El Alamein
Dinner with Air Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder, a quiet man who painted water-colours (Sargent and the English school), and knew what he was up to, exactly. Which, no doubt, was why he persisted in painting water-colours. It is agreeable, sometimes, to do something properly one knows one cannot do really well.
After dinner Montgomery and Tom walked back to the trailers. There they sat on the stoop and watched the small breakers whiten, for the Mediterranean is a shallow sea, like a partially fried egg on the frying-pan of the beach. Montgomery talked for a while and then got up to go.
“I always read a bit before I turn in,” he said, and confessed sadly that he had few books with him. His library had been bombed out, at Dover.
Even here, the German bombers came close. One day Tom had to hug the ground. He didn’t mind that, but when he got up the cap on one of his incisors was gone. That was the cap he had had inserted when he first came to New York, and Cobb, who had gotten him there, had told him he couldn’t be chairman of Commonwealth and Southern Corporation with a gold filling in a front tooth. If you earned more than 10,000 a year, you didn’t have gold fillings. “And what’s more I’m going to send a boy round every ten days, to see you get a haircut,” said Cobb. That was back in ’28. A nice old duck, shrewd as hell, and dead now. But such are the prices of competence and position. You have to keep up appearances.
Was there an acceptable dentist in Cairo?
In the Desert
Tom had changed from a suit into an army issue shirt and slacks too small for him. He looked sheepish, felt sheepish, but the conversation was interesting. They were talking about Rommel.
A good professional man admires other good men in the same profession, no matter whose side they are on, and so it did not do to slight Rommel. It was a case of Hannibal and the Romans. Ergo he was a gentleman. He was. And a great commander. He was. And had to be defeated. He was. But to give them credit, even had he won, they would have said the same thing. That is why they respected him, why he committed suicide when given the choice, and why we have always given him his due.
An interesting study could be done upon the war’s suicides both professional and personal, their real causes, and their effects, from Rommel, Bedeaux, Zweig and Forrestal, to the poor devils on Okinawa. But Americans do not commit suicide for such reasons, generally speaking. It is because they are not, like the rest of the world, any longer taught ethics in grammar school, or, where the subject really belongs, at home.
At the moment, Rommel had no time for such personal trifles. He was still striding about, in polished boots and somewhat exotic costumes of his own contrivance, such as generals always manage to acquire, being intensely practical, and just as intensely elegant, like the magician in one of Mr. Bergman’s black comedies, which was, if you came right down to it, how the world had forced him to regard himself. It had been so long since it had been possible to take all that out during the standard German vacation at Capri or Taormina.
Here was the Libyan desert. It was not sand. It was like the deeps of the Ocean Sea, a landscape scattered with rocks, the detritus of some unsurfaced world above the sky, with its own benthes, radiant with heat, a sky of different colours, like the layers of the sea in reverse, the nadir pale and shimmering, the zenith dark. The rocks tumbled a bit, but some had not moved since the wind first put them there. The Coelocanth, which everyone thought extinct, burst into flame and boiled its crew, as a shell hit it and the tractor treads sprang off. In this lethal aquarium there was a sufficiency of barbed wire, with which we once fenced our ranges, and behind which the opponent rangers were now fenced in. Out there the Italians died for want of water, and every day there took place the battle of the conger eel and the manta ray, over which should have the right, on this empty bottom, to be the sole predator.
Still, the Medical Corps learned a lot. There is on the one hand the Hippocratic oath. On the other, the need for experiment. Here both could be satisfied.
El Alamein
That North African shore can be depressing. There are no contrasts. The low land slides wearily under the water, and the water as listlessly fingers the shore. It was hot, and there was an air-fight going on. It was not an air-fight we were winning. The planes came down like geese full of buckshot and hit the ground with a flaming smack. There was no one to retrieve them.
As Tom watched, out of nothing in that porcelain sky, parachutes snapped into place like moonflowers unfurling on an invisible vine. Like those Leonardian devices children make out of handkerchiefs, string at the four corners, and a bolt at the bottom to weigh them, the parachutes wobbled and moved rapidly out to sea. One of the bolts was low enough, so Tom could see the doll at the end of it (not a bolt, after all) tugging frantically at the strings, trying to prevent that seaward drift,
… and then swept rapidly away, into that muddy perimeter, the colour of bilge here, which was the Nile pushing up dry land between itself and the open sea.
But that frightened gesture of a tiny arm, raised helplessly in the sky, as the current caught it, lodged in his mind all day.
Later, at the base, he asked about it.
“It’s surprising how many of them drift back. Some fall behind enemy lines and some far into the desert. But their ingenuity and self-reliance bring an amazing number of them back to headquarters.”
Like seeds, or spores, but infertile. Like tufts of dandelion.
In the Tank Garage
Somewhere in the desert. Our boys were in there, tinkering. It is the American passion, though we have outgrown the period when it made us a unique queue at the Patent Office. Now it was the Russians who felt that apostolic thrill. Now that the Word had been promulgated and handed down, the Americans serviced the God in the Machine instead. With enthusiasm, with interest, with ingenuity, but still, the machine itself was the thing given, the Logos, the true faith. The Machine would pull us through.
Anyone on whom the entire apparatus of western culture has been thrown away, can at least modify a car. You lower the blocks. You lower the front axle for a quick get-away, or the back, for style. You install a radio. You redesign the radiator. You repaint with dull puce body colour. Then off you go. For the fifteen seconds it lasts, a drag race solves all problems. If you crash, it does better than that. You gun for the chase. You take off. You go. The only thing that’s missing is anything remotely resembling a rabbit, to give the chase a beast in view.
The tank repair station was in a large, moulded concrete building. And there, if you came right down to it, was where the first few Americans sent to North Africa were least at sea. It made no difference to them that Leptis Magna was not far away. They had not heard of Leptis Magna and did not know what those ruins meant. But repairing a tractor, even so far from Mainstreet, they were almost happy. And so, if you came right down to it, though he did know where Leptis Magna was, and what those ruins meant, and very little about tractors, was Tom. But again and again came that question, what are the Cincinnati Cardinals doing? What are the Dodgers? And that didn’t please him so much. It seemed a poor thing to die for, even in a ruthless and unidealistic war, the Dodgers. Or was it? It was only cricket, after all, speeded up, and without a country house to go back to, afterwards.
Decent kids, on the whole, without a thought or a scruple in their heads, except to get back where they came from, where there wasn’t a thought or a scruple either to confuse them, and where they would be less decent, as life went on. As for his vision of a unified world, they thought that was a lot of malarky, and who could blame them, for they knew it to be impossible, out of simple common sense. Beulah Land would come some day, but not now. They could have told him that. But he seemed okay otherwise. He really seemed to be interested in just what a good soldering job could do.
A Dinner in Alexandria
On the starched side. British mostly. If you overlook Scandinavia, the British are the most civilized people in the western world, but they are a little ostentatious about bei
ng so, at times. However, when challenged, they grow quite modest. But firm. That is part of being civilized, too. The captive French fleet could be seen in the harbour.
Unfortunately Tom had just announced that after the war all colonies must go, which displeased the English very much, though it absolutely delighted the Americans.
America, strictly speaking, doesn’t have any, except for Cuba and the Phillipines, which were spheres of influence; the Panama Canal, which is a business; Puerto Rico, Alaska, and Hawaii, which are territories; Samoa, which was only a mandate; a part of Antarctica, which was uninhabitable, though there had been quite a gallop to uninhabit it; and the Virgin Islands, Swan, Saipan, Palau, the Marshalls, Howland, Johnston, Palmyra, Phoenix, and perhaps a few more, which were only islands, though cannily chosen, so no one would expect us to give up those. Nor had we ever meddled in the internal affairs of, or sent troops into, any countries but Nicaragua, Mexico, Columbia, Costa Rica, Tripolitania, Spain, the Phillipines, Cuba, Haiti, Puerto Rico, Morocco, Canada, China and Japan, so on the whole we felt quite virtuous. So let these nations who had meddled when we had not, see the error of their ways.
“We mean to hold our own. I did not become His Majesty’s first minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire,” said Churchill.
No doubt. But when it had to be done, he was there to see it, all the same.
A Prisoner of War Camp
In Paris, about then, the Germans were holding, at the Madeleine, a military funeral for a Captain Scheben, who had been garrotted in an alley by partisans. Later, if he had been young enough, good-looking enough, and anonymous enough, there would be a little booklet. There was a whole series of those little booklets, about the size and format of a Piper-Bücherei art souvenir, bound in heavy brick-coloured cloth, with a gold swastika on the cover. The format was invariable. There was a frontispiece, usually taken from a smudged snapshot, of the deceased, very conscious of his uniform, and looking either angry or stern and wistful, those being the two standard German military expressions, apart from fatigue, being, indeed, perhaps the two standard military expressions. There followed a description of the deceased’s sports, family, and devotion to the Fatherland, and if he had not given his life nobly for the Cause, at least he had been struck down in a dastardly manner. Then about sixty pages of black-letter text, with quotations from letters home, or a piece of verse in which the word Blumen almost invariably occurred. These booklets were supposed to boost morale, and perhaps they did. If you died in a proper manner you were memorialized in a little book. But they make sad reading now, like those American high school albums in which one finds what one once was, staring up defiantly from the pages and the mists of time, in soft focus, like a spirit photograph, with a list of attributes below, with one’s aspirations, one’s ambitions, one’s dreams, but never one’s fears, and not one of them one’s own.
The square in which the Madeleine sits is not one of Paris’s triumphs. There is something wrong with the trees, and you expect a little Le Nôtre parc with children and nursemaids, not that unexpected temple of Jupiter, which does not seem at all like a church.
The Germans had taken it over. And it must be said that, perhaps because they had the same sort of thing in Berlin, or because they were by nature an hieratic if unruly people, they suited it a lot better. There was something towering and terrible and childish about them which went well with the scale. It was their religion to be military. They had the sadomasochistic streak of a child or a Christian mystic. That gave them an exalted, spiritual look which is what one is supposed to find in a church, and seldom saw on the faces of those who sat in one while planning the menu for dinner. Alas, it is also the look you expect on the face of the executioner in the cellar.
The coffin was brought down the stairs. Two booted young soldiers hauled it up on to the gun-carriage, looking like two small boys bending over a toybox. The gun-carriage had a pall embroidered, for some reason, with silver snowflakes. Unfortunately the tunics of those uniforms, that moral tarnhelm they could not do without, were badly cut. On younger men it did not matter, but it made older men stick out with the pompous absurd waggle of the rump of a self-centred atrabilious white duck. They are a people made to be seen from the front only. They do not exist in the round. The best you get is a decadent high relief, like that Pergamon altar they keep in their capital.
Here in the desert, when captured, they had the look of dreamers slapped awake, who want to go back to sleep again, lost, disoriented, drugged with fatigue, with a curious, absent-minded, exhausted smile, very sorry for what they had done, and yet not sorry at all.
God sees everything but waits.
It was time to move on and leave the Sphinx behind, sitting there. But when you come right down to it, there isn’t one. That’s why we refer to Him so much. There’s something else, too real to know about, the facts of our existence, and we need Him between ourselves and that. God is so much smaller and so much easier than that. A thought appropriate only to the clarity of a desert night, and of these stars, but not to be forgotten all the same. It was out in these deserts, somewhere, that that God had been factured. A curious thought. Even a disturbing one.
On the Plane
He had never been out of America so far before, and found the experience instructive. Of course he didn’t kid himself that he could master world history in fifty days, but five minutes in any town tells you more about the place than any amount of reading up on it, if you know how to use your eyes, and that is what he was there for.
Beirut
Here, in Syria, there was a little comedy. It occurred where comedies, at their request, are assigned in our day, among the French.
There was another dinner-party. He absolutely abominated dinner-parties. One spoke to the left. One spoke to the right. And all that occurred was, that one got seasick from the constant motion, went home, and took a dramamine.
The comedy came with the walks around the garden afterwards, three of them, each time with a different partner. Separately they were comical, but put together, they were sad.
Walk number one was with Charles de Gaulle, the leader of the Free French. General de Gaulle was given to busts of Napoleon, pictures of Napoleon, statues of Napoleon, books about Napoleon, and vast quantities of spinach on his epaulettes and hat.
“I cannot sacrifice or compromise my principles,” he said, without really bothering to go into them.
“Like Joan of Arc,” said his aide. But said that way, it sounded more like a confession of spiritual limitations, than the blunt statement of an irremediable virtue.
No, not quite like Joan of Arc. It appeared, on further conversation, that he could not sacrifice Lebanon and Syria either, now or at any time. Perhaps someone else would do it for him. Say, the Lebanese.
Napoleon was all very well, but at the moment General de Gaulle was more on the order of a French Homer Lea, only more absurd, and with more dignity. It was not his fault that he looked like an Angevin and behaved like a Bourbon.
He had several complaints.
Walk number two, around that incongruously formal garden set smack in the midst of Syria, produced no fewer. This was with General Georges Catroux, the military ruler of Syria and Lebanon. In Alexandria, where Tom had had his Kipling chat, the French fleet, or what was left of it, was bottled up, waiting for orders from Pétain that could neither be received nor carried out. Here it was Catroux himself who was bottled up.
Walk number three was with General E. L. Spears, head of the British Mission, who did not care for de Gaulle in the least, and could say so unhampered by an interpreter. While they all took their turns, music welled around the shrubbery and trailed off into the night air, above the town below, where they had no use for any of these good gentlemen.
Nor did these good gentlemen have much use for Tom, when they discovered he had been down into the town to talk among the natives. That was not done.
Jerusalem
Palestine
was no better. That unattractive land between the mountains and the sea was shaped like a wishbone, which contending parties could snap and had whenever they felt the wish to do so. Why did the Jews have to found a country there, whose emblem should have been a sitting duck, when they could sensibly have gone off to part of Argentina or South Brazil instead, as originally they planned?
“Jerusalem the golden.” There was nothing golden about it. Architecturally it looked like a pocket that had been turned inside out, as it had been, many times, to reveal nothing more valuable inside than lint in the lining. It was not beautiful. It was not dignified. It was not well. One could never overlook the fact that the celebrated wailing wall was in a cul-de-sac, that it was a dead end.
Protocol demanded that Tom stay with the British Resident High Commissioner. The British High Commissioner said there was no trouble of any kind, and peeled a peach. The British preferred the Arabs, as who wouldn’t, Glubb Pasha, and that rather puzzling person, Lawrence, who was dead now, thank God, and a great man. Arabs were ascetic, hedonist, and moved in the right tall way. The British were not anti-Semitic, except possibly in Bermondsey and a few really good clubs, but they were rational, and Jewish history was a nightmare. Couscous was one thing. Stuffed cabbage leaves were quite another. There is something innately vulgar to the British mind about cabbage, even when steamed. It suggests murky hallways. The Jews suggested Edward VII and his friends, and though those friends were admirable enough, their names suggested too much rouge and Captain Nemo’s Nautilus, rather than Queen Victoria and Cowes. And a submarine is a disturbing object. It moves at the wrong pace. It may surface at any moment from the subconscious of the sea.
Tom Fool Page 16
