Their Promised Land

by Ian Buruma

  In a rare instance of old-fashioned chivalry, the Bulgarians once in a while allowed British stretcher bearers to run out in daylight to pick up the corpses strewn across the ravine after one more disastrous nocturnal attack. In his book The Story of the Salonica Army, G. Ward Price writes that “our doctors and stretcher-bearers with great gallantry stepped out directly into the open, trusting to no other protection than the Red Cross.”

  The stretcher bearers and medical orderlies had to cope for days and nights without much sleep with a continuous stream of wounded and mangled men, who still had a chance of survival in the dressing stations.

  One of the orderlies was Bernard. There are no letters from the front at Doiran Lake. But his unit was certainly there. In the two letters from Macedonia that I have (there might possibly have been more), there is of course no mention of what he actually thought of this deadly clash between empires provoked by Balkan politics that few of the soldiers on either side would have even remotely understood. There is only one observation about the Greek allies, before the great battle began, showing that he was quite conventional in his prejudices: “Many have been our adventures, including a good insight into the lazy Greek & his ways & especially an interesting type of these people who has been to America some time or other & thus speaks broken English & uses the word ‘sure’ perfectly pronounced once in every five words.”

  By September 7, 1917, his battalion had been moved to Palestine via Egypt. There is a photograph of Bernard, looking rather unhappy, sitting cross-legged in shorts and a tropical helmet on the back of a camel in front of the pyramid of Giza. Because of the desert wind, Bernard finds the heat in Palestine quite bearable. To stave off the boredom of waiting for the next military move, the men keep desert pets, anything from “colossal Tarantula spiders as big as a small rat to tiny little mice the size of a kitchen beetle.” One officer keeps a chameleon, another a couple of field rats. One chap has a snake. He is nice, writes Bernard, but “that goes without saying—He’s Irish & all Hibernians I have met are great.”

  Bernard (FAR RIGHT) in Egypt

  Bernard does not mention what for, but an Old Uppinghamian “I knew slightly at school has just figured amongst the new list of V.C.s [Victoria Crosses].” He was “quite a nice, quiet, unassuming individual when I knew him. I suppose that’s what ‘The right stuff’ is made from.”

  As would be the case so often in his life, Bernard’s emotions are most deeply stirred by music. Here is his postscript to a letter written on September 10:

  Last night we went to a Brigade concert & amongst other items a Cello [player] appeared. Of course he was out of practice, but not having heard a Cello since Blighty—fifteen months ago!!! & the idea of an endless vista of sand containing such an instrument gave it an exceptional value.

  When the cellist started playing Handel’s Largo in G, Bernard was deeply touched, since it reminded him of the musical afternoon when he first met Win, and he pictured himself “struggling through the same piece vainly trying to remember a few bars by heart, endeavouring with like futility to make it sound nice & getting hot in the combined effort.”

  The next letter, dated December 6, is posted from Alexandria, where he had the luxury of writing in pen and ink instead of the usual scrawl in pencil. He had been moved there from the desert to have his tonsils removed: “Just tonsillitis, but they shifted me from Beersheba to Alex, glad for the rest yet rather ashamed & inclined to hang my tail between my legs at leaving the rest of the boys in the middle of things.”

  “Things” in this instance meant the Battle of Beersheba. Various attempts had been made by the British to capture Gaza from the Turkish Ottoman troops, all of them ending in disaster with thousands of casualties. General Edmund Allenby took over from the hapless Sir Archibald Murray. The problem was that the Allied forces were stuck in the desert without access to water. Beersheba had wells. So the plan was to capture Beersheba in a day, before the retreating Turkish defenders had time to destroy the wells.

  On October 31, the Turkish trenches were bombarded for several hours in the early morning, after which a combined force of British, Australian, and New Zealand troops attacked. By the afternoon more than a thousand Allied soldiers were dead, but the Turkish trenches were taken. Beersheba itself, however, was still in Ottoman hands.

  When the sun began to set, the Australian general Harry Chauvel decided on a now legendary act of derring-do. Two Australian regiments of the Light Horse Brigade were ordered to storm Beersheba in an old-fashioned cavalry charge. Five hundred shouting and screaming Australians galloped through clouds of desert dust kicked up by the horses. Their bayonets, brandished like sabers, more for show than anything else, caught the last flickering rays of the sun. A number of horses and men crumpled under machine-gun fire, but the surprise was so great that the Turkish and German troops were overwhelmed, and after some ferocious hand-to-hand combat in the town, Beersheba was taken with its water wells intact.

  Bernard refers to the battle obliquely. In a letter sent on December 6, Win’s birthday, but still addressed to all in Parsifal Road, he mentions seeing a film in an Alexandria movie house about the fall of Beersheba (La prise de Bir Saba). He remarks, “I saw many things go up to the place of deployment on the night before [the attack] but never a Kinematograph. Still, one never knows it may have come up with the Bully [beef stew], but more likely the operator may have taken a few camels way back & there were plenty of them knocking about—ten thousand came up one night with supplies in one never ending column.”

  The letter ends with a special greeting: “As it’s December 6th shall we all join in with the other blue-coated patients of Beech House in wishing the best of luck to the wee nurse of no. 6 ward & the rest of her family. Cheery oh everybody. Love, Bernard.”

  This is the first direct reference to Win in the wartime correspondence. Perhaps that is why it elicited a direct answer written on December 30, thanking Bernard:

  It was ripping of you to remember my birthday—I hope you are feeling quite fit again, but all the same, it was a pity you didn’t manage more than three weeks in hospital. It was not long for tonsillitis, & anyhow you should have tried the useful and persuasive art of swinging the lead. I should think you’d be jolly well justified after—how many months is it?—without leave, & I don’t think you need worry about leaving the boys in the middle. If you had been knocked out, you wouldn’t have had any pangs.

  “Swinging the lead” is an old-fashioned slang expression for shirking a duty, or taking time off work. Nothing could have been further from Bernard’s nature. Nor Win’s actually. But she was quite prepared to allow others to do so. Like him, she was determined to do her bit for the country, but she sounds unconvinced about the necessity for this war, a sentiment evidently shared by some of her patients.

  “I am becoming quite a proficient lead-swinger,” she declares, “through long and varied experience. A man came into my ward last August with a scalded foot; his foot was well in a couple of weeks & he is still going strong, & I have managed it quite alone. I have got quite a name for it amongst the patients, & how they all wish that I was the Captain who has to come round and mark them out. I wish I was too, because then the war would have ended long ago.”

  Win (SECOND FROM LEFT) at Beech House

  She would never have said such a thing in World War II, which to her was not just a conflict of nations or empires, but a struggle for survival.

  Beech House seems to have been a happy experience on the whole. Even though it was a military hospital staffed by Jewish nurses, Christmas was celebrated with gusto: “We had such a jolly time. Matron was awfully sporting, & she let us smoke after the staff dinner on Christmas Day; or rather let me say that Matron and the Commandant were so absorbed in eating nuts and maintaining polite conversation, that they did not notice that the rest of us were filling the atmosphere with the pleasant perfume of Gold Flake cigarettes.”


  Well, she concludes, she hopes he will stay a long time at the Convalescent Camp in Alexandria: “Anyhow, here’s the best of luck to you! All good wishes & Cheerio! from Winnie.”

  In fact, Bernard did not swing the lead at all, for just a few days after he wrote his letter from Alexandria, he was on the road to Jerusalem with General Allenby’s army. There are, alas, no letters recording this event. He did sometimes mention it in conversations about Israel. Though he was never an ardent Zionist, entering the holy sites had evidently moved him.

  The British prime minister, David Lloyd George, had insisted that the British take Jerusalem from the Turks by Christmas. Not that this would end the war any sooner, but it was hoped that such a feat would boost morale on the home front. Where even Richard Lionheart had failed in the Third Crusade in 1192, Lloyd George (or, more accurately, Allenby) had to succeed.

  Passing along the same routes as the medieval Crusaders, past Hebron and the outskirts of Bethlehem, was not easy. British and Empire troops had to drag their artillery across foggy mountain passes on roads made almost impassable by incessant rainstorms. Horses and limbers often got stuck in the sticky black mud.

  Allenby’s aim was to surround Jerusalem and force the Turks to surrender without having to fight in the holy city itself. On December 9, victory was his. Christians once again ruled over a sacred Muslim site, even though Allenby tactfully left the Mosque of Omar, located directly across from the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, under Muslim control. On the eleventh, Allenby entered Jerusalem’s Old City on foot through the Jaffa Gate, to show his respect, and was met by guards representing England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, France, India, and Italy. He noted that “the population received me well.”

  All I have to show for Bernard’s presence at this historic event is another one of his relics, a small “Album Souvenir,” entitled in English and French: Entrance of the British and Allied Troops in Jerusalem. Between covers of cypress wood, engraved with a picture of the sacred Muslim Dome of the Rock, are a collection of dried “flowers from the Holy Land” and photographs of the Turkish surrender and Allenby’s official entrance.

  They are rather dull pictures, many of them a little out of focus: of British soldiers milling around, waiting for the general to arrive; of the general, still on horseback, riding through the outskirts of the town, with citizens, shielded from the sun by black parasols, watching his entrance from their balconies; of Allenby reading a proclamation to a mass of Turkish soldiers wearing fezzes; of Allenby departing on horseback; of the Duke of Connaught, one of Queen Victoria’s sons, handing out medals. All I know about the duke is that he later became governor-general of Canada and was reputed to have sported a tattoo down his spine of a fox hunt with the hunted creature’s tail disappearing into its hole.

  Bernard was there. What he did exactly, how long he was there for, and what his movements were in the next few months, I don’t know. Regimental records mention the capture of Jericho in February and a number of scrappy fights in the Jordan Valley with a broken Ottoman enemy.

  A letter dated May 24, 1918, does not give much more information. It is the first one addressed directly to “Dear Winnie” since the breakup in 1916. He writes:

  Fate has been having a game with me & knowing my peculiar attitude towards tramping, studied this pet aversion of mine & so ordained that I should join a distinctly mobile Division. Ever since we left the desert we have been—well, like my mother crossing Oxford Circus. Hither and thither and back again, regular fidgets until they have termed us the Cook’s Tourists & our motto has become “Quo Vadis.”

  But quite where he was, away from the desert, is unclear. Records do show that his division was gradually being “Indianised”; that is to say, fresh troops from the Indian Army were brought in to replace British soldiers, most of whom were sent back to France, Bernard evidently among them. For his next letter, of July 20, mentions that “they had to have us back here after all to put a different light on affairs, tho’ ours is only a moral support as yet.” He was probably in a dreary railway town close to Calais, named Audruicq, which had been turned into a massive munitions dump.

  Bernard’s battalion in France was joined by a number of men who had been on leave in England. He writes, “They are at once surrounded by numerous friends who clamour for news as to the condition of the really one and only country. All accounts are entirely satisfactory & tho’ my leave has still got twelve weeks to wait, well, I am licking my lips.”

  Bernard was shipped back to England in October. The war was not yet quite over. The remnants of his regiment had moved farther into Flanders. Blood-soaked old battlegrounds—Ypres, Cambrai, Bapaume, Passchendaele—were finally taken by Allied troops. Even the once impregnable cliffs of Doiran in Macedonia had fallen to the Allies in September. The England that Bernard had left behind in 1916 was still feverish with patriotism. He returned to a country exhausted, financially drained, and sick of war. More than nine hundred thousand men from Britain and its empire had been lost. (France lost more than a million, as had Russia and Austria-Hungary, and Germany almost two million.) But all this misery was eclipsed in family memory by a story recounted to us many times as a kind of miracle.

  Bernard came back in relatively good shape, but he suffered from a sufficiently serious outbreak of boils that he was sent to a military hospital in London. By sheer coincidence he had landed not only in Beech House but in the exact ward where Win was nursing. She first realized that he was there by finding a photograph of herself in a laundry basket. It must have fallen out of a pocket in his tunic. Their love was instantly, if still rather secretly, rekindled. Bernard’s boils must have been hard to get rid of, for he was still in hospital on November 11, when the war was finally over. His discharge from the army, dated January 1, 1919, still has his regimental address as Beech House Military Hospital, Brondesbury, London.

  Like countless people all over the world, Win caught influenza, the disease that would kill more than fifty million in 1918, more than three times the number of dead in World War I. In her forced absence from Beech House, she wrote a letter to Bernard recommending, a little flippantly, that he should take a course in “Pelmanism” to face his difficulties in returning to civilian life. Pelmanism, named after the Pelman Institute, which offered a correspondence course in this mental technique, devised in the 1890s, was supposed to expand the mind and minimize inefficiency. Early fans included Sir Robert Baden-Powell, the Boy Scout leader, and Jerome K. Jerome, the author of Three Men in a Boat. Pelmanism is no longer in favor in psychiatric circles.

  On November 3, Winnie thanks Bernard for lending her his copy of My Lady Nicotine, a novel by James Barrie about a middle-aged bachelor trying to give up smoking. She also mentions his boils, asking him whether he has any dressing on them, and hoping that he will still have a tiny boil left so he can remain in hospital long enough for her return to the ward and celebrate his birthday on the twenty-third.

  In fact, he seems to have been well enough to leave the hospital to go to concerts, for Winnie asks him about a performance by the pianist Vladimir von Pachmann (the “von” was added by this Odessa-born Jewish musician himself).

  The tone of the correspondence is still a little formal (“Dear Bernard, Thank you so much for your cheery letter . . .”), but their love was openly expressed. In the envelope of the letter Winnie sent on November 3, I found a lock of her brown hair, which looked as fresh as it was in 1918. Since I knew her only with thick grey hair, this discovery gave me an uncanny feeling, as though part of her had suddenly sprung back to physical life. I did not care to look at it, let alone touch it, for long.

  Three days later, on November 6, Bernard sends her a copy of Many Inventions, a collection of short stories by another favorite author, Rudyard Kipling. He ends it with, “Cheery-oh, buck up & oust the ’flu, Bernard.”

  Her letter dated January 3, four days before his formal discharge from the army, is still add
ressed to “Dear Bernard,” but she asks him whether he can come with her to a dance on the tenth. If he could, would he come and dine at 17 Parsifal Road first, and “have your clothes brought here as before.”

  There is a handwritten dance program, dated March 18. Inside are fourteen dances, fox-trots, waltzes, and one-steps. Every dance has the initials of a booked partner. B.E.S. takes up five of the fourteen dances. He is by then a medical student at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, trying to make up for lost time. In a letter from “Emmers,” dated May 1, he asks her for her photograph to keep in his wallet, and ends his letter with “Love from Bernard—It’s nice to be able to say this without camouflage now.”

  Win’s next letter, sent on June 30, begins, “Dear Boss-to-be, (You’re not there yet tho’, so don’t start crowing too soon).” She recounts their first meeting, and how proud she was, a sixteen-year-old girl with her hair all the way down her back, of “the big jolly schoolboy who was head of his House.” It was “ripping” of him, she continues, to write to her on Peace Night, June 28, when the Versailles Treaty was signed.

  She adds, “It is the first great occasion that we have not been together since you came home in September—and it was a great occasion for both of us, Bernard, apart from the general good. First—the League of Nations—which means that you will never never have to leave me to fight and endanger your life in any rotten war that can ever be invented. Second, that the two countries to which we both owe all we have, are no longer enemies.”

  Three

  THE LONG WAIT

  Bernard might have been drinking when he started this letter to Win. He is not sure about the date: “Somewhere between 20–30 of Jan., 1920,” it says. “Saturday evening anyhow.” The writing in blue ink on the top of the letter sent from Emmanuel College, Cambridge, looks distinctly uneven. It was in fact the twenty-sixth of January.