by Alec Waugh
“You remember me? That’s fine. I’d hoped you would. I was afraid you mightn’t. There’s no need, is there, for an interview. Let’s see if the G.2’s free.”
The interview had taken place in a bare “unlived-in” room, decorated with admonitions against careless talk. The G.2 was housed with a second G.3 and two staff lieutenants, in a partitioned-off corner of what had been a lounge. He was elderly and benign and not undignified, with a row of last-war medals. Without giving the air of being in a hurry, he was clearly an extremely busy man.
“Ah, yes,” he said. “So here you are at last. We’ve had a great deal of difficulty in unearthing you. I think we have something for you that will prove congenial. I suppose your colonel would make no objection to your leaving? You’re not attached to any unit, are you? To an I.T.C.? Ah, yes, I think we can manage that. Martin,” he raised his voice to address one of the staff lieutenants, “have we got the necessary A.G. release. We have? That’s excellent. Then there’s nothing more to be done except for you to fill in the necessary papers. And for me to wish you the very best of luck.”
And I still, he thought, haven’t the foggiest idea what it’s all about.
He had no very much clearer idea when he left an hour later, having filled up several forms, having axffied his finger-prints to some other forms, having been issued with various articles of kit.
He was to sail for France immediately. He was to return to his depot, hand over at once, dispose of his spare kit, and return to London in time to catch a train on Thursday. He was issued with a movement order, reproduced six times, that he was to deliver to a series of R.T.O.s. He was to report finally to a certain major at G.H.Q. His posting order read: “As I.O. writer.”
He stared at this document with some surprise. A good many labels had been affixed to writers by contemporary criticism, but never had he seen one described as I.O. before.
“What does that stand for?” he inquired.
“Intelligence Officer.”
“So that’s what I’ve become.”
“Exactly.”
He was then issued with a gas cape.
“Anything else you want?” they asked.
“I haven’t a revolver.”
The staff lieutenant laughed.
“You’re going to G.H.Q. What on earth would you be wanting with a revolver?”
34
THE CHANNEL, 25 APRIL 1940
It was from Victoria by a special train and early in the morning that in the last war one had crossed to France It was from Waterloo that he left this time, by an ordinary train that was on its way to Dorchester.
That early departure platform had been crowded with parents, sisters, fiancées, wives. There was no seeing-off this time. You weren’t supposed to say where you were going. He lunched on the train, in a mixed company of soldiers and civilians; for all that any of them knew he was returning to camp or starting out on leave for Bournemouth.
He had no idea where he was going. He did not know where G.H.Q. was stationed. He was blindfold from the time he stepped aboard. Yet in a way it was very like an ordinary crossing to the continent. The ship had been painted grey, had been stripped of its fittings, but it was an ordinary channel steamer and the actual cabin was of the type with which how many channel crossings in the course of twenty years had not familiarized him. And there was a ship’s steward to get an extra blanket and bring him his morning’s tea an hour before he docked.
35
LE HAVRE, 26 APRIL 1940
One of his chief last-war memories was the dreariness of that long afternoon and evening at Boulogne on one’s return from leave, waiting for the morning train. One had mooned moodily round the shops, with little money left to spend, and in no mood to spend it, remembering in what spirit one had trodden these same streets, a fortnight earlier, with one’s leave ahead.
It was now in Le Havre that he had to spend twelve hours. It was strange to be spending them in just this place. Le Havre had never seemed a real place to him. It was a passage between a train and a boat. He had usually crossed that way, taking the night service that got one in to Paris at about half-past ten, and that on the return landed one, breakfasted, at Waterloo at nine. Once he had sailed from New York, catching the de Grasse there.
The R.T.O. was established now in the C.G.T. offices. There was a canteen in the Customs shed and a cloakroom in the flower-shop that still bore in reasonably fresh paint the slogan “Say it with flowers. Send flowers by cablegram.” Flowers by cablegram—how much a part of his life that had once been. New York. The pouring of people on to the boats. How long would it be before he sent flowers by cable again?
36
JOURNEY UP THE LINE, 27 APRIL 1940
He had still no idea where he was going. He had by now three copies of his movement order left. He had still, he presumed, some little way to go. The train would be in the station, he was told, at eight. No, the R.T.O. informed him, he could not tell him what time it left. That was a military secret. The C.M.P. sergeant on the platform was a little more explicit. It certainly would not be leaving before ten. Which meant, he decided, that he’d be safe if he got there by eleven. It was one before it actually pulled out.
It was a typical “leave, up-the-line” variety of train, unheated and because of the black-out regulations, without lights. It moved capriciously, starting off suddenly, halting suddenly. Cramped and cold, he doubted if he had travelled much over fifty miles before daylight gradually revealed a landscape that was unmistakably that of Northern France. I wonder where I am going, he asked himself.
It was the same question he knew that each of the other four occupants of his compartment was pondering. It was a question that none of them dared ask. They eyed each other in the grey light with manifest suspicion. In the last war, propaganda was concentrated first upon recruiting, then upon Bonds. This time it was concerned with “careless talk.” The “méfiez-vous, taisez-vous” notices of 1917 seemed very puny beside the National Gallery of poster work that adorned every hoarding with warnings against indiscretion. He was not even certain whether it would not be indiscreet to wonder out loud where they were. Standing in the corridor to read the names of station after unfamiliar station, he wondered whether any plans had been made to stop at one where there was a station buffet. It was not till he had reached Amiens shortly before noon that a word carelessly dropped by a police corporal told him that he was bound for Arras.
37
ALBERT TO BAPAUME
Verses written in July 1917 on the occasion of his first journey up the line.
FROM ALBERT TO BAPAUME
Lonely and bare and desolate,
Stretches of muddy filtered green,
A silence half articulate
Of all that those dumb eyes have seen.
A battered trench, a tree with boughs,
Smutted and black with smoke and fire,
A solitary ruined house,
A crumpled mass of rusty wire.
And scarlet by each ragged fen,
Long scattered ranks of poppies lay,
As though the blood of the dead men
Had not been wholly washed away.
38
AMIENS TO ARRAS
He looked in vain for any sign that would remind him of the countryside that he had known twenty-three years before. Flat and green it stretched under a grey sky, intersected by its long, straight roads, the horizon cut by the tall thin poplars, enlivened every few miles or so by a patch of dull red roofing. Husbandry was being pursued with the plodding mercenary persistence of the northern peasant. The spire of the church at Albert stood straight against the sky. There was no sign of war, of this war or the last, except in the side of a single steeply-sloping bank below a wood where the rough untended grass was pockmarked still with the cavities of shell-holes.
39
I.O. WRITER
It was a curious appointment. He wondered if it had been held before by an intelligence officer on the staff
of a G.H.Q. The section to which he was attached was designated as I.C. (II). Its staff consisted of a G.3, two I.O. Captains, and an I.O. Lieutenant, with representatives of the Army Film Unit and the B.B.C. attached. It was not responsible in any way for War Correspondents and the Press. It watched their activities indeed with some concern. Another section dealt with censorship. It did pretty well everything else, however, that could be brought under the inclusive heading of publicity. It watched military and civilian morale, and through watching the local Press and censorship intercepts was in a position to issue a fortnightly “morale” report. It kept track of rumours. It issued a weekly political news bulletin for the troops. It furnished the Ministry of Information in Paris with reports that could be incorporated into their bulletins, and its parent section at the War Office with articles that could be used as hand-outs to the Press. It originated ideas that could be employed by the official propagandists. Its G.3 was a young journalist of promise, energy, and achievement who had represented The Times in New York and in Berlin.
Himself, he was never to discover how it was that he had been posted there. His posting order read, “to fill a new appointment.” He assumed that some time earlier someone had said. “It would be useful you know if we could have a professional writer as opposed to a journalist to write up special occasions for us.” He imagined that the application had been made because on that particular day a particular officer had had nothing particular to do. And because it had been initialled by that one section, it had been initialled by other sections. Finally it had become a recommendation to the War Establishment Committee.
That was the way things happened in the army. But even so he did not know why they should have chosen him. To himself he seemed for this particular appointment an unusual choice, since for a number of years now he had concentrated on novels and magazine short stories. There were a dozen writers whom he would have recommended in preference to himself, and his selection had been made entirely on his reputation as a writer, since the War Office, he was to learn, had not at first realized that he was already in the army. Possibly some major had been reading one of his books at the time the application had been under final consideration, and his name had been the first to occur to him.
Once he had asked the G.3 how it had all come about. The G.3 had shaken his head sagely, inferring that the secrets of staff selections could not be divulged. Whether this was true, or whether he had forgotten or whether he had never known, he was not to discover. Not that it really mattered; he told himself: “I’m here and the thing to do is to make a job of it.”
He did not think that he was going to find that impossible. The G.3 was a natural journalist, restless, dynamic, living upon his nerves, working in swift, short spasms, capable of intense concentration, impatient of routine. The organization of an office, the organization of other people’s work was not strictly his line of country. It was indeed the senior I.O.’s perpetual complaint that he was given no clear “directif,” that he was never told what to do. For himself that was a trait in an immediate superior that he was grateful for.
There are two kinds of editor. There is the kind that all but writes his magazine himself, that gets round him a team of contributors whose work he so impresses with his own personality that every paragraph, essay, story is in a sense self-expression, so that the whole magazine is “his.” There is the other kind who does not know what he really wants, but can recognize what men can give it him, men to whom he can give a rough plan of the lines within which they are to work and leave them to it. Both methods have their merits. Some writers like being organized, like having their work supervised. Himself, he never had. He had in fact never been able to work for the editor who outlined his plots for him. “Why can’t he write his own stories for himself,” he had wondered. He’d be able to work with this G.3 all right.
The instructions that he was given were vague but they were adequate. “One of our chief problems,” the G.3 said, “is to convince the French that we really are all out, that we are trying, that there’s none of that ‘fighting to the last Frenchman’ business. You’ve just come from an I.T.C. What about an article on the way our recruits are being trained?”
“I’ve material for a series of articles on that.”
“Make it a series then.”
To convince the French that we really were all out. It was a large assignment; and there were many difficulties, not the least of which being a doubt as to the media through which the French were to be so convinced. For I.C. (II) G.H.Q., B.E.F., had not, as P.R., M.E.F. was to have two years later, a completely equipped publicity and propaganda organization of its own, with presses and newsprint and radio programmes. I.C. (II) had to work through other branches, through the M.O.I. in Paris, and through the War Office. Without special sanction it could not issue anything upon its own. It was dependent upon the kind offices of other branches. It had no platform. As I.O. writer he might produce a perfect series of articles on the thoroughness with which England was training her new armies, but there might well be no columns within which to publish it. It was a difficulty, a major difficulty for one who for the last fifteen years had known where and under what conditions his writings would appear. It was a difficulty and, facing it, he knew there was only one way in which to overcome it—namely, to ignore it, to produce the stuff and then see to what purpose it could be put, to get down in fact to the job right away, to get something thought out and something written.
And there was plenty to write about, all right.
He wrote a series of six articles on the training in England of the new armies. Then he did a series of five articles on the civilian effort, on the way in which every single individual life had been reorientated since the outbreak of the war. He devised and wrote the first instalment of a serial that was to be translated into French and run as a daily feuilleton, about the romance of a young British soldier and a French peasant girl, that would in the course of its action deal with the various points that were at issue between the French and British.
From the morale reports and the censorship intercepts he would be able to discover week by week what those points were. He knew that the French were indignant over the alleged carelessness of the English drivers and the consequent road accidents; that they resented the careless way in which the troops behaved in billets, marking out dartboards on good panelling; that they were jealous of the higher rates of pay that the British troops received; more than anything they were concerned over the “affaires” that were supposed to be taking place between British soldiers and the French women whose husbands, sweethearts and brothers were in the line.
There were points, innumerable other points, that he could discover from the morale reports. By dealing with them in a feuilleton, by presenting the problems from the viewpoint of the British soldier, a British soldier moreover with whom as the hero of the story the reader would be in sympathy, he would be able, he hoped, to make the French see those issues from a different angle.
The French public would be receiving propaganda without recognizing it as such.
The first instalments came back from the G.I with the pencilled comment: “This is original work and an original idea. Write twice as much again and we’ll put the idea up to the D.M.I.”
It was on 9 May that he read that pencilled comment.
40
ARRAS, MAY 1940
Twenty-three years back, serving as a machine-gun officer in France, he had sometimes thought: “When the next war comes I’ll be over forty. I’ll be on the staff. It ought to be a pretty good war for me.” He had pictured himself billeted in some cosy little town, well behind the line where there would be cafés and cabarets and cinemas; he had pictured himself making trips round the countryside, taking an occasional week-end leave in Paris. With just enough work to keep him occupied by day, he had seen himself sitting in the evenings in a café watching the homely varied pageant of Provincial life pass by. There would be cosy little dinners, ordered in advance, in
one of those small auberges, where “la patronne” not only supervised but did the cooking. Every so often there would be a gay evening at a night-club. He had pictured the life of a staff officer, that was to say, in terms of a continual thirty-six hours’ leave.
It was very different from that in Arras. He was billeted with a French couple in a small house in a side street beyond the railway. It was a clean room; it looked upon a cherry tree. It had a comfortable bed. It was a considerably more comfortable bed than the one he had occupied at Dorchester in barracks. But the house was over a mile from the centre of the town where the G.H.Q. offices were located. It was through dreary streets that his walk took him to his work.
The hours that he worked were long. Nine o’clock to one. Two o’clock to seven-thirty. During the afternoons he was allowed an hour off for exercise. The time passed slowly. In peace-time, working at the fullest pressure he had never spent more than five hours at his desk in a single day. It was hard to fill in nine hours and a half. Even if he were to produce an article a day—and to find a fresh subject every day was in itself a full-time occupation—he would only be doing three hours’ actual writing. There was little routine office work, little routine correspondence, little hunting about in files. The atmosphere of I.C. (II) was in fact rather like that of a newspaper office in which there was no rush of incoming news. There were the papers to be read in the morning—and they got not only the Paris and local papers but the London ones as well. There were reports and there were intelligence summaries. But for one who was used to working fast, life had to be taken at the pace of a slow-motion film to make the work last out over the nine and a half hours.
