative of such frankness that age would find it too intolerably moving and youth too destructive of illusion.

  That was the end of my war except for a ridiculous adventure under most questionable auspices which took me to Germany for the last two weeks. In the vast warren of London University where the staff of the Ministry of Information incontinently proliferated, one breeding burrow belonged to the War Office. Some servant of state, doubtless sincere in the appreciation of his own ingenuity, had convinced the Treasury that officers capable of writing coherently upon a typewriter could, if directed by other officers, do a better job of reporting than experienced war correspondents directed by a newspaper. True, the department suggested subjects to military writers of the calibre of Cyril Falls and John North, but they hardly needed its assistance.

  Into this burrow went I, silently asking pardon from the Paiforce sections whose ration allowance, in spite of my correspondence and interviews and appeals, had only been enough to buy one small native meal a day. The appointment carried staff pay, War Office pay and the privilege of living at home. For some weeks I drank with such courtesy as I could summon the Ministry of Information tea, and occasionally enquired if I could have enough work to justify the expenditure. It was at last suggested that I might like to go to Germany and write up the recent battles of the Guards Armoured Division.

  I was supposed to fly direct to Main Headquarters of 21st Army Group, but my department made a mistake in the movement order and despatched me to Rear Headquarters at Brussels. Once there it was pointed out that, though my credentials appeared to be in order, the position of Main Headquarters was secret and could not be revealed. Through the years we security men had carried out too thorough an education. As Brussels could neither turn me back nor send me forward, they told me to take a train to Genepp—which I think was railhead for the left flank facing Holland—and then, like a stranger in a London street, to ask again.

  I spent a soldierly night on the floor of a battered building in Genepp and grabbed a filling supper from a field kitchen. In the morning I had a journey, through sheets of rain, straight out of Kafka—by random transport to an unknown destination the name of which I was forbidden to ask. That in fact I arrived in time for lunch was proof that five years had not been wholly wasted.

  The next day I travelled up to Soltau with a press conducting officer, passing on the way through the deep valleys of bulldozed brick which were all that was left of Munster and Osnabruck. Having no transport of my own, which made impossible the schedule of visits tentatively proposed to me, I took the Press Camp for my headquarters and borrowed lifts in any available cars, collecting impressions of the end of the story which had begun for me in the Cairo of 1939.

  The last week of the war seemed to be marked by vicious rather than determined fighting. In the great arc formed by the North Sea and the Russian Front an unknown number of the enemy was compressed into an ever-decreasing space. The country itself added to the prevailing air of mystery, for the extent of forest was almost equal to cultivated land; and upon the network of good roads, silent and empty, one had the se
nsation of malevolent watchers who, but for the fear of retaliation, would turn car or tank to baked gingerbread. Between the woods were the claret-coloured villages, the deep red eaves of the gables almost touching the ground, intact except for the odd house which had refused or omitted to hang out its white flag and been blasted by the passing armour.

  For me, who had spent my non-combatant war in close and continual contact with civilians, the cold, necessary militarism was a shock. Fraternisation did not exist, for the Germans were untouchable, not only from our antipathy but in fact. Pubs and shops were shut. Billets were emptied of their inhabitants before the troops moved in. There were no women to be seen. The world of steel and trees was inhuman.

  The concentration camps had had their effect. Many of the troops had seen Belsen and Sandbostel with their own eyes; most had talked to someone who did see them. Prisoners-of-war, except for S.S. men, were considered blameless, but I had the impression that when any German civilian complained of our frigid severity—for they were whining already—he was likely to hear the word Belsen in reply.

  I myself was in Sandbostel two days after it was captured. Many of the prisoners had been evacuated, but little could yet be done to clean the camp. I suppose I have seen more than most men of extremes of filth and poverty in strange places, but Sandbostel was a degradation of the human body beyond experience or imagination. The pervading smell was that of very dirty pigs. Even the comparison is today meaningless, for there are few farms like those of my boyhood where you could smell the pigs two hundred yards away. Amidst the dysentery dung squatted or walked figures in striped pyjamas. It was the camp uniform. They were more human squatting; when they walked, you could see the terrible thinness and the puppetlike uncertainty of legs. It rained continuously. They no longer noticed weather.