Soldier

IN August 1939 I had all the attributes of peace except any desire for it. Although I was now an interested craftsman and acquiring an incredulous respect for myself, I was always conscious of some futility in the writer’s life. I had watched the gropings of my Europe back towards the lights which had gone out in 1914, and had dared to believe that between the economic depression and Hitler’s occupation of the Rhineland they had again flickered into life, if only for a few hours and in a few most favoured streets. My feeling for Nazi Germany had the savagery of a personal vendetta.

Yet if a smooth surface of life could make content, content I should have been. I had a London flat and a growing circle of friends, which I badly needed. Reviewers had been very kind to my first novel. I had a second in the hands of the publishers and I could see what I was going to live on for three months ahead.

On August 20th I received a telegram from the War Office requesting me—we were not yet on a footing of orders—to report within twenty-four hours. The urgency surprised and flattered me. No one had ever demanded me within twenty-four hours; next week was always enough. I assumed that I was wanted to attend another course, not that the end and object of courses had arrived. As politically uninformed as any other member of the public, I could not believe that Hitler intended to strike eastwards after our guarantee to Poland and Roumania had made it clear that any more playing at soldiers meant world war.

It had been very different at the time of Munich. Then war had seemed to me imminent and in honour unavoidable. What use there could be for an able-bodied commercial traveller of thirty-eight—I was not yet wholly committed in mind to my new profession—I did not know. For active service abroad I was not trained. Both Civil Defence and Anti-Aircraft formations, for which I was easily acceptable, lacked the outlandish touch which I personally felt inseparable from war. Then came an announcement that men of good education and a military standard of health could join the Territorial Army Reserve of Officers. I took my place in the queue which snaked amiably through the courtyards of the War Office.

It was a considerable queue. There must have been at least five hundred of us on that morning of the Munich Crisis. From then on I never had any doubt what the ultimate result of war would be. My certainty was of course the wildest romanticism, growing upon one solid fact. Those hundreds in the queue, by their faces and bearing, were so obviously produced by a training more Spartan than any other country had imposed upon its youth. Many of them, no doubt, would have bored me to the point of any subterfuge for escape; most were still living in a Kipling world of the early nineteen-hundreds; some, like myself, had an extra edge upon their patriotism because war appeared so infinitely more desirable than sitting at a desk or looking for a desk to sit at. But the fact remained that they were a cross-section of a self-confident élite—far from perfect officers from the point of view of handling men, far from a German standard of intelligence, yet with values so simple and assured that they would rejoice the heart of any commander.

Arrived inside the War Office, we sat at tables and filled in forms. I had not expected so many questions which I could answer with a hopeful affirmative. There was even mention of Certificate A, the existence of which I had entirely forgotten though I had acquired it in 1918. Its face value was comic, proving only that its possessor could command a company in the still Napoleonic manœuvres of the parade ground without tying it into a knot, that he could take a rifle to pieces and answer correctly written questions on the infantry tactics of the Boer War. But I have the utmost respect for it, since I never had any other military training and it sufficed. I had learned the first principle of the military life: that if you preserve a smart, alert and intelligent bearing, you will have ample time later to find out what the devil your superiors or subordinates are talking about.

The Munich autumn passed; in the winter I was summoned to have my languages tested. Nothing but life had ever tested them before. My Spanish turned out to be still fluent, profane and idiomatic; my French, serviceable for all ordinary purposes; my German, a wildly individual version of the language which could be readily understood by any person of goodwill.

Soon afterwards I received a letter inviting me to an interview. It was a mysterious letter, for it was not franked On His Majesty’s Service but bore a stamp. Keeping imagination upon all the curb it could endure I called at the War Office and was shown into a room which seemed to me unnecessarily large. At the far end of it were a colonel and an exceptionally lovely girl. I restrained my eyes, fearing that I might be written down, in the too easy judgement of the English, as a man who had more interest in women than duty. The real reason for Joan Bright’s presence was not, I now feel, the primitive separation of honest rams from billy goats, but the value of her snap judgement. Her remarks—if I am right—when each of us had left the room would have been entertaining to hear.

Then came two courses in Intelligence Duties. The subjects of the lectures were utterly unexpected, for there was hardly a mention of the employment of spies or of security against them. Roughly speaking, we were being trained in the strategy of the coming war. We were never actually told that defeat was probable, but it was clearly foreseen that at the very best the meeting of the main armies would produce stalemate, and that victory might be destined for the side which could produce the most ingenious methods of breaking it.

The use and organisation of the commando, the opportunities given by the parachute, the rallying of large local forces by small parties of British, the art of guerrilla warfare—those were the main subjects of the course. All the underhand methods of tying down the enemy and destroying his confidence which began to inspire the public between 1942 and 1944 were prophesied to us and the technique explained in the summer of 1939. British military thinking was revolutionary. It had to be, for the War Office was short of any weapon but cunning. I remember that when a party of us was taken to the Farnborough depot, so that we might be able to recognise and describe the main features of our own or enemy armour, there was only one modern tank in the sheds, and that was a prototype.

Nothing was said of our intended employment—or indeed could be said, for no one could tell where in the coming war the fronts would be. It seemed to me pretty obvious that I should be used in a Spain which was fighting with the Axis, and I dreamed of my partisans in the remote hills from the Cantabrian Mountains to the Picos de Europa.

When in August 1939 I reported to the War Office, the dream of Basque commandos vanished. It was to be Roumania. I had never given the country a thought. When tested for a knowledge of the language, I could not speak a word nor even read a newspaper. At my first visit to the War Office in that eager queue I well remember wondering, pen poised over the form, whether I had or had not the impudence to put Roumanian among my languages. But it was absurd to admit that one had lived in a country for four years and been content to know enough to call a cab. Still hesitating, I scribbled the nine letters. So small and insignificant and unnoticed an act decided the pattern of six years of my life and therefore all the far course of it.

My orders were to leave for Egypt in four days. Startled by the sudden conjuring of a Captain Household out of those gentlemanly courses and the last remains of youth, I went out and bought uniform. Marina, with a prudence which for the first and last time was fully justified, left for America. She remains in my life as a loyal and beloved friend. Out of the raw and passionate material which had forced itself upon her fourteen years earlier she made everything but a husband.

The four long trains stood on the waterfront sidings at Dieppe. Around them, in them, carrying their kit to them were naval ratings in uniform, and officers of all three services barely disguised in sports jackets and grey flannel trousers. I crossed the quay to buy bread, ham and wine for what promised to be a long and uncomfortable journey. The French, appalled, begged me to tell them whether this brisk and purposeful movement, so familiar to the middle-aged among them, was mobilisation. I denied it impatiently. What we were and what our destination was no business of theirs. But the four trains, though they stood in the objective world of 1939, belonged to 1914 in the sad eyes which stared from every shop and café.

I knew their foreboding—the undismissible certainty that one has been at the beginning before and that the end must be the same. To me it had come in 1933 when sitting in a Brussels café I had opened the evening paper and found myself staring at a cartoon of sky darkened by German bayonets. It seems a mere nothing. But for ten years there had been no bayonets in cartoons. We did not think that in our lifetime there ever would be. No man or woman under forty can realise how unimaginable was European war to the casual citizen, the casual European newspaper reader in the years between Versailles and Hitler.

Yet to me and to not a few of us born about 1900 war was in some sort a release. We had been at school from 1914 to 1918, and our education, outside the classrooms and the monotonous games, was directed towards making us efficient officers. Our elders, first so senior as to be gods, then gods who had come down to earth, then near contemporaries, went to France and largely stayed there. We knew very well that the average life of an infantry subaltern in the line was three weeks. It did not bother those who waited any more than those who went. One is always the exception. It did produce, however, an acceptance of death as a possible, even a normal end of youth—the price which might have to be paid for satisfying our overwhelming, burning curiosity as to what it was really like to be under enemy fire, a question as intense as what it was really like to sleep with a woman. Merely to be told, however frequently and vividly, was not enough. Thus when the armistice came and still one was a schoolboy it produced frustration not relief.

So the circumstances in which I landed at Dieppe were a proud fulfilment—though indeed I felt something of a fraud since there were as yet no war and no danger and no doubt at all in my mind that anyone entrusting his life to my military knowledge would certainly lose it. So I had to be satisfied with the romantic pleasure—for such a sybarite as myself—of considerable discomfort.

The four trains were full of naval ratings for the Mediterranean Fleet, of the officers of Wavell’s army recalled from leave, of essential civilians staffing harbours, depots and cables: of everyone in fact who had to be at his post before Germany could close the overland routes to the east, and Italy delay the passage of the Mediterranean. Warsaw and Bucharest might be cut off at any moment, so the Polish and Roumanian military missions were despatched to Egypt whence, by rail or air, they could move to their stations on the declaration of war. We were nearly all amateur soldiers, picked for our languages or special knowledge, and put in the picture—trained is too strong a word—by the same courses. We must have been the very first party of the new armies to leave England on active service. At least two of us did not see it again for five and a half years.

I can claim with truth to have crossed the length of the Mediterranean in an open boat. After two days and a night in the train, much of it spent on sidings within infuriating sight of Paris, we arrived at Marseilles and were taken on board the waiting cruiser. Seventeen hundred of us there were, and the ship could not have been fought and could barely be handled without treading on us. The two military missions, claiming to be so secret that they were not allowed to mix with their fellows, captured and held one of the ship’s boats; and there, beneath the davits, some twenty of us lived and slept during the passage to Alexandria. The only unbearable hardship was the lack of any alcohol. Food, though it largely consisted of bread and marmalade, was happily spiced by the speed of that treaty cruiser, reaching urgently across the Mediterranean at thirty knots.

The Polish mission flew off to Warsaw from Cairo, leaving the Roumanians at the Metropolitan Hotel—then less well known than later and still able to keep up superb menus for us, its sole guests in August—to wait in extreme luxury for the declaration of war.

We could only enter neutral Roumania secretly and as civilians, for the object of our mission was wholly destructive. Our orders were to deny Roumanian oil to the Germans if they invaded Roumania, and to concert plans with picked engineers of the oil companies and our opposite numbers from the French Army for the utter destruction of the fields and refineries. The Germans, naturally, would be aware that some such plot must be well in hand, but so long as there was no noticeable British activity and no sudden arrival of suspicious strangers they could only guess.

We travelled separately through Palestine, Lebanon and Turkey, with reasonable cover as businessmen. I was forbidden to travel on my current passport which gave my profession as author. Authors, said the authorities, were immediately suspected by every security officer. Compton Mackenzie and Somerset Maugham had destroyed our reputation as unworldly innocents for ever. So I was given a new passport which stated that I was an Insurance Agent. Nobody could know less than I about insurance, but, as I did not have to practise or pretend to practise the profession, that mattered little.

As soon as Poland had been overrun, Roumania was helpless; but she hoped to delay invasion with her own army and such detachments of Weygand’s army in Syria as could arrive in time to hold the line of the Carpathians. We had three plans for the devastation of the oil-fields. No. 1 assumed the active help of the Roumanian Army. No. 2 assumed its complete preoccupation on the frontier, leaving us to do the job with the expert help of a field company of sappers, trained in demolition, which stood ready in Egypt to join us as soon as Roumania was at war. No. 3 called for the utmost possible measure of destruction in spite of the opposition of the Roumanian government and army. A few of the most trustworthy officers of the Roumanian general staff knew all about Plan 1—and of course our identities—something of Plan 2 and nothing at all of Plan 3.

On arrival in Roumania I went straight to Ploeşti where I stayed with Gwynn Elias, the fields manager of Unirea, ostensibly as an old friend and personal guest, to familiarise myself with oil, its machinery and its men. We had to be so careful not to compromise the organisation that frequent visits to the fields were impossible. Ploeşti swarmed with Germans. The Americans and Dutch were neutral. And some of the bluffer British, while they could be trusted to blow up anything including, if necessary, themselves, were incapable of not talking loudly in cafés.

My colleagues had much better cover than I. Stanley Green had once been secretary of Unirea and could pretend up to a point that he was on special duty from the London office. Tim Watts, the angel of doom for the refineries, was a chemist from I.C.I. and entitled to take a reasonable interest in oil and its derivatives. But I could only remain as inconspicuous as possible, letting it be known that I was not anxious to return from this pleasant neutral country to an England at war. I spent my days upon Elias’s living-room floor, carpeted with large-scale maps of the Ţintea field, and my nights, when we could all move around more freely, at conferences or bridge.

Even in South America I have never known anything like Elias’s hospitality to the prisoner in his house. They were the salt of the earth, those picked men of the oil-fields, keen, daring, ingenious and refusing to be beaten by any technical problem. All the essential work was done by them. We merely co-ordinated it.

But nothing happened. The expected German invasion did not come; the period of phoney war dragged on; the wives of the oil-men, who had been evacuated, returned to Ploeşti. Only one service had any immediate nuisance value, and that was of quite another organisation which took an interest in the aviation spirit shipped from Russia to Roumania and on by rail to Germany. Oil from the Roumanian fields was largely denied to the enemy by economic warfare.

When the plans, the responsibilities and the methods had been worked out, there was no further point in staying at Ploeşti and arousing curiosity. So we were all taken on to the staff of the legation, following the German practice of giving minor diplomatic status to their professional toughs. Green, Watts and I were installed in an office of dubious propriety between the Military Attaché and the Air Attaché where, when we were not poring over our maps and elaborating still quicker routes and instruments of destruction, we ciphered and deciphered telegrams—an occupation of appalling boredom, since seldom was anything of more than routine interest allowed to pass through our undiplomatic hands.

The Military Attaché, Geoffrey Macnab, was a master of his art, never allowing his right hand to know too obviously what his left hand was about. Roumania, though it would be an allied country if invaded, was in fact neutral and very anxious to give no provocation. The government was only prepared to look the other way so long as there were no Franco-British activities so open and outrageous that the German legation would be justified in protesting.

Geoffrey Macnab was responsible for our administration and discipline, but only for such operations as were approved by and concerted with the Roumanian General Staff. At first it must have been a nightmare for him to be encumbered with officers in civilian clothing, of God-only-knew what training, what background and what lack of discretion, playing casually with detonators in the next-door office and drinking very much more than was good for them. But never for a moment did he treat us as if we were anything other than trusted friends from his own battalion. We liked him so much that we tried to be sensitive to the lightest touch of the reins—a handy metaphor, though in fact he normally expressed incipient uneasiness by standing on one leg and wriggling the other.

During the twenty years’ peace I had not considered the regular officer, when I considered him at all, as any asset to his generation. This was partly due to too much reading of the follies of 1914–1918, partly to personal observation of the fact that if you were capable of passing any examination whatever you could pass into Sandhurst. The War Office, the ship and Egypt had already suggested to me that I was wrong. Macnab, setting an example which I never forgot of how to command imperceptibly, added further evidence. I cannot remember an occasion in five years of war when I met with discourtesy or marked impatience from a regular officer. Professional ferocity, yes. Deliberate stupidity, no. It was always the amateur soldier, with an eye on his own importance, who was difficult. The professional trained between the wars, far from being doubtful and jealous of the amateur, seemed to cherish the new raw material with which the State had supplied him.

My tribute to him, as from a romanticist, is worthless; but from the security officer, which for most of the war I was, it carries weight. By the very nature of my job I was a nuisance to busy men wanting to get on with the fighting, a perfumed staff officer to Hotspurs. But it was the regular, not the amateur, who always responded with good manners and good sense.

Our real operational command, oddly enough, was naval. All our detailed planning was directed by Commander Watson, as he then was. I do not know who picked him to lead so desperate and delicate a venture which was military from beginning to end except for farcical sideshows on the Danube, but the choice was admirable. He was straight out of any stirring saga in glorious technicolour—for most exaggeratedly naval characters have an astonishing gift for becoming what seafaring fiction and the taxpayers expect. He was a handsome man with cold, dark-blue eyes, and he had a natural as well as a naval talent for leadership, simple, unquestioning and unquestioned. I felt that my own expansive and only vaguely ruthless fire of duty was in him concentrated to a white flame. I cannot imagine a better leader with whom to go into action, although in following his example one might be offered less chance than was really available to live and fight another day. Had Watson leaned over my dying body I feel that my last words would have been notably patriotic, but to Geoffrey Macnab they would have been profane.

In February 1940 I was despatched to Egypt on a demolition course. For the first time I put on uniform, obtained a movement order instead of a ticket and was delivered to Dabaa in the Western Desert where the field company of sappers which was earmarked for use in Roumania took over my body.

I admitted that my military training had been of the sketchiest, and they were immensely kind. It is possible that we who came down to them from Roumania appeared mysterious and heroic figures, in spite of pointing out to them apologetically that our only activities were to eat in two of the finest restaurants of all Europe and to attend a cabaret every evening. Romantic vision—which exists in the eye of the observer rather than of the participant—was more solidly based upon our appreciation of them. These were the men for whose technical skill and ability to fight off interference we were only pathfinders.

A fortnight under canvas with an efficient unit of high and happy morale made me more confident that the illusion would not be detected whenever I had to play the part of captain in any straightforward War Office production. With growing enthusiasm I blew craters, cut steel, stunned fish and my wrist-watch; and though the company had created for some miles around their camp a desert more formidable than that supplied by nature, they managed to find for the completion of my training a substantial roofless building of mud and stone. I am a most incompetent electrician, and it was one of the triumphs of my personal war when, after laying and wiring the charges myself, I pressed the plunger and the building disintegrated into noise and flame, hurling a large chunk of itself—for overkeenness had brought me a little close—in tribute at my god-like feet.

Back in Bucharest our unheroic life of luxury continued; we felt like parasites upon the unhealthy back of war. Secrecy was more essential than ever, and we preserved it; but there was no sense of speed or urgency to indemnify us. Ever since the assassination of Calinescu, the Roumanian foreign minister, by the Iron Guard, German influence had been increasing; but the Roumanians believed fairly firmly in the ultimate victory of the French and British. As soon as disaster in the West showed that we were no match at all for the German Army, it was clear that the mission would not be allowed to destroy the oil-fields, and that the field company of sappers would be forbidden to land.

That brought our third scheme into operation: to do what damage we could with a handful of British oil engineers. Our objective was the high-pressure field at Ţintea. If we could destroy that, Roumanian output would be limited to the bailing and pumping wells. We believed it could be done by four or five small parties running from well to well, laying a heavy charge at the base of each Christmas tree which controlled the flow, and timing them to go off simultaneously. Whether all the wells would catch fire immediately was doubtful, though we had means of persuading them to do so. But in any case those pillars of gas and oil could never again be controlled by anything less than a specialist team from Texas.

The guards on the wells were still company guards, whose exact movements were known. We reckoned that they could be put silently out of action, partly by bluff from engineers whom they knew, partly by strong-arm methods. It was highly desirable to avoid loss of life. Since we were in a neutral country, killing was murder. When the wells went up, a score of torches lighting the eastern foothills of the Carpathians, we hoped to be racing through the night to Galatz and a waiting destroyer.

We were convinced that the plan was possible; and in theory it was. But in practice we should have been disorganised by the difficulty, which later and more professional commandos proved again and again, of any exact timing in a night operation. I think we could have sent up enough wells to make the field unworkable, and possibly to exhaust it, but the chance of the parties ever reuniting for escape was nil; so was escape without shooting.

Twenty-four hours before this spectacular act of sabotage was to be carried out, the Roumanians posted two military sentries on every well. Who betrayed us we never knew. Such indications as there were suggested that the leak was not in Bucharest or Ploeşti, but through the Roumanian Legation in London. It is possible that someone in authority had forgotten that the allegiances of major oil companies cannot, even in war, be too closely defined.

That was the end of the oil scheme for ever. In July one of our French colleagues was arrested by the Paris Gestapo while carrying a portfolio of papers which gave away much of the earlier and official plot. All the British employees of the oil companies were expelled from Roumania. We clerks at the Legation, though both the police and the liaison officers of the Gestapo who were now with them knew that our clerkliness was highly dubious, were permitted after much argument to remain.

War, if one has the temperament for it, may be enjoyable; but it is a most unsatisfactory setting for human intelligence. What is planned with infinite pains and care never happens; and what is unforeseen flurries the ant-heap to madness before petering away into unimportance like a short story which the author cannot finish. Success does not seem to depend upon the prudence which claims to control or guard against events, but upon creating an instrument which is not affected by events. The justification for our existence—if in fact there was any—came in Burma, where our techniques proved useful and two of the oil-men, by then commissioned in the Army, were decorated for gallantry.

Perhaps our studies were also of some use in the protection of oil-fields. Three years later I inspected the Kirkuk high-pressure field, drawn partly by duty, partly by curiosity, and found that the Ţintea plan had been utterly defeated by burying the Christmas tree deep in a bank of pebbles. To reach the vulnerable depths of it, the saboteur would have needed hours without interruption and a platoon of men with noisy shovels.

Bucharest put on high summer, which I drank in from the balcony of a delightful rent-free flat taken over from one of the most deservedly exiled, high above the boulevards. The monks chanted in the dark-panelled monasteries. The willows continued to cascade over streams racing down to the Danube with the last of the snow water, while the frogs sang and the buffaloes wallowed. The restaurants which jewelled with their flowers or lights the chain of lakes around Bucharest—all marshes when I was young—still offered white wine and gipsy music, while the night air breathing up from roots of rushes cooled the exquisite complexions of the women. Never was such a country as the Wallachian plain for shade and water in savage heat. Those summer months of 1940 were the last blossoming of Byzantine civilisation.

What could we do but enjoy it? No individual can be affected to more than a sigh and a passing anxiety by public ills so long as he has health, an amply sufficient income and a share of such luxuries as his impatient body demands; and if he has none of them, no perfection of national prosperity will ever persuade him to swing happily from bough to bough. My own enjoyment was little disturbed by the fact that the police seemed to have chosen me out from my fellows for special treatment. Indeed their attentions possibly helped to dispel a sense of guilt.

What their exact object was I never discovered—whether they hoped to make the Legation withdraw my union card, or whether they wished to impress the Iron Guard or the Gestapo by quite un-Roumanian energy. Probably we had unknown friends in the police who, when ordered to move a pawn, merely fiddled with it convincingly and withdrew their fingers. Sometimes I would be escorted to police headquarters, kept for a few hours in the waiting-room or on a hard chair in the passage, asked a few polite and inconsequent questions and dismissed; sometimes two scruffy plain-clothes operatives would blockade my front door and compel me to unconventional exits and movements which they could easily have prevented if they had had any real interest in arresting me. It was useful to have a second establishment where one did not have to register on arrival.

The Legation flower garden was at its most spectacular. Unable to assist our country in arms, at least we were propagandists for its taste. The German collection of girls—handsome though it was—could not be compared with the British. One was an active patriot, her lovely eyes burning with the foreknowledge of public and private misery. Another, leaving politics to those who cared for them, had a skin of such individual and improbable texture that any New York beauty parlour, though utterly unable to analyse the cause of the matt velvet, would have paid her merely to stand in the shop. There was a Moldavian dancer, slim and statuesque, whose classic Greek face was the only one I have ever seen which had no sort of severity at all. There was a delicate young night-club singer, whose thirteenth-century perfection madly aroused the proper knightly mixture of chivalry and desire. And that is but to mention those who were above any mere film-star standard of beauty.

My own part in all this Persian horticulture taught me at last to speak Roumanian: effortless, with fair accent and sentence rhythm, and with little notion beyond the imitative why I was employing any particular grammatical construction. The lesson was too swift, for one Latin language—even when its forms and its loan-words are barbaric—destroys another. My Roumanian has vanished. My Spanish fumbles. I paid no other price for entering that fairy hill where the normal penalty is of shattered emotions or a sense of guilt.

Meanwhile disasters were falling hard upon Roumania. The Russians, with German approval, annexed Bessarabia. The Germans, with Russian approval, decided to solve the Transylvanian question.

Imagine a cupid’s bow with the arrow fitted and half drawn. The curve of the bow is the chain of the Carpathians. The string is the frontier between Hungary and Roumania fixed by the Treaty of Trianon. Between string and bow is Transylvania—a glorious, quiet country of hills and woods, not unlike the Welsh border of Hereford and Shropshire on a much larger scale, inhabited by Magyars and Roumanians inextricably mixed.

Generally speaking and subject to a mass of local exceptions, there were more Hungarian than Roumanian townsfolk and more Roumanian than Hungarian peasants. Before 1914, under Hungarian rule, the Roumanians were treated as a subject race and allowed no effective political representation. Under Roumanian rule, after 1920, the Hungarians had equal rights, but were humiliated by the corrupt and pliant administration of a people whose traditions were Byzantine and whose religion was Greek Orthodox. Further bedevilling the pattern of nationalities were ancient settlements of German blood and language: some of them gentle Austrians, some blond and bumptious Saxons.

At the end of September 1940 Hitler superbly settled the Transylvanian question by an award which, ethnically, was neither better nor worse than the Treaty of Trianon, but placed Roumania at the mercy of any advance from Vienna and Budapest. A wedge of territory from the centre of the bow, corresponding to the wide shoulder and left arm of the archer, was given to Hungary, and the Roumanians were ordered to withdraw their troops, their administrative staff and all their official possessions within ten days.

This offered a marvellous chance to enter the cauldron and observe whatever Hungarian, Roumanian and German movements were bubbling within it. We were particularly anxious to know whether any units of the Wehrmacht, in uniform or plain clothes, were involved. Geoffrey Macnab invited me to go with him and try to slip through into the abandoned territory. Even as a much-liked military attaché he could not get permission from the bitter and broken-hearted Roumanians. It was quite certain that I could not.

The luck was with me. While his car was stopped at the military control post outside Braşov and he was drawing all attention to himself and his arguments, the sentries impatiently waved me on, presumably taking me for someone who had legitimate business in the town. A moment later my Polish driver and I had the freedom of Transylvania. We raced westwards, like a speculative hearse, along the road to dying Europe, and soon began to meet the retreating columns of the Roumanian Army.

All the roads were jammed with weary divisions on the final stretch of their 250-mile march to the east. Angry and unsinging, under a pall of hot dust, the men moved as the armies of all history, and as armies will never move again. They had only their first-line transport, drawn by oxen and horses, overladen with their baggage and barrack stores. They were forbidden by the treaty to requisition and evacuate the lorries of the abandoned provinces, and all their own motor transport had been used to empty the buildings of the civil administration.

The men were fighting fit and the field ambulances had very few occupants. These were allies of whom in a less scientific age we could have been proud, who would have fought over the exploding oil-fields with cheers and laughter if only the Germans had obligingly invaded a year before. I remembered the epic of the Battle of Marasesti—possibly the only folk epic, authorless except for gipsy singers, produced in Europe during the twentieth century—which celebrated the sole Roumanian victory of 1917 when the peasant troops, incompetently officered, half-starved and decimated by typhus, lost their tempers and tore into the astonished Germans with cold steel. We used to ask the gipsy bands to play it whenever there was a party of the enemy enjoying its meal. In the last few months they had sadly refused.

The next day, driving south across the path of the rear guards, we returned through the pass of Petroşani into Roumania proper. I cannot remember why. Probably there were rumours of German units in the south-west which had to be investigated, or information was wanted on troop movements in the pass. After exploring the country around Craiova, we turned north again into Transylvania by a forest track which the map suggested was passable for vehicles in summer.

Hour after hour, congratulating ourselves on avoiding all control posts but increasingly aware that the car could never be turned back, we crept downwards over rutted turf winding so closely among trees that in places we had to manœuvre as if extracting the car from a crowded parking place. Towards midnight this Hans Andersen path led us out into a world that was the dreamed ideal of human beings ever since the Golden Age. It was a world with no government at all.

The Roumanians had gone. The Hungarians had not yet arrived. There was, next morning, a curious sense of apprehensive freedom. Magyar-speaking peasants were pleased, but frankly admitted that in that district of mixed population it was not worth while to upset the peace between neighbours. Roumanian speakers were sad but comforted themselves—for in adversity we believe anything—with thoughts that Transylvania would be isolated from war and politics. Both nationalities walked in the streets or sat outside their cottages waiting, doing no work, savouring the quiet of this strange day without military, without police, without even a post office. Torn papers flapped lazily around the forecourts of barracks and public buildings. Official windows, blank and black, were pointless decorations to the squares which they had overawed. There were no flags.

But it was time to watch the arrival of the triumphant Magyars. We drove north-west, crossing the axis of the advance, and were nearly caught behind it when the wheels dug themselves in on a soft hillside where we were hiding and observing simultaneously—with perhaps a balance in favour of the first.

A small column of armoured cars was advancing below us, with another in the distance on a parallel road. Both were preceded by motor-cyclists in black leather jerkins and with slung carbines. Such modernity was overwhelming after the dust and the ox-carts; but comparison was hardly fair. Had the Roumanians been feeling their way into empty country, preceded by their toy Renault tanks, they would have appeared equally up to date.

The Hungarian advance guards, though fast in open country, were stopping to ensure that all centres of population were clear of the potential enemy and to instal the new administration. We were able to by-pass them and race ahead. We were now in a wholly Magyar-speaking district. The village streets were decorated with triumphal arches. Outside gendarmerie or church were welcoming tables of food and wine.

We were hungry and thirsty; and this air of civic rejoicing, though we were far from invited to the party, was irresistible. My Polish driver made a suggestion of a simple daring which would never have occurred to me. Our Legation car had no diplomatic number-plates but it did possess a Union Jack to be flown from the radiator cap whenever a real diplomat was in it and on official business. This jewel of a chauffeur proposed that we should put it up.

The Legation had its pick of the Poles. On the collapse of their country, any military who could still pass between the Russians and Germans escaped into Roumania. If in uniform, they had to be interned; but if they managed to appear at the frontier in anything remotely resembling civilian clothes, they were treated as civil refugees. The Roumanians, moved by a people they liked and a fate which might well be in store for themselves, gave them all the hospitality they could afford. The British, too, could and did help. Lord Forbes—now the Earl of Granard and then an extraordinarily able boy in his middle twenties—had flown himself into Bucharest in 1939 and bullied the Legation, which had no job for him, into letting him take over Polish refugees. Later he was appointed Air Attaché, but his hobby remained Poles. Whenever a reliable man was wanted for any job, speaking any required language, Forbes could always recommend one. This driver was his own, and a particular pet. He had a most sympathetic disregard for the consequences of his actions. To have no nerves, you need to have no country.

At the next village, flying the Union Jack, we were received with roars of applause and, when we stopped at one of those hospitable tables, overwhelmed with bread, meat, bottles and questions. Who were we? What were we doing? The Hungarians had a bad conscience at accepting Transylvania from the hands of Hitler. They were delighted to see the British flag. It promised that there was still opposition to the Nazis.

I explained that I was the Official British Observer. My speaking of the despised Roumanian aroused only interest. After long experience of the League of Nations and its commissions empowered to report upon the treatment of minorities, they thought it astonishing that any official observer should speak either of the local languages. It is a depressing thought that all international investigations are conducted through interpreters with an axe to grind.

The quenching of their curiosity and our thirst was interrupted by the roar of the Hungarian advance guard coming up the road. We bounded into the car and vanished. Once out of sight behind the nearest kindly contour, panic gave way to the healthy optimism of wine. It was cowardly to go on ahead, skimming the cream of the sandwiches under a false pretence, when duty demanded that we should observe the actual occupation. It seems to me now that duty demanded nothing of the sort, but at the time I was possibly taken in by my own propaganda.

We folded away the Union Jack and drove into the next little town a few minutes ahead of the motor-cyclists, adopting a stern and selfless pose like that of the mounted police officer who rides a quarter of a mile in front of a procession and ignores the premature cheers. Our right to park among other cars opposite the reception committee was not questioned. The public was busy craning its neck, and no officious authority, for another happy half minute, existed.

There was little to see but general enthusiasm and what looked like a brigade staff. Accompanying the Hungarians were a car of German newspapermen and a car of observers, more official than I, with Nazi arm-bands. The hated symbol on that hated, military flesh was curiously unreal. Both they and I were prohibited from wearing uniform in a neutral country, so that I could hardly be considered a spy; nor, however romantically I tried, could I feel that I was anything so definite. On the other hand I had no right whatever to be in Hungary—though the mayor was only now signing his oath of allegiance—nor to take notes of troop movements.

The rejoicings covered a discreet withdrawal. I was far more nervous when we passed through Bistrţa, a sulky Saxon town now flowering with swastikas which had been forbidden by the Roumanian government, where the inhabitants had no immediate excitement to take their minds off the presence of a stranger and nothing to do but stare suspiciously and make futile half-gestures of blocking the road.

There was now little empty space between the advancing Magyars and the angry Roumanians looking down from the mountain-tops into their lovely lost province. We began the gloomy climb, up through the pine forests of the Dracula country to the new frontier. At the top, above the trees, the road was barred. An attempt at bluff, a swearing that I lived in Bucharest and was happy to be able to return to my dear country, merely brought the bayonets forward from a yard to six inches. After all that humiliation the Roumanian soldiery was thirsting for blood, and any foreigner would do.

We were rescued by a young lieutenant of security police who ordered us to return to Transylvania. When I flatly refused and showed him my diplomatic union card, which at least proved that I was normally resident in Bucharest, he jumped into the car and escorted us down to Vatra Dornei for interrogation. He was a pleasant and civilised fellow, and I remarked, with the light-heartedness of a clear conscience, that I hoped I should not be shot. The prospect did not seem to him altogether absurd; he answered that Roumanians shot no one without court-martial. It then occurred to me that I had in my notebook, besides bits of information on Hungarians, details far less scrappy of the Roumanian order of battle. It was just that touch of professionalism which the amateur soldier so enjoys.

Little Vatra Dornei was half garrison town, half holiday resort. In spite of all the excitement across the border, it preserved the peace of Sunday evening. There was laughter to be heard from the cafés and, over all, the song of the water rushing down to the Moldavian rivers. The lieutenant, marching a little behind, directed me to the office of the Deputy Provost Marshal. He did not bother with my Polish driver. Whatever the man had been up to, there was no doubt of his status and political sympathies. The Roumanians were usually generous to exiled Poles.

The D.P.M. was not in his office. His clerk thought he was at home. We went to his home. His wife thought he was at the office. The security lieutenant, seeing in time the pit which yawned at his feet, quickly lied that we had not yet been to the office. In after years when I too was in control of frontiers—though not, thank God, ever responsible to a D.P.M.—I used to remember my Roumanian colleague with affection. I doubt if I myself, in the obstinate pursuit of duty, would have been so quick to anticipate the worst as he.

But there his tact ended. He must have suspected how his commanding officer was spending the evening, but he saw no reason why so commonplace and traditionally soldierly a sport should not be interrupted with as little ceremony as a British officer would interrupt a game of bridge.

He dragged me round the hotels, and at last we ran the D.P.M. to earth. He was upstairs in a bedroom. The security officer knocked and entered, leaving me in the passage. There was an embarrassed female exclamation. The D.P.M.’s voice rose—quite literally, for it started at divan level and continued at the height of a standing man. His eloquence was so fascinating that I never thought of getting rid of my incriminating notebook. The strip torn off that unfortunate lieutenant was the most uninhibited exhibition of discourteous military cursing I have ever heard.

When the lieutenant came out, I suggested a drink. He accompanied me, still silent, to a café table. I did what I could to restore his equanimity—praised his country, his army and even his government, told him that I had watched the retreat and that no other troops in Europe could have effected it on their feet in time. He hardly spoke at all. At last he told me to take my car and driver and go quickly before he changed his mind.

It was not that he believed me innocent; nor was it wholly humiliation that on such a day of national mourning his commanding officer should spend the evening in pleasant dalliance. What shook him, I think, was the taking of amusement so seriously that interrogation of a highly suspicious character in a time of crisis could not be immediately arranged. The D.P.M. might in his defence have pleaded—if he had ever heard of him—Sir Francis Drake and his game of bowls. But he was not a man to explain himself to subordinates. He personified the middle-class bully who is the greatest justification of communism in any peasant country. For the lieutenant nothing was worth while any more, and it was easier to get rid of the patronisingly sympathetic foreigner than to endure his eyes.

A day or two after I returned to Bucharest, the end came. King Carol abdicated. Antonescu and his fascist Iron Guard took over the government. Already one hotel was packed with German officers in civilian clothes. Since Roumania was still officially neutral, the accredited diplomats stayed on. All the more equivocal British organisations were loaded into a ship and despatched from Constanta to Istanbul.

Our last act was to get rid of our store of explosives which could not possibly be left where they were. That was a nerve-racking night, for several cars had to pass through the capital and out into open country while the roads were busy with the disorganised activities of police, military and the Iron Guard. If one of the cars were stopped, and its cargo of gelignite, gun cotton, detonators and the timing devices of the saboteur were examined, the Roumanians would be justified in interning us for the duration of the war. But safely we sank them, punt-load after punt-load, among the tall reeds of a lake, and intemperately, when all was done, we drank the white wine of our bold host who had provided the waterside villa and the boat.

Of the original Roumanian mission some, during the long wait for action, had been claimed by commercial warfare, by the fringes of diplomacy and by other branches of Intelligence. The only simple soldiers left were Stanley Green and myself. He had some right to the name, for he had seen active service, under age, in the first war.

We reported to GHQ in Cairo and began to look for jobs. Egypt in October 1940 was still a preserve of the regular army. If the amateur had not been sent out from England with a definite posting or was not a local resident with special knowledge of the Middle East and its languages, he was nobody’s responsibility and was very sensibly encouraged to raid the military branches for himself and grab whatever work he thought would suit him; a fair parallel would be the seeking of a job in peacetime through the streets of some immense, self-sufficient industrial centre, full of friendliness and short of men. What I had been doing was known; what my training had been was not. So I polished my Sam Browne, attended to my saluting and let them speak for me. I was determined not to be stuck in an office.

First we tried to get into commandos, then still in their infancy, and were frankly told that bath chairs were not included in their transport. They were right, of course, but it was a shock. I did not like being forced to consider the fact that in another month I should be forty. After a year in Roumania I thought myself fully capable of drinking commando or commanded under whatever table there might be, and of carrying on subtle and destructive warfare from any mountain-top. It did not occur to me that I was rather less capable of climbing there than I had been, seven years earlier, upon Hymettus.

Green in his explorations—eventually leading him to control of refugees, for which his imaginative kindness and instinctive understanding of eccentric mentalities perfectly fitted him—discovered the existence of something called Field Security, and recommended it to me. It sounded congenial—the only branch of Intelligence in which a free-lance could enjoy the care and companionship of a unit under his own command.

I called at Field Security Headquarters and was interviewed by the commandant, Robin Wordsworth—an amateur like myself, chosen for his excellent Arabic and his experience of administration in the Sudan, who had been for a year or two before the war a Dorset farmer. He had a welcoming face, burnt by the desert as by his own concealed emotions, which was attractive to men and even more to women. He was in urgent need of officers with languages, and took me on with no apparent hesitation. I was supposed to attend a security course of three weeks at the depot. I never did. Even as a security officer it was my fate to be taught by experience.

A few days after I had, in principle, joined, I was hanging about the commandant’s office and reading all the manuals and directives on the functions of I (b): the defence, that is, of the army against the enemy agent. An exclamatory conversation was going on between Robin and his adjutant on the utter impossibility of finding an officer to take a Field Security Section to Greece at short notice. I proposed myself. At least I knew my way about Athens, could read a menu in Greek and choose from it intelligently. Within a week of landing at Alexandria I found myself back there, but now bivouacked on the sands to the south of the city with my tiny independent command around me in the darkness. Here at last was fulfilment.

To right and left of us were other small units or detachments under other junior officers. We were settling down to open tins when some Poles appeared out of the night and told us that a hot meal was ready in their camp if the men would come up with their mess-tins, and that they would be honoured if the officers would dine with them in mess. That was typical of Poles. I doubt if any British unit would have been so generous. Hospitality to casual visitors was normal, but hospitality to two or three hundred could never be explained on paper. It occurred to me much later that the Poles had impulsively driven a most improper hole through the security of our move. We had not been mysteriously left on the dark sands for nothing.

The next day we were shipped to the Piraeus on the Australian cruiser Sydney, then covered with glory from a successful action in the Mediterranean. I was alarmed to find myself the senior captain on board, and therefore O.C. troops. But the centuries-old routine of this—to me—astonishing organisation, the Army, could deal at once with a situation so preposterous. Where there was an O.C., it appeared there had to be an adjutant. To appoint one who had travelled out to the Middle East in a troopship and had some idea what duties devolved upon an O.C. troops was my first and only responsibility. I was installed with some state in the Captain’s day cabin—he himself sleeping on the bridge—where I learned in peace the lecture notes of the course I had not attended, and at intervals wandered round the mess decks with my adjutant, looking, I hoped, benevolent.

Arrived in Athens, it was immediately obvious that nobody knew what Field Security was for, nor how it should be used. That was often so in the early days of war, and the general ignorance tended to make a section self-reliant and to weld it into a unit of enthusiastic specialists. We ourselves knew exactly what we were for, and how to sell our services to the doubtful or unwilling.

A Field Security Section consisted of an officer, a sergeant-major and twelve N.C.Os. Its transport was a truck and thirteen motor-cycles; its armament fourteen pistols and a typewriter; its other lethal weapons, its comforts, its blankets and its furniture, when it had any, were whatever it could more or less legally acquire. Being all men of a type to accept life as they found it, under the guidance of a sergeant-major chosen for his knowledge of army routine, a section prided itself on taking intelligent advantage of the military passion for papers and was hardly ever at a loss to account for its cherished, corporate possessions.

The primary duty of an F.S. section was to take precautions for the security of the division or corps to which it was attached—which meant in practice discreet supervision of all civilians with whom the formation came in contact, and, after successful action, the policing of enemy territory until the arrival of trained administrators. We also had to investigate leakages of information, deliberate or accidental, which could be an unpleasant duty. But serious cases were very rare, and security was more soundly assured by lectures and friendly contacts than by officious action. I do not think we were ever unpopular among the troops of the Middle East. Plain common sense showed that the protection we tried to give was necessary.

Instead of attachment to corps or division, a section could be posted to a capital, a port, a frontier or any district where the curiosity of enemy intelligence was likely to be active. This was far more interesting work than pure military security, for the section became the eyes, ears, languages and mobile reserve of I (b). It had nothing whatever to do with the employment of spies or the collection of information from enemy territory.

The section which left for Athens at the beginning of November 1940 was military, and attached to a force under R.A.F. command. After the Italian attack on October 28, five British squadrons were sent to the help of the Greeks together with port operating companies and detachments of all the base services. My duty was to look after the more elementary points of their security in a country which was not at war with Germany, where German agents, diplomatic or not, were therefore free from interference. It was a very limited freedom—as ours had been in Roumania—for the Greek secret police under the dictatorship of Metaxas were subtle and active.

I found that Lord Forbes, the Air Attaché in Bucharest, had flowered into a Wing-Commander and was the senior intelligence officer on the R.A.F. staff, so I decided that he should give us our orders and receive our reports. This was, in fact, partly correct, but I should also have been reporting to my Area Commander. He accepted my word that such a course would be most irregular.

That was a pity, for when in later years I came under Colonel Robinson in Beirut and Amman he handled his Field Security with a lovely light rein. Perhaps, unconsciously, I taught him; and he, in return, taught me how the Regular Army expressed its most violent feelings without ever, for one moment, being impolite.

I cannot remember why it was that we could never get an efficient guard on the Area Headquarters building. Certainly the fault was mine; but I was then too inexperienced to be able to afford that confident geniality which comes from a knowledge of the powers one has but does not use. Finally, to force the issue, one of my over-keen N.C.Os entered the building in civilian clothes, wandered where he would and stole the Area Commander’s current correspondence off his desk—none of it, somewhat to his disappointment, secret.

I thoroughly disapproved, but the wretched act was written down as permissible. So next morning I called with an apology to return the evidence that a proper guard was essential. The Area Commander was out and I was not prepared to hand back his papers to anyone else. I went off for the morning to visit my detachments and when I came back the correspondence had been missed and the world alerted.

With the now useless apology I presented myself. Clear-eyed, without passion, artistically, Robinson summed me up and lectured me. He quite understood, he said, the difficulty of my duties, but if security units were to wear the uniform of the Army and be considered part of it, they should share its standards, perhaps old-fashioned, of gentlemanly behaviour. I heartily agreed, but could not say so without putting the blame on a subordinate. When I had recovered my equanimity in the nearest bar—for I had never been on the mat before and was utterly terrified—I decided again that I liked the Army. This was not the verbal murder I expected, but more resembled a difference of opinion forcibly expressed.

Athens was a wonderful school in which to learn the procedure and customs of the military, for it was a GHQ in miniature, containing detachments of almost every branch. With this free staff course going on outside the office, and, inside it, my old Cornish sergeant-major with years of experience in the Military Police, I no longer had to fall back on guesses. By Christmas I felt pretty confident that I knew the ways of this hierarchical, socialist community, and that if a great many years of my life were destined to be spent in it, as seemed highly probable in those days when Russia was still an unfriendly neutral and America an unlikely ally, there was no reason at all why they should not be enjoyable.

The biggest daily job was the security of the airfields against sabotage or too close observation, and the protection of the crews from the results of their uninhibited gossip. They were out night after night in their old Blenheims and Gladiators and when they were not they would relax in the Athens cabarets. As soon as the young Squadron-Leaders realised that we were starry-eyed in admiration, well understanding that long hours of ironic conversation with death demanded an easier listener, they gave us wonderful co-operation. The R.A.F. officer has always seemed to me a better psychologist than his counterpart in Army or Navy. I suppose he has to be. The spirit of the individual is so important to him and so much more vulnerable.

There was, however, a line of defence more reliable than fatherly talks: control of the cabaret entertainers. This was done by the Greek Police, and mercilessly. The contacts of the artiste were watched day and night; the poor girl had to choose between enforced virginity and an official protector. The protectorate was a closed shop, and Field Security was not eligible.

Athens was a clumsy and difficult town for any such amusements. When our little force arrived, hospitality was overwhelming. To pay for a drink in a tavern was nearly impossible, and the troops were freely invited to Greek homes. They were not so over-civilised as to consider Greek womanhood a trifle primitive. On the contrary, they found the girls feminine, gay and virtuous. Sometimes they fell in love and pestered their commanding officers for permission to marry; sometimes they indulged in simple preliminaries which would appear quite innocuous at home, and were beaten up by soldier brothers.

Even Colonel Xenos, a formidable figure who held the whole of Greek security in his hands and had under the Metaxas dictatorship heaven-only-knew what powers of death and exile, was puzzled and embarrassed by the problem and used hesitatingly to discuss it with me. Not only did the Greeks, in peacetime, have a puritanism which elevated the virginity of a girl and the fidelity of a wife into symbols of inhuman importance, but they honestly felt that in their country’s extremity any indulgence of the flesh was wrong. The army, fighting in conditions of desperate cold and discomfort on the mountains of Albania, heard rumours of our luxurious living in Athens and reacted exactly as our own men in 1944 who, when they had not seen their wives or girl-friends for five years, read of the exploits of highly-paid American and Canadian troops in Britain. But the Greeks did more than grumble. When the bachelors came down on leave from Albania, they swore to have no pleasure that was unattainable for their comrades. And, by God, most of them kept their word!

Requests for reasonable facilities for the troops were considered improper, and matters which could have been smoothly arranged in western Europe remained a cause of mutual embarrassment. Allied relations had begun with a difficult incident. To find room for headquarters and base units, schools, hotels and public buildings had been emptied in a hurry. Among the latter was a hospital for the ladies of the town. It did indeed form an excellent billet; but the Greeks, in their passion of welcome and patriotism, had not considered the effects of letting the ladies loose on the streets. Thereafter both sides were inclined to preserve a more than Victorian reticence about the facts of life.

All this straightforward military security—women, waiters, civilian employees, strangers hanging about Piraeus docks for no good reason, or questioning British troops with native Greek inquisitiveness which was almost certainly innocent but might not be—kept me busy consulting and contributing to the files of the Defence Security Officer—a civilian—and of the Greek Police.

Among the police themselves there was conflict. Some admired the professionalism and liberty of action of the Gestapo—an admiration which is common and perhaps inevitable in those responsible for the security of any strong central government, though usually unspoken except in drink. Others concerned themselves as little as possible with current politics and gave a straight loyalty to the Crown. A third party—and they of course were the most pro-British—loathed Metaxas with good liberal exaggeration of his comparatively mild and few iniquities. They were the best contacts and informants of my men, who were consequently troubled in mind. They had enlisted to destroy fascism in all its forms, and found themselves in fact collaborating with the secret police of a dictator. I had to impress upon them that if the devil were fighting Mussolini, the devil and no one else was our ally.

Though a mere observer of the intrigues, I was sometimes considered a person able to influence events and liable to take an interest in Greek politics. It was no use to insist that I knew nothing of politics and was only a junior officer in command of a handful of military specialists; I was still expected to keep up the Compton Mackenzie tradition. My profession had nothing to do with it. That was unknown, and almost forgotten by myself. It was just that Greeks always tend to hysteria in their view of Intelligence. In spite of the fact that I had no money to pay agents and, if I had, no notion of what to do with them, even I, in rare moments of depression, could think of myself as a spider in the centre of a web. But the clear sky of day and the heartening and bitter retsina of the nights never failed to convince me that in reality I barged through webs without seeing that they were there, and that I had no more ability to build one than a bluebottle.

No secrets, then? None at all in what we did. We were never nearer the heart of things than supplying guards on the Legation for the visits of Eden, Wavell and Wilson. In what we knew, however, there had to be much that was highly confidential—not such a mass in Athens as later, for Field Security was still considered to have more affinities with the Military Police than with Intelligence. But even then it occurred to me that the variety of information known to each F.S. officer—and never discussed unless in the way of duty among ourselves—was quite extraordinary. Nobody wanted to give it to us, but there was often no alternative. When you are the sole person who can produce a silent and reliable N.C.O. as an escort or a messenger, and when you are controlling the exits and entrances by a port or frontier, the wheels of Intelligence cannot run smoothly without telling you when to look the other way. You may not always know the why, but you must know the who and where and—sometimes most secret of all—by whose orders. In my four years’ experience I never remember a case where this confidence was abused.

About half the personnel of F.S. was drawn from commerce, teaching, journalism, the law, the stock exchange: men of education with languages or experience which specially fitted them for the work. In those early days promotion from lance-corporal to lieutenant and then to captain could be very rapid. We also had a stiffening of regular soldiers, some of them from the Military Police. As a general rule they were not much use on any Intelligence duties except routine controls; their years of training, however, were invaluable in any emergency, whether the section was operating under conditions of discomfort or of actual danger.

Besides these, we had a sprinkling of men who had lived in the Middle East and enlisted there, speakers of Greek, Arabic and Italian. We could never make soldiers of them—for we had not the time or the technique—but if they could be trusted to work alone and did not take too romantic a view of themselves, they were the most useful of us all. Other branches of Intelligence had a deplorable habit of stealing them for their own mysterious purposes, and we could seldom get them back.

We were never too military, and discipline was informal. When we did go through the traditional motions of parades and inspections, we performed them in a spirit of holiday—for the close, mutual trust between the section and its officer made the continual practice of obedience so obviously unnecessary. Daily relations in a crack section between the Field Security Officer and his N.C.Os much resembled those between a fatherly sales manager and his salesmen. But each section had its own individual character. In some the smartness of the men—when they were in uniform—and the atmosphere of the section office were reasonably regimental; in others the place looked and sounded like a salesman’s office in SoHo. And these were sometimes the best when it came to the real job of detecting enemy agents.

Our fairly leisurely Athenian life came to an end in early March when the British, Australian and New Zealand expeditionary force began to arrive at the Piraeus. The camps sprang up under the olive trees of Attica, and the German diplomats, whose forces were poised on the Bulgarian frontier and ready to strike, naturally showed an interest in the enemy. The most glorious row I ever was in occurred when I was ordered to send a motor-cyclist to tail the German Minister’s car and report what he did.

I put the N.G.O. in uniform. It still seems to me sensible. If the Minister, pretending to be a nice, kind uncle, were to talk to any of the troops, my man had only to warn them who he was. But apparently I should have put him in plain clothes and, by not doing so, had caused a diplomatic incident. Rockets from the diplomats descended upon the staff, and were passed on to me. I should certainly have been sent back to Egypt in disgrace if Colonel Xenos had not stood up for me. It was pleasant to know that the liaison between a junior captain and this powerful servant of the King had been friendly and useful enough to cause him to intervene.

On April 6 the Germans attacked, and with Yugoslavia overrun there was never a hope of holding them. The Military Mission which had been in Athens since the autumn knew that defeat was certain, though preserving in public set smiles of triumph and confidence. The planners in Cairo had done their loyal best to prevent any such pessimism gaining ground—and certainly it never reached the formations—but why they should have assumed that their colleagues in Athens with the same evidence in front of them would not come to the same conclusion I have never been able to understand.

If our history of the last sixty years could be plotted as a graph, the Greek disaster would fit neatly into the ever-recurring conflict between political idealism and the facts of power. To the microcosmic England of myself—at bottom far more typical of my countrymen than it pleases me to think—the conflict was as plain as in any leading article. I suppose it is now pretty generally agreed that our action in Greece had no effect whatever on the course of the war, and that the suggestion that it delayed Hitler’s attack on Russia is an excuse which will not hold water for a moment. Yet I am proud and I was proud then that we had permitted generosity, whether real or a political gesture, to overcome common sense. The value of the expedition, if it had any, was at bottom religious. It emphasised the fact that the British Commonwealth, now forced into a long, savage war of national defence, had at first intended and still intended a crusade.

The night after the declaration of war the German air force struck at the Piraeus with overwhelming physical and psychological effect. The bomb damage itself was by no means irreparable, but a lucky hit was scored on an ammunition ship. Attempts to tow her out failed. Alongside her was a loaded train. What good Field Security thought it could do at the docks I cannot imagine, but the tradition was growing that, like newspapermen, we ought to be on the spot and able to report first-hand anything of interest to security. The troops and the crews had been evacuated from the port. The ambulances had come and gone. The Area Commander—another one, this—was strolling casually through the dust with his cane under his arm and his monocle in his eye. He seemed to think we had done well to come, but would be wise to go. Half an hour after we left, the ship blew up depositing her bows, on an even keel, in a little public garden two miles away, where, bronzed by fire, they looked like a memorial to lost mariners by an over-realistic sculptor.

The Greek armies in Albania collapsed and disintegrated. They were worn out. For six months they had exposed to the whole world the emptiness of Mussolini’s claim to have made of Italy a great military power. Humiliated before his allies and enemies, he had continually employed fresh reserves out of all proportion to the importance of the campaign; and still the Greeks held or advanced. But there was nothing left, in material or human spirit, with which to form a new front against the Germans.

I had watched the Greek civil and military refugees pouring back into Athens by the Eleusis road, and given hospitality to odd N.C.Os of the divisional sections who had become hopelessly separated from their units and ridden back to Athens for orders. I knew, too, that the more mysterious purveyors of Intelligence, who always appeared to place an excitable value on their lives, had secretly embarked for Egypt. But I could not really believe that final defeat was immediate and present in the room until on April 24 Patrick Wilson, son of the Commander-in-Chief, told me to take my section west, and to keep a professional eye on the security of the vital bridge over the Corinth Canal and the beaches near Megara where an Australian division would be embarked. That done, I was free to get the section out when and where I could.

We left Athens in the late afternoon. The road from Megara to Corinth, cut into the escarpment between hills and the sea, was a first taste of war. There was no cover, and plenty of evidence that it was visited by enemy aircraft. Our little convoy of a truck and thirteen motorcycles lost no time in reaching the flatter coast beyond, and bivouacked for the night.

In the morning I left detachments at the embarkation beach and the canal bridge, and took half the section to Nauplion. On the way we passed the ruins of Mycenae and, since our timetable was our own, it seemed a pity not to visit them. The official guide was delighted to have work. As a servant of history, he was entirely undisturbed by transient accidents upon the distant road and in the sky. Far too overwhelmed by the present was a party of Greek air force mechanics and ground staff who cowered in the beehive tomb of Agamemnon. They too were living in a world of their imagination, but he who had only the lions upon the grey gate to guard him was the happier.

Late that evening I was back at the beach, to learn that the Australians had come and gone without embarking. All that was left of them was a mad private who, it was said, had chased the beach-master over the sands and caused some alarm to his staff before it withdrew to launches and the horizon. The private was still firing shots and chasing the ghosts of beach-masters through the scrub, but that was no reason for not getting some sleep.

I shall never forget the quality of peace in that still night as I lay on soft gravel in my sleeping-bag. I cannot explain it. Rest in the open air of April Greece? An awareness of romance due to too much reading of boy’s stories at too early an age? The feeling that as a close-knit unit we were equal to anything which routine duty or own safety might demand? It was peace such as a shepherd might feel when the dust had settled, and the raiders who had dismounted and drunk at his well were gone.

At dawn the mad private, delighted to find that his peace, at any rate, was shared, disturbed us with random fire. It was difficult to know what to do with him, for he did not seem amenable to my scientific and Marina-like approach. One of my sergeants, rising hastily from his blankets, had stuffed his .38 pistol into his trousers pocket. Endeavouring to draw it—an unnecessary gesture since my own was already backing up psychiatry—he shot himself through the foot. Bloodshed seemed at once to recall to the soldier his normal life of the previous weeks, and he willingly consented to be handed over to some passing compatriots.

The vital bridge was now in the hands of the sappers who were to blow it up, so I collected my detachment and took the road to Nauplion. Memory refuses to distinguish between this and the previous day, offering only random events. A Greek youth shot clean through the middle of the neck from right to left, and apparently none the worse for it. Mile after mile of burning and abandoned transport. A formal request from the section that they would be vastly obliged if I would stand up in the truck and spot for them since they could not hear the noise of planes above the roar of their motor-cycles—a point which would have occurred to any properly trained soldier. The dive-bombing of my truck outside Corinth when the driver and I took refuge beneath it and he, who was a regular soldier, remembered too late that it was the worst place to be. The wish, unique in my life, that I had filled my immense and irregular bottle with water instead of whisky and water. It was a fair sample of life, a rushing eagerly hither and yon to objectives which in reality were of such little importance that memory rejects any logical sequence for them.

The whole section was reunited at Nauplion, a little town still shivering from the unexpected impact of war where the main street was a gravel-bed of broken glass which crunched under foot. A plume of smoke rising above low hills marked where the S.S. Ulster Prince had gone aground in the channel and was burning. The troops which should have embarked in her were scattered around the town, and their officers were summoned to a conference which I attended. I knew none of them, nor the commander of the force.

The conference was told that there was no longer any hope of getting off from Nauplion, and that the ultimate destination would probably be Kalamai in the south of the Peloponnese. This seemed to be a good tip for masterless men, though I doubted if our worn transport would stand some eighty miles of night driving over rough roads.

I returned to the lane where the section was waiting for me and explained that we had finished our duties—unless something unexpected turned up—and that our return to Egypt depended on our own endurance and ingenuity. We destroyed all our baggage, and started off with the truck empty except for the impulsive sergeant. He was in good enough form for the journey, since his bullet, by astonishing luck, had passed between two toe bones without shattering either of them.

The road was mountainous, and as we were driving without lights the surface seemed worse than it really was. One by one, like the ten little nigger boys, either a man or his motor-cycle gave up. The first went into the truck, the second into the ravine which was always on one side or the other of the road. We did not meet or pass a soul, and how I found the way I cannot imagine. Possibly my mind was so concentrated on map-reading as to exclude my usual optimistic turnings; more probably the road led to Kalamai and nowhere else. The last motor-cycle was hurled to destruction, and then we were all in the fifteen-hundredweight truck with enough petrol but very little oil. It crept gallantly on until we ran into the tail of an Australian convoy, hopelessly jammed outside Kalamai with dawn an hour away.

An Australian Field Security Section was helping the military police to sort out the traffic. I learned from my opposite number that this was the Australian division which should have been taken off from the Megara beaches, that it was trying to disperse under the olives before dawn and that if it could not and the movement was spotted by enemy aircraft, heaven help any ships which tried to evacuate us! Our own fighter squadrons had been finished long since.

Nose to tail, in two lanes, the vehicles crept up the main street of Kalamai. It seemed an interminably long street. Seeing a narrow gap between two houses where it was unlikely that a truck could be spotted from the air, we turned into it and stopped. It was broad daylight, but the stream of traffic had now thinned to small convoys racing for cover. It cannot have been more than five minutes after the road was clear and innocent that an enemy plane came over and circled like a hopeful vulture. The entire division held its breath lest some fool of a battery commander should open up. There was in fact one single shot. It sounded like the beginning of a conversation suddenly suppressed. The German observer must have seen that there was a scattering of troops, but nothing to suggest the presence of a division.

We slept for a couple of hours in a ploughed field behind the houses. The behaviour of the Greeks reached an unbelievable ideal of allied conduct. Neither here nor on the road did we hear a word of reproach. They were confident that we should return victorious, having as little forethought as ourselves of that commonplace of folk-lore that when the devil is down he merely changes, Nazi to Communist, his shape. A kindly villager brought us bread hot from the oven; another brought wine. Those who had nothing—and they were many, for there would be little food in Greece when our abandoned rations were finished—gave praise and sympathy.

I set out refreshed to explore the area, and discovered a considerable British force—base units which had gone straight from Athens to Kalamai some days before—with many officers whom I knew. They were pessimistic. Since they had no arms but rifles and the Germans were already in the Peloponnese, the only prospect was ignominious surrender. They seemed to know little or nothing of the presence of the Australians.

Under the circumstances it was the obvious duty of the section to take to the hills or find its own transport to Crete. We disliked capture as much as anyone else, and the prospect of being interrogated rather more—though in fact it turned out, when in later campaigns the occasional Field Security N.C.O. was put in the bag, that the enemy treated us correctly and as any other prisoners-of-war. I went down to the port with a Greek-speaking N.C.O. who was a master of the long, unhurried negotiation of the Levant, and we found a tug-boat captain who himself was willing to run for Crete rather than work for the Germans, but warned us that his engineer would never agree.

This was a challenge to the section’s enterprise. Continual contact, on the tug and in the cafés, kept up the captain’s courage and prevented him changing his mind. Another Greek-speaker investigated, without arousing suspicion, the opinions of the engineer and the harbour-master. A third detachment circulated among the British troops with orders to find one or two who could stoke and run a marine steam-engine, and to be professionally mysterious about their motives.

I still mourn for my requisitioned tug-boat upon the high seas—although, to judge by what happened to those who escaped in boats which offered a still smaller target, we should have reached Crete in the dinghy or not at all. Later in the day my sergeant-major, who always believed in comfort, discovered the top-secret information that the Division were to be taken off after dark. He suggested that we should do a little port security work and be taken off as well.

My conscience was not altogether happy about this. I felt that we ought to stay with our own people. On the other hand I could not deny that I was perfectly prepared to leave them by tug. Manifestly my attitude stank of pretences, especially since I had permission to get the section away when and where I could. So, with a sense of anticlimax, we patrolled the quays and, as soon as there seemed to be a shortage of Australians, embarked in the tender ourselves.

The next night there was an attempt to evacuate the British which failed because the Germans were already in the port. It was certainly wise to give priority to a first-class fighting division, whether British or Australian, but I see no reason why some of those defenceless base units on the hillside could not at least have stood in a queue. On our own ship, a liner of over ten thousand tons, there was room to spare.

I had expected—having heard of such things in the first war—to have some trouble on paper with my sergeant’s self-inflicted wound. But of course there was none. My statement that it was an accident was at once accepted and recorded. When we were all comfortable I went to my luxurious bunk in a cabin for two. And there were only two in it.

In the morning I saw that we were one of a convoy of four big ships with destroyer escort. I do not know whether the other three had embarked their troops at Kalamai or elsewhere. For the rest of the forenoon I was somewhat preoccupied by the reverberation of metal. While dreaming in a delicious bath, walls, pipes and tub were suddenly turned into a cacophonous iron drum. Leaping into the passage, I found myself among other naked, soapy and enquiring officers. We were on the whole reassured to be told that the shock to our innocence was only a near miss from a bomb. The same thing happened after breakfast when again meditating, though now not prostrate but enthroned, the pipe connecting me with the outer world appeared to be hit by something the size of a minor planet. I decided to spend the rest of the day in whatever softly padded saloon there might be.

On deck the Australian machine-gunners were having the time of their lives. I saw them bring down one bomber, and they claimed two more. So far as small arms were concerned, the fire power of that ship was terrific and must have startled the enemy pilots. But those of us who were not serving a weapon were not allowed to watch; when the next wave came over, we were lined up in an alleyway, three decks down, to stand and listen. Although my conversation was cool and my face, I trust, casual, I found that my knees were gently and imperceptibly knocking together and that the cliché of the fiction writers was true. Ever since I have considered that the highest courage is that of engine-room staff who go about their business when the enemy is kettle-drumming upon the thin steel which separates them from the sea.

One of the convoy broke her back, but the destroyers saved every man on board her before she split in half and sank. The rest were hardly damaged and, next morning, out of range.

Back in Cairo it was considered that our escape not only accorded with standards of common sense but with those of military panache. As I wished to be credited with the first and nothing would have induced me to confess, at the age of forty, to a preference for the second, that was satisfactory. I spent a few lonely days of leave at Port Said, missing the section and looking forward with the eternal hope of the predatory male to sentimental companionship—which did indeed surprisingly offer itself, but I could not find a word to say to the girl. There is nothing so destructive of desire as to be bored by the artificiality of one’s own conversation.

The next job was the most exhausting upon which I have ever had to concentrate. Thousands of refugees had escaped by sea from Greece to Egypt—civilians, military in civilian clothes, foreigners of doubtful antecedents, Sephardic Jews resident in Salonica whose ancestors had been expelled from Spain, Aschkenazy Jews driven on from country to country by Hitler’s advance, policemen with democratic sympathies or now frantically pretending them, cabaret girls, honest peasant families who had fled in such momentary hysteria of panic that they were distressingly vague as to how they had managed it or at what port, or country even, they had arrived. Some ingenious and original organiser had housed the Cairo herd in the Agricultural Hall. Each stall, intended for prize cow or Arab stallion, held a group of men or women or an entire family. The building was immense and—for Egypt in May—cool. It was designed for the tidy distribution of rations and medicaments, whether by stud grooms or by the Army, and water was laid on in every stall. The sanitary arrangements, though quite satisfactory for animals and the smaller refugees, were all that had to be improvised.

To sort out this mass by preliminary interrogation into individuals with a name and a past was my job. It went on for a fortnight in which the shortest day was twelve hours. I had the loan of Greek-speakers from the Field Security depot, and I myself worked through relays of interpreters chosen from such Greek soldiers and police as were obviously reliable and spoke one of my languages. I could understand enough Greek to appreciate the main points of a story and to ask a very simple question, but no more.

Hardest to bear were the well-meaning efforts of British business and diplomatic wives, determined to be angels of mercy and always making pets of the more plausible and doubtful characters. But that is one of the curses laid upon security officers; I had already experienced it in Athens where my efforts to prevent society women whom I knew to be pro-German from visiting British hospitals and soldiers’ clubs were pilloried as narrow-minded. I have no doubt that in a time of emergency and among any cultured and merciful people security must give way to charity; but one should also put a penny in the box for the security officer who will not forgive himself nor be forgiven if the enemy agent slips through too easily.

That done, I was invited to run a Greek bureau in Security Intelligence Middle East. I did not feel, however, that I had charged into this fascinating life in order to sit in an office and file the political aberrations of Greeks. I wanted to be out and about again with a section. My choice, from the point of view of military ambition, was foolish. But I was determined to enjoy my war in my own way.

Robin Wordsworth offered me the Jerusalem section, which was a little uncertain what it was doing or why it was supposed to be doing it. When I had been in the Holy City a couple of weeks I was uncertain too. I (b) was unique for jealous stupidity. If I wanted information from headquarters files, I could only get it by persistence. The alternative was to get it from Palestine Police—if one did not mind being suspected of intending to sell it to Jew or Arab.

But certainly the section had not created confidence around itself, and was not to be compared with my brilliant Greek section. It was one of the first to be formed and contained too many ex-regulars who had transferred to Field Security at a time when we were ready to accept anyone with a trustworthy record but few other qualifications; and it was influenced by the military police, who always judged a man’s keenness on his ability to ‘bring cases.’ There was, however, one compensation: the best sergeant-major I ever had. He had been a Lincolnshire gamekeeper, and only wanted an employer who knew his own mind. That section, when we had trimmed it to shape, began to resemble in tone some remote English village. It was cunning rather than intelligent, cynical, outrageously cheerful at parties or under stress, and rich with hidden tenderness in unexpected places.

Meanwhile, expecting a long stay in Jerusalem, I made myself comfortable. A Field Security Officer, unless with a formation, was not obliged or encouraged to live in a mess. It was a preposterous ruling, founded on the idea that he might be called upon to investigate the indiscretions of a brother officer. If he ever did, the mess and the brother officer would have been the last persons to know anything about it. But of course we fostered the delusion for all it was worth, since it allowed us to live on a civilian standard. A safe rule for the traveller was to choose the hotel where the Field Security Officer stayed. It was sure to be cheap and to have food which, however exotic to British tastes, was highly edible.

I quickly discovered that Jerusalem hotels, with the exception of the too expensive King David, were dull. Those with Jewish proprietors were too redolent of Central Europe. Those with Arab proprietors ran to hot sweet puddings, suet and other delights of the colonial service. There was nothing for it but to take a flat, and so, answering an advertisement, I fell in with a delightful person of about my own age who had come as a child from Poland to Palestine, studied philosophy under Croce in Italy and spoke the only Hebrew I ever heard which was not harsh to the ear. Haim Wardi had converted an old Arab stable into a cool one-room house, packed with books. At the bottom of his garden was a much smaller one-room house. This I took, and furnished it with the barest necessities, painted grey, and two Bokhara rugs. It successfully combined military and aesthetic severity.

But it was not the time for this personal armistice. Truer fulfilment, considering my environment and its opportunities, was to exercise such powers of creation as I had in wide human relationships rather than in a miniature setting for them. And I was swiftly hurled into a position where harmony had to be made from the raw materials of hatred and malice, without even a little decent human envy to lighten the mixture. I was ordered to Beirut to take over the security of the docks during the evacuation of the Vichy troops.

They were the Army of the Levant in which we had placed all our hopes during the early Roumanian days. Disillusioned, sullen and isolated from home, they accepted the defeat of France and obeyed the Vichy government of Pétain which was still administering the mandated territories of Syria and the Lebanon. Relations with the British were correct and, on the Palestine frontier, by no means cold. Middle East Command, already engaged to the last man and vehicle in the desert, Abyssinia and Greece, had no wish whatever for added trouble in Syria.

When, however, Rashid Ali’s revolt of May 1941 broke out in Iraq, he was assisted by German aircraft. Dentz, the French commander-in-chief, permitted the refuelling of the aircraft in Syria and even supplied the rebels with French arms. This was a most dangerous threat to the garrison of the Middle East, then, though we did not feel it, a besieged army, for it could turn our whole position and cut off the vital Iraqi oil supplies as well.

The intentions of the enemy were obvious, and there was nothing for it but to occupy Syria and the Lebanon before he did. Operations began on June 9, 1941. Fighting was hard and for the first week or two critical, but the common tradition of military politeness—chivalry is too delicate a word for modern weapons—was on the whole preserved, since aggressors and defenders understood each others’ motives. The campaign ended with the armistice of July 14, under the terms of which we agreed to repatriate the Vichy troops by sea to France with the honours of war. That trumpet phrase of heraldry meant in practice that every officer and man should march on board with his personal arms. Also I think—for words are still magic—it enforced an eighteenth-century standard of courtesy upon the victors and preserved the pride of the gallantly defeated.

But ease was bedevilled by the Free French, though not for a moment can they be blamed. They insisted that the mandated territories were not ours to occupy, and were quite unimpressed by our offer of independence for Syria and a qualified independence for the Lebanon. De Gaulle did not so much distrust our intentions as our ability, in the stress of war and the confusion of peace, ever to carry them out. He was, of course, right. Even assuming that we had held the territories in trust and formally returned them to France after the war, the Arabs themselves, as later they did, would have demanded an end to foreign tutelage. If French influence was to survive at all, French participation in the campaign and the continuity of French administration were essential.

The intervention of de Gaulle and his handful of fanatical gallants might reasonably have been expected to limit the fighting and to make surrender more palatable for the Army of the Levant. It did not. It poisoned all negotiations with the bitterness of civil war. The Free French needed both troops and administrators. They therefore demanded and obtained the right to canvass the defeated Vichy army, coercing every officer and man to opt for repatriation or enlistment under the cross of de Gaulle with no alternative. They obtained only five thousand out of thirty-seven thousand. Humiliated by failure, they tried every trick of Gaullist intransigence to delay the embarkation. Each side accused the other of betraying France. Both appealed to the British for protection.

That was the position when I arrived in Beirut at the beginning of August. The Free French prowled around the Vichy camps in some danger of their lives. The Lebanese fawned upon the British, swearing that they desired nothing so much as to become a colony of Empire—a most transparent lie, for if, in spite of their tastes, they did not like the French they would have been bored to the point of rebellion by the Anglo-Saxon. In the St Georges Hotel, with its sun-umbrellaed terrace overlooking the Mediterranean, its balconies and its cool restaurant, life remained obstinately fixed at 1939. Families of the wealthier French officers discussed packing. Christian Arabs bought and sold the futures of commodities which did not exist, and discussed the peculiarities of British officers who were too blind to see a bribe when delicately offered. Intelligence captains and majors conferred in corners, with half an eye upon the exotic mistresses of the French army and colonial service, restless, poor lovely darlings, with the problem of whether they should transfer their affections to Free French, who were as moneyless as monks and a lot more honest, or sail to unknown severities in France.

High on Lebanon the brigadiers and colonels of the Armistice Control Commission exhausted their energy in preventing furious disputes on the merits of Pétain and de Gaulle, and somehow found a little more to arrange the transference of administration and the order in which the troops should embark. Under the olive trees of the coastal hills was the ultimate arbiter, the Australian Corps, behaving very well under the formidable impact of Lebanese araq and intensely disappointed to find that the village maidens, often of startling beauty, were just as unsatisfactory as the Greeks. Meanwhile the liners, by courtesy of the British and German Admiralties, had started from Marseilles.

Fortunately our commander was that patient military diplomat, General Wilson, now Field-Marshal Lord Wilson of Libya. His executive instrument was the Control Commission. Among the committees responsible to the Control Commission was the Embarkation Committee, upon which I represented the interests of security.

The chairman was Colonel Robinson. Those perfect military manners which I had, trembling, appreciated in Athens now paid a dividend. He understood French well, and spoke it with that touch of hesitation and those delightfully English constructions which always engage the affections of Frenchmen. There were two majors from A and Q branches of the Vichy staff, who quickly warmed to our friendly intentions. There was a Free French captain whose orders were obviously to protest at anything and everything. On our own side were representatives of Movement Control and of the Navy. The Vichy navy was represented by a lieutenant-commander who was frigid and correct until he was allowed—in private—to say what he thought of our attack on the French fleet at Mers el Kebir. Discovering that we had no strong opinions, for or against, he became almost human and would even drink with the hated British, assuring us in the most friendly manner that the Germans were even more detestable.

The main duties of security were three: to ensure that no unauthorised person went on board the ships or disembarked from them, since every convoy provided a heaven-sent chance for the enemy to communicate with agents and sympathisers: to inspect personal kit for valuables and papers during the embarkation parade of the troops: to make a thorough customs examination of the main baggage. For these duties I had an Australian guard company, one and sometimes two Australian Field Security sections and Oswald Ormsby’s magnificent section—most of whom had commissions within a year—which had arrived from England two months before. Most important of all, I had that dream of a security officer, a free hand—provided of course that I did not create or look like creating any international incident which the Control Commission could not settle.

The first convoy arrived; and the quays of Beirut, empty except for the grey, reptilian urgency of the Navy, were suddenly gay with Europe. The very names of the liners, drawn from the fleets of the Cie. Transatlantique and Messageries Maritimes, were a reminder that peaceful harbours still existed, though for many years yet neither they nor we would be released to visit them.

On every gangway were armed guards, with orders to allow no one on or off the ships who did not present my handwritten pass stating the name and rank of the person. The passes were squares of coloured cardboard, and what the colour of the day would be depended on my random choice among the sheets bought from a stationery shop. It looked an unbreakable system—always remembering that the weak point of any system of passes is the guard.

The Australians were ideal. By birthright and taste they were no respecters of persons, and I reinforced the national humour by giving them specimen passes with ranks of brigadier upwards and with names and initials—if you looked at them closely—of pungent indecency. There was no bluffing them. They would not have allowed General Wilson himself on board without my pass.

But the perfect system was of course immediately disorganised by the unforeseen. Although the Vichy troops could not be induced to join the Free French, the crews of the liners were only too willing. When forced back up the gangways, they either jumped into the sea or swarmed down the mooring cables or carried refuse on shore and refused to return.

There was little chance of evading the strong force of guards on well-lit quays, or the patrol boats in the harbour. At least I have always hoped so. But even if we arrested every deserter, the position was impossible. Without their proper complement of engineers and electricians the ships could not be sailed back to Marseilles—as the Free French were happily aware. And our sentries were becoming muddled and uncertain; for, if you qualify a sentry’s orders by too many exceptions, he is inclined to treat his duty as a boring ceremonial and to be of no more worldly use than a bayonet outside Buckingham Palace.

We appealed to the Control Commission. So, with fury and an unanswerable case, did the Free French. The judgement was deliciously British. On no account was anyone to be permitted to leave the ships. But, if they did, they were to be arrested and handed over to the Free French, who on their part were not to harangue, encourage or assist deserters but to be truly thankful for what God and the security officer might give them.

In practice I translated this to mean: (a) that any Free French officer hanging about the ships should be imperceptibly drawn off to a harbour café to talk about de Gaulle; (b) that deserters, if still on the gangway or preparing to jump, should be deterred by the utmost Australian ferocity; (c) that if a deserter actually had both feet on the quay, he was to be escorted to the guardroom.

The orders worked. A sentry with a good breakfast in his belly would stretch them a bit; another who happened to be feeling anti-French, Free or not, would work to rule. And the guardroom was usually occupied by half a dozen outrageously cheerful deserters awaiting interrogation by their compatriots.

Free French security appeared, to our minds, eccentric. If the man rallying to de Gaulle were a Catholic and interrogated by a Catholic, he was passed at once; he was also all right if he were an anti-clerical Socialist, and happened to be interrogated by an anti-clerical Socialist. But if his luck were out, and he got an interrogator from the wrong party, he was held in custody for further and prolonged examination. My own interrogations—which I only undertook if a man looked of interest to other branches of Intelligence—usually ended in too much boisterous goodwill all round, and assurances that if there were any pro-Boche about his companions would unearth him sooner than I. In their case that was probably true. Groups of the homeless, however, are inclined to whisper to the security officer against the silent, the eccentric or the contemptuous, and to accept the plausible, talkative rogue.

During the three or four days between the arrival of the ships and their departure the Field Security sections had to turn themselves into customs officers. The French were allowed to take home their used furniture and household goods. This meant that married officers and administrators, who might have served for many years in Syria, had each of them enough beautifully-made and nailed crates to fill a removal van. The export of gold, of new goods, of documents and of food was forbidden. Our problem was to guess if any of these were hidden in the cavernous recesses of the crates.

It was manifestly impossible; so would it have been for real customs officers. But we were most of us travellers, and knew their procedure and their limitations. Like them, we wanted to send off our thirty-two thousand speaking well of the good nature of the British; like them, we had to find scapegoats so that army wife would whisper to army wife, before they packed, of the appalling indignities suffered by poor Mme Telle, and how Colonel Chose, who had bought so much beautiful embroidered bed linen had been forced to take it all back to the shop and sell it for what they would give.

The customs officer has no real defence against the nonprofessional smuggler but the informant. Nor had we. Being Arabs, our informants were more often actuated by malice than a sense of duty; they tended to accuse police and officials whom they did not like of smuggling out the Lebanese gold reserve hidden in upholstery. By God and His Glory, we had only to rip it all up and we should see! Ormsby’s section, which was normally stationed in Beirut and gathered the information, grew brilliant at sifting the true from the false. Their chief source was the shopkeeper who knew very well that the passengers were not allowed to buy household goods for shipment to France and promptly reported any purchase. If we had no information whatever and still had to make an example of somebody, we naturally chose the difficult, the protesting or the evasive—who had to suffer the disappearance of the military into their crates, the exposure upon the dock of the open wardrobes and the dining-room suite, and the long wait for a carpenter with a hammer and nails.

Dock concrete blazed in the sub-tropical sun, and the sparkle of the sea, promising blue cold of diamonds, deceptively added still more heat from its tepid upper layer. The Field Security N.C.Os, their shirts and shorts dark brown with sweat, worked in groups of three—always containing one fluent French-speaker—questioning, chalking and occasionally opening. They never lost cheerfulness, and seemed to impress upon the French themselves that this was a sort of relentless, top-speed game. I can remember despair among the voyagers and irony and such half-humorous language as any soldier might in the circumstances be expected to use, but little real resentment or bitterness. We in the customs sheds could afford to be merciful, knowing ourselves to be chiefly a deterrent. The true work of detection was being done outside the port by a sinister-looking sergeant of Ormsby’s section who had already familiarised himself with a fair cross-section of the good and bad characters of the waterfront.

The day of embarkation was more formal. Sam Brownes shone and webbing was blancoed, for we were to impose ourselves upon the French army in parade order. The battalions which had at last, in spite of all Free French obstruction, obtained their embarkation orders marched to the place d’armes on the east of the docks, and lined up in column of companies for inspection. Our men went slowly along the ranks, asking a question here and searching a kitbag there. I doubt if we ever confiscated anything. Fresh from the opulent crates of staff and administration we were in socialist mood when it came to discovering a cheese or a present of cheap jewellery in the poor haversacks of other ranks.

The troops were allowed the personal arms proper to their ranks, and nothing more. On one occasion, with doubtful legality, I ordered tommy-guns to be surrendered. The French lieutenant-colonel protested that his establishment was one sub-machine-gun to a platoon, and that its bearer carried no rifle. When I pointed out that the Middle East was very short of tommy-guns and that we could use them on Germans whereas he could not, he very sportingly gave way. But I had to assure him that the British, not the Free French, would be armed with them. Which in fact did get them I do not know, but four were acquired by the sections as cherished possessions, covered by the completely worthless but unchallengeable authority of the Embarkation Committee.

Nothing else, being moderate men, did we spirit away except much-wanted .45 ammunition and two cars. The ammo, was very necessary, for the Army, though it had provided us with revolvers, refused us more than twelve rounds per man. Thereafter the Syrian and Palestine sections could really learn to shoot and challenged each other to matches, losing section to order and pay for dinner in the back room of whatever grubby and efficient restaurant they patronised.

The history of the two cars is a cautionary tale for young officers who should always be careful that their winnings are covered by paper, preferably issued by a unit about to depart for some other theatre of war.

Our friends on the Vichy embarkation staff, who left last of all, were reluctant to surrender their staff cars to the Free French and told us in what street they had parked them. Ormsby, who was deep in plain-clothes work, needed a civilian car as well as his section truck. As for me, I had not even a truck, having been issued with a horrible little toy Italian car, captured in the desert. So we helped ourselves—he to a discreet black Citroën, I to a powerful Ford open tourer.

For months we used our cars without a care, but meanwhile the Free French, instead of attending to their internal politics, were ferreting out the fate of all the vehicles which should have been theirs and were not. A mild enquiry from Ninth Army, interested though obviously bored by nonsensical claims, was a warning that we should hear more of the matter. For me, instant action was easy. A friendly Australian R.A.S.C. company maintained my vehicles. I had no trouble in persuading its commanding officer to condemn my Italian horror and formally to issue the Ford in replacement. Thereafter I could look any military policeman in the eye. But Ormsby went for months in terror of court martial with the Citroën hidden under a cover in the section yard. Being a man of honour, he could not sell it; and he could not either lose it or drive it into the sea in case possession was ever incontrovertibly traced to him. In the end that car demanded the joint efforts of Robin Wordsworth, the adjutant and the most secret offices of the Middle East before it would consent to vanish into the anonymous mass of British Army vehicles.

When the parade was over and the troops were filing on board, we reverted from soldiers to customs officers and lined up behind the long counter in the customs shed to deal with the hand baggage of the families. The export of personal jewellery was of course permitted, but ladies who festooned themselves like African queens with heavy gold bracelets were in trouble; so were those who tried to assure a hasty and indiscriminate chalking of their baggage by rubbing themselves, spiritually or in fact, against the weary masculinity of the most sophisticated corps in the British Army. But the woman who was charming, cultured, helpless, assuming at once that she must put us at ease in our embarrassing duty, beat us as completely as she beats professionals. She floated deliciously on board, escorted by a chivalrous sergeant—if the officers were too busy—and there no doubt unpacked with an air of triumph and laid upon the bunk, which waited to enclose within its blushing teak such cool good manners, her insignificant contraband.

Between convoys there were a few free days when the sections could put back some of the weight which they had sweated off on the docks, and I, apart from sittings of the Embarkation Committee, could idle in the luxury of the St Georges Hotel. Then the rush would begin again, starting with the despair of the Vichy staff because all their plans for the movement of troops from outlying stations to Beirut had been demolished by the demands of the Free French for last-minute changes. Every day I was in the offices of the majors of A and Q branch, and mutual commiseration led to friendship—a melancholy and almost emotional friendship in which we wished to heaven that our easy collaboration was for a more martial purpose. Neither of them ever suspected that I was not a regular, and when at a final lunch I told them with what an amateur they had really dealt, their surprise was a most flattering compliment to my anthropoid capacity for imitating the actions of a different species.

On the second convoy we sent off a battalion of the Foreign Legion—magnificent troops with a tendency to grow cinematic beards. When our respectful inspection of their kit was over, the commanding officer, formally and by his adjutant, requested me to report to him. He returned my salute with a glorious French flick of the wrist. We were instantly and obviously transported to the valiant and not wholly juvenile world of the Honours of War. He told me that I was the last British officer he would see, and this was the last chance he would have. He gave me his word that at his order the whole battalion would march off the place d’armes and join the British. But Free French they would not be.

It went to my heart to reply that his offer could not be accepted. The question had arisen a dozen times before, both in the camps and at the final parade. For once our orders were precise. Either the troops sailed for France or they accepted the Cross of Lorraine. The hatred between the two parties of the French was pathological. Vichy could not forgive the Free French for having made their right and gallant sacrifice; and the Free French themselves made reunion so much more difficult than it need have been. In those early Syrian days they were touchy, narrow and unsure of themselves. Among all the historical virtues of France the only one they fully represented was her superb courage.

The Foreign Legion sloped arms and marched off by companies to the dock gates, where they stood easy while the column ahead of them moved forward yard by yard before breaking up into queues for the gangways. I was suddenly hurled into the position of the lonely and dutiful representative of power on the second page of a Kipling short story—which ended, since the craftsman is bound by laws less merciful than life, in knock-about farce.

A crowd of some twenty or thirty Free French marines gathered at the dock gates yelling insults. The Legion began to growl and to return them. I advised the marines to disperse in what I hoped was the true French manner, genial, weary and authoritative. But they could not know that I had any authority; for them I was merely a stray British officer interfering with their fun. I tried an order. They slunk back ten yards and shouted a little louder than before. The men of the Legion instead of staring ahead along the line of the column turned to face the marines.

Roaring up the docks on a motor-cycle, I grabbed Ormsby’s truck and driver and half a dozen tough Australians from the guardroom. The marines still seemed to believe that I was an unaccountable spoil-sport. There was nothing left but to arrest the ringleaders and cart them off to their barracks under guard. I was just about to climb into the truck, congratulating myself that an incident grave, likely to involve the Control Commission in an endless exchange of signals with London, had been prevented, when one of the Australians loosed off his pistol and shot a Free French marine through both cheeks. As he had his mouth loudly open at the time he lost no teeth.

Ormsby’s driver was in civil life an undertaker’s assistant. Though accustomed to death, he preferred it in more respectful surroundings than those provided by the Foreign Legion, Australians, Free French Marines and me. The bullet after traversing those surprised and indignant cheeks continued through the canvas of the truck and the windscreen. The driver’s peacetime training reinforced his panic. Having, as he supposed, a corpse in the back, he proposed to remove it. He trod on the accelerator, and I found myself shouting vainly after a cloud of dust.

I could already hear the accusations. Not content with threatening gallant allies and shooting them down in droves, I had lost control of the situation and given no orders for the disposal of the prisoners and the care of the wounded. I despatched motor-cyclists to all likely spots. I rang up the hospitals. I alerted the military police. No good. The truck had vanished into the shimmering air of the Levant. It was, or seemed to me hours before even Field Security could bring me news of it.

The undertaker’s assistant had driven madly for open country. The Australians and the marines, assuming that he was carrying out orders unknown to them, sat peaceably in the back. They had patched up the cheeks with field dressings and were now on excellent terms with each other.

After a while the driver, meeting neither cemetery nor sudden death, shamefacedly stopped by the side of the road. The guard, joyously discovering the improbable situation, tackled it with Australian versatility. They turned the marines loose in town, took the casualty to hospital, sent the driver and truck back to his billet and then very reasonably enjoyed the opportunity for a slow and pleasant stroll back to the docks through the August evening.

Of course there was a Court of Enquiry to satisfy the Free French howl for British blood, preferably mine. Ormsby’s driver—sportsman that he was—told the Court exactly what had happened and reduced them to unjudicial chuckles. The Australian guard commander swore that his man who fired the unnecessary shot had only recently left the hands of the Corps psychiatrist and had now been returned to him for further adjustment. I played Kipling for all he was worth, and explained in terse phrases, dragged unwillingly from the strong, silent man, what would have happened if the Foreign Legion had drawn those bayonets which the Honours of War permitted them to carry. The evidence, though quite unrehearsed, built up to an effective climax. I was not only cleared, but even congratulated.

When the time came for the last convoy, orders and counter-orders rained upon Beirut from the mountains. The Vichy government were attempting to avoid their obligation to return the few British prisoners-of-war from Salonica; as a reprisal General Dentz and some of his officers were transferred to Jerusalem under open arrest. Another storm blew up when the Free French insisted on retaining in Syria certain key administrators of the colonial service, whether or not they rallied to de Gaulle.

On the Embarkation Committee, however, and at the docks collaboration had grown into a model for NATO. The Vichy staff were friendly and regretful. The Free French, affected by the finality of the parting, had recovered some of that national flexibility which hitherto they had been afraid to use. I myself ascribed the better understanding to Colonel Koenig (later the French commander in the magnificent action of Bir Hachim and G.O.C. in French-occupied Germany) on the worthless evidence—yet the only evidence which is ever attainable by a junior officer—that he commanded my respect and that he would listen.

The Australians had been ordered to give the last of the French troops the military adieu proper to the Honours of War. Nobody had considered the ceremonial possibilities of Field Security, for which I cannot altogether blame them. But we wanted to say good-bye more than anyone else, and—having little of it in our daily life—we enjoyed good theatre. There was going to be a space to the left of the line. Since it was certain that no one would ever question our presence so long as we did the job properly, I decided that F.S. should fill it.

Ormsby, fresh out from England, at least knew what a section should look like when formally paraded with its motor-cycles. From an ex-cavalry officer I obtained the details of an imposing manœuvre which would enable the four sections to roar up the docks in third gear and peel off to the left into a double line on the narrow quay.

It came off smartly, and we were still as guardsmen—though soaked with the sweat, dust and straw of the customs—when the great, gay ships began to move and the crash of the Australians presenting arms pointed a moment of utter silence before the band swept into the Marseillaise. I remember standing at the salute, facing the widening gap of sea, with tears paying no honours at all to the primitive immobility of my face. I am always inclined to swallow when I hear on any solemn occasion that most glorious of national anthems. But this was good-bye. All of me, the foolish and frustrated boy of 1914–1918, the passionate lover of Europe, even the writer for whom the clarity of the French sentence was sacred, said good-bye for years which I then believed would double that first war to the beloved nation.

In September 1941 I returned to Jerusalem and my deserted section, which had been carrying on, sound and stolid, under the sergeant-major. They were elated over the capture of a dangerous character whom they had cast, somewhat irregularly, into the military clink. He was a recruit in one of the newly formed Jewish companies who possessed in his kit private weapons which had not been issued to him by any quartermaster or even an Embarkation Committee. Visiting him in his unhappy cell, I saw that he was not at all the type of Jewish revolutionary who collected illegal arms in order to use them on the British as a scapegoat for Hitler. He really did want to kill Germans, and thought very reasonably that a fearsome dagger and an obsolete pistol would be of assistance; it was evident, in fact, that, like his interrogator, he was a harmless romanticist. I had to disillusion the section as tactfully as I could. Sections were always over-keen when officerless, for the staff seldom knew how to handle them. Quite half the art of the Field Security Officer was to prevent his men from rushing off after rabbits without spoiling their enthusiasm for the hunt.

It was now that Ninth Army was formed, under General Wilson, to take over the task of forming a defensive front in Syria in case the enemy attacked through Turkey. Headquarters moved up to Brumana, a lovely village strung along the top of the coastal range 2,500 feet above Beirut, with High Lebanon behind. We went with them, as the Ninth Army section, and settled down to a dull round of pure military security, the chief object of which was to ensure headquarters against any such raid as our commandos had just carried out on Rommel. Lighter relief was the investigation of innumerable monks and their cellars, of one Roumanian cabaret girl all violets and fur coat, of the feudal factions of the Lebanese, mutually libellous, and a charming little Greco-Phoenician temple. I myself, putting forward the accepted myth that I ought not to live in a mess, luxuriated once more at the Hotel St Georges and travelled back and forth over the mountain roads by motor-cycle.

I had possessed and quickly smashed one of these enthralling vehicles in my teens. In Jerusalem I learned, or half learned, under the anxious care of the sergeant-major, to ride one again. Indeed I rode it, rejoicing and absent-minded, all the way to Beirut when I went up to take over the security of the embarkation. Oswald Ormsby’s section was then billeted in a house off a steep flight of steps which ran down from the square towards the port. By some astonishing misjudgment of clutch or acceleration I found myself careering down these steps, and stopped in front of the billet trying to look as if I had done it on purpose. That marvellous section was prejudiced in my favour ever after—not that they were taken in for a moment, but they appreciated a sense of style even in suicide.

On these daily trips to and from Brumana I came to no great harm but once, when a combination of ice and the mayor’s brandy caused me to run over my own thumb. I do not know how I did this, for the motor-bike and I parted company without any noticeable period of mutual entanglement. But my casual confidence makes me shudder. For more than a year the roads, the lanes and even the goat tracks of Lebanon and Palestine were for me delight and recreation. My N.C.Os, who lived on their motor-cycles and would no more walk than a cattleman, occasionally ventured a restraining word. They were right. Many sections, including my own, had a man killed, and there was hardly a winter month when none was in hospital. The cause of the casualties was nearly always the same—a military or civilian truck turning left without mirror or hand signal just when the motor-cyclist was committed to overtake.

Ninth Army was only an immensely important skeleton which could, at need, be instantly clothed with troops. It was based on Arab country, friendly but incalculable, yet it was not responsible for administration or internal security; those were the duties of the small, devoted but jealous band of the Free French who, if they had a near revolt on their hands, could be implicitly trusted to keep all news of it from the British and, when that was no longer possible, to believe illogically that we had instigated it. Not only was there danger of a pro-German movement, but agents could slip over from neutral Turkey across the five hundred miles of wild frontier to support any Fifth Column.

Added to these difficulties was the potentially explosive problem of feeding Syria and the Lebanon. The Arab capitalist, Christian or Moslem, is even more immoral than a novelist’s exaggeration of the nineteenth-century American. Profit in his mind is a conception completely isolated from its effects, and a speculator who has cornered wheat can piously give charity to starving children without any sense at all of his own guilt. It was the task of the British politely to conceal their opinions and, by a combination of wheat imports and fines, to force the cornered stocks on to the market.

Either General Wilson or his able son, Patrick, who stretched long legs with deceptive casualness in the I (b) office, perceived that in Field Security the Army had a reliable organisation to hand which could watch and warn. Never had we been employed in quite such a role, nor had such appreciative masters.

Field Security was then at its flowering. In early days, still feeling for its responsibilities, it concentrated on the elementary duties of security police; in the later days of the occupation of enemy territory, temptation and the delusion of self-importance were sometimes too great for common flesh. But in the years between 1941 and 1944 the Field Security Wing in the Middle East preserved a standard of common sense, discretion, tirelessness and gaiety which made me proud to belong to it. Partly this was Robin Wordsworth’s doing; partly it was due to the extraordinary quality of the four sections which arrived from England in the spring of 1941.

There were sections at Beirut and Damascus; at Quneitra among the Druse; across the desert at Deir ez Zor on the Euphrates; in the Duck’s Bill of Syria where the frontiers of Iraq, Turkey and Syria meet and the mountains of Persia are in sight on a clear day. Most vital of all was the Aleppo section whose men, speaking every language of the Levant, rode the trains of the Baghdad Railway which so closely followed the frontier that a passenger jumping from the left-hand window would land in Turkey, and from the right-hand in Syria. All the sections had outlying detachments in the chief villages of their district: sometimes a pair, sometimes a man alone, living on the local food and drink, sleeping in a whitewashed village room on his blankets—if the section had never managed to win some camp beds—and spending his days listening to the village notables or smoothing relations between the civilian population and some unit which considered itself lonely.

De Gaulle in his memoirs writes bitterly of the British agents all over the country, and I presume that, partly, he means us. But we were never anti-French, nor did we ever give advice to the administered against the interests of the administration. We were probably annoying in that it was difficult to keep anything secret from us. One has only to imagine the position reversed—a French Army in, say, the pre-war Sudan, doubtful whether the hard-worked remnants of a British colonial service could ensure its security, and determined that no sudden development should take it by surprise. We conceived ourselves as a modest, necessary oil, permeating everywhere it is true, but helping the cogs of Arab, French and British to interlock as smoothly as possible and thus to relieve the fighting troops of all distractions from their proper business.

My own part in all this was wretchedly small, but I had had more than my fair share of opportunities already. We were moved down from Brumana to Tripoli to look after the security of Ninth Australian Division. There was very little of the more interesting civil security, for the French team in Tripoli was efficient.

On one journey to Latakia I met God. He was sitting in the hotel restaurant wearing a bright brown lounge suit and drinking brandy like any other man. He was also extremely courteous in, as one would expect, the divine language of France, and did not press upon me the First Commandment. He was then giving us a great deal of trouble, for, while we impiously doubted his identity, his own clan did not. It was a country as rich in religions as in Roman days. There were Moslem heretics with fascinating rites of their own: the Alaouites with their priest-king and his sacred wives, the Yezidis who were polite to the devil in the Jebel Sinjar, the Druses whose covens, for most of the year, were respectable as Scottish elders. There were the happy and urbane Bahai, and a few Zoroastrians. And there were four different kinds of native Christians, excluding the sects produced by competitive missionaries ranging in time from St James to the Methodists. God was on a very good wicket from the start.

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. Merely 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 lawyer 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.

I staged a show straight out of any boy’s story. It would not have taken in an intelligent European—unless he had been reading too many of them—but it was calculated to appeal to the Arab passion for dramatic unreality: a failing which does not lead him into as much trouble as might be expected, since it is balanced by a tiptoe, deer-like quality of caution.

When X led the notable and his three or four retainers into the room, they were faced by a desk behind which sat a figure in a white suit with a Nazi arm-band, and a black bag over his head pierced by Ku Klux Klan eye-holes. Behind him, standing to attention were three large, silent toughs, also black-bagged—among them, Prendergast, whose appearance of Teutonic stiffness and brutality behind his tommy-gun was wholly terrifying. I rose with courtesy—for the principal German agent would surely have some knowledge of local customs, though unfortunately he spoke no Arabic—and my address of welcome was beautifully interpreted by X. Except for occasional harsh commands, we used French, on the grounds that X did not understand German nor I Italian.

Our guest was a man of distinction in his middle forties, exquisitely robed and bearded. In spite of the extraordinary spectacle, his face showed only the slightest flicker of surprise, instantly extinguished; he might have been entering the tent or house of some distant cousin whom he had never had the good fortune to meet before. It is that fineness of breeding which has always enchanted the not so rare Englishmen who have loved, pampered and courted the Arabs for the last hundred years. It is impossible not to respect and admire an aristocrat even if you know—or perhaps because you know—that under the perfection of good manners is a childish heart seething with fear and distrust, and balancing the advantage of treachery against the convention which forbids it.

This minor and slippery Saladin infected me with a chivalry which I am sure my Fuehrer would have censured. When the hour came for the evening prayer, I withdrew the masked chorus, leaving notable and retainers alone with Allah and all our arms. The gesture did indeed impress him, and upon our return relations over the coffee were most cordial. Except for the taking of a solemn oath of brotherhood, the meeting led nowhere. That was to be expected. He sent his regards to the Fuehrer, having in his mind, I imagine, a mere picture of envied power to shed blood noisily, and never perceiving that his daily solitudes with God made nonsense of that intolerable plebeian.

A second meeting was marked by even greater social ease—especially on our part, for we had at first omitted to ventilate the black bags, and conversation on a hot Palestine night, let alone enthusiastic heiling of Hitler, left us gasping and sweating in our home-made Turkish baths. Confidence seemed to be growing. I bought from the notable an Italian automatic. X recommended the purchase on the grounds that it was a gesture of trust, admitting us, as it were, to the arms-dealing club.

But trust was still far from absolute. When we came out of the block of flats after giving our Arab guests an hour to get away, their hired car charged round a corner at us trying to illuminate our faces with the headlights. It was a clumsy attempt and it failed; but then there was a half-hearted attempt to follow us. We separated and took to lanes and backyards, making such speed as was possible with tommy-guns down our trouser legs, and reunited over cool drinks in my garden.

X and the Arabic-speaking corporal who had been lent to me were, however, very nearly in trouble. They were taken out into a barrenness of hills to see more caves, and, once there, were suddenly told that it was known that the principal German agent was a British officer. X, with great presence of mind, replied contemptuously that of course he was. What else could he be and still operate successfully and unsuspected? This answer surprised and delighted the notable—who had only been trying a third-degree guess—and both men reported that it was quite safe to continue the meetings.

We no longer believed in the cache of arms, and we had established with reasonable certainty that our man was not in touch with any real German agent or network. The notable was ready to commit himself to support of the enemy provided Rommel was near enough to protect him from the consequences; but that was nothing new. Plenty of influential Palestine Arabs were willing to be polite to the Germans—not that they at all preferred them to the British, but they approved their methods of dealing with Jews. The question thus arose what use further meetings could be. We might indeed set up as agents provocateurs, but we had quite enough potential trouble in Palestine without provoking more. For us the operation had no longer any clear objective. For Cairo it might have some. So Henry Hunloke reported what we had done and asked for orders. Cairo replied in effect that if Household and Prendergast had now enjoyed themselves sufficiently to return to their normal routine, nothing would be lost by their doing so.

I agreed with the verdict thankfully. I felt that I could continue the meetings for some time without embarrassing I (b) or the Palestine Administration, but I could not bear the thought of arresting a man with whom I had taken a very solemnly sworn oath of brotherhood. Honour is a luxury which both spy and security officer must sometimes be prepared to forego; nevertheless to break an oath is a crime against humanity. I see and saw the difference between that and fair deception as resembling the difference between the murder of a civilian and killing an enemy in uniform.

There were two sequels to this pointless adventure. Prendergast, thirteen years later in Kenya, attended a meeting of the Mau Mau and won a George Cross for it. I have never heard the story from him, but the memory of our parlour theatre, completely without danger, may have, as it were, inoculated him against stage nerves when he engaged in the real professional play with its appalling risk of instant and disgusting death.

The other sequel is a record of sheer naughtiness. I gave the Italian automatic which I had bought to an officer leaving for Persia at short notice, who had no pistol of his own. GHQ were then in a state of justifiable excitement over the number of captured weapons which were reaching an eager market. All road and frontier controls were ordered to put the possessor on a charge if he could not prove that he had come innocently by his weapon.

I was sitting in my office one evening with a conscience exceptionally clear when a solemn sergeant of the Special Investigation Branch—the detective branch of the military police—requested a private interview with me. That seemed unusual—for liaison was at officer level—but I saw the light when, after some professional clearing of the throat, he asked me if I would care to make a statement regarding a pistol which Captain So-and-So said that I had given him. The word given was pronounced in the sedate inverted commas of the police, and I could sense a well-controlled enthusiasm that at last the S.I.B. had been able to pin a crime on Field Security.

Our relations with them were always most friendly but marked by disapproving silences, somewhat resembling those between the amateur sleuth and the inspector in a detective story. For example, it was the duty of the S.I.B. to trace and apprehend a deserter. It might be our duty to watch the deserter’s contacts and even to meet him for an occasional drink without hinting to him or anyone else that we knew exactly what he was. The result was that they considered us irresponsible, while we, more in touch with politics, would sometimes hide our eyes in horror at the constable’s heavy foot loudly descending upon bridges too flimsy for an angel’s toe.

I pretended embarrassment. I allowed it to be dragged from me that I had indeed bought the pistol for money. I would not say where. I even signed with trembling hand a statement, and murmured that I hoped Palestine Headquarters would be able to clear me. So the sergeant’s captain had a final polish put upon his buttons and called on Henry Hunloke. He, warned by me that the enquiry was on the way, but quite ignorant of my un-Christian behaviour, of course said with his usual humorous and impenetrable courtesy that my arms-dealing had the approval of high authority. Ever after I could see upon the dead faces—when sober—of the S.I.B. a guarded determination not even to hint that the Intelligence staff were selling pistols and spending the proceeds upon alcohol and women.

Early in 1943 I followed the pistol to Paiforce, a new Command, entirely separate from Middle East Command, which had been formed under General Wilson to hold Persia and Iraq against a very possible German offensive through the Caucasus, and to keep the road and railway open for the American supplies which were pouring into Russia through the Persian Gulf ports.

I was offered the job of Commandant of Field Security and of course accepted with pride and delight. But between my acceptance and departure Paiforce died—though still preserving an appearance of life from busy movements of the beetles on its corpse. The German threat was obviously over for ever when their armies fell back from Stalingrad and the Volga. Wilson left to take over Middle East Command.

I arrived in Baghdad in March. The staff, occupying a large housing estate, was to be seen at its very worst. This desert suburbia, coloured yellow and mud upon a plain of mud, was itself enough to rot any generosity of spirit among those who worked in it. The one object of every administrative soldier—he was often unconscious of it and saw it as duty—was to increase the work of his department so that it should not be abolished. And that would be true of the army of any nation, for as soon as a soldier gets into a chair which is not operational he takes on all the vices of a civil servant.

Having created Paiforce, the War Office could not be expected to put a brutal end to it within six months; and the Command did have an excuse for existence since the Persian Gulf was too far away to be easily administered by Middle East. Just as in the days of the Pharaohs there was only one road from the Nile to Mesopotamia, though ours cut straight across the desert and theirs circled round it through Syria.

The fault seemed to lie—but here I am out of my depth—in too rigid a system of administration. If war requires a Command responsible, without any intermediary, only to Whitehall, then it must be a General Headquarters; and if it is a GHQ, then it must have all the administrative offices of a GHQ in spite of the fact that there is a bare half day’s work for any of them. Heaven knows what Paiforce cost the taxpayer, simply because established custom prevented Treasury and War Office from limiting a GHQ to the size, say, of an army staff.

The result was that captains became colonels, and majors, brigadiers, in spite of themselves. Promptly they acquired a vested interest in creating enough paper to give their jobs a semblance of indispensability. Even those who were only too willing to lose exalted rank on condition that they might leave Paiforce for a more active front found it difficult to do so without pulling strings in Cairo or London. There was indeed a small office at GHQ responsible for reducing staff where possible, but to go in there and submit a paper actually recommending reduction was considered as unconventional as preaching pacifism.

Our living conditions were revolting. Admittedly my own had been sybaritic, but I would not have minded a clean change to canvas and open air. As it was, we were crammed into requisitioned hotels along the Tigris, from which we poured every morning at eight on to the ferries across to our housing estate. The kitchens and sanitary arrangements of these detestable hotels were quite inadequate to deal with us, and drink on either side of the river was pretty well limited to the Baghdad water supply. For my evening relaxation I was reduced to a couple of shots of palm toddy in the privacy, when there was any, of my literally stinking bedroom. There were two beds in it, and the other was reserved for visiting officers. I never knew to what pillowed head I should be compelled to be polite, nor whether it would prefer to snore, to converse or to vomit.

Not everyone loathed Baghdad as much as I. Down the Tigris was a noble thick-walled house, built by some rich merchant in days when the trader was the only tourist, where mysterious Intelligence officers lived with silver and mahogany. What they did I was never quite sure and, as Commandant, Field Security, I had to set an example by refraining from indiscreet questions. But among them was Alec Waugh, as always on enviably good terms with his surroundings. Occasional meals together reminded me that the hideousness of that squalid city should be easily endurable to the accustomed traveller.

At the beginning of the hot weather, messes were at last organised. The Intelligence staff was allotted a house with a flowered courtyard and, on two sides of it, a line of whitewashed cells in which one could set up a camp bed and an orange box and enjoy privacy. It was so genial a mess that I wondered if my preference for hotels—excluding Baghdad—had not been entirely wrong. Our mess secretary was a bon vivant who had had some experience of catering for a London club. His duties at GHQ were of the slightest, and he spent his time supervising the issue of rations and the Iraqi cooks. What that man did—I am ashamed that I have forgotten his name—with ration beef, bully, potatoes and onions was incredible. Even on the rare occasions when one could not enjoy the meal, one could be entertained by the ingenuity of the attempt. Liquid supplies became plentiful, for every officer on tour, especially if he were bound for Teheran, was expected to bring back whatever he could buy and carry. I myself had the luck to find a NAAFI about to close down in Kirkuk, and returned to Baghdad with dozens of gin and Palestine wine in the back of the car.

Once away from Baghdad and on tour among the sections depression was impossible. I never cared for central Iraq, since there is no colour in it but the weary sky, no accident of ground but irrigation ditches and no timber except for the palms along the Tigris. How the human spirit could have flowered in that world of fertile mud is difficult for the European to understand. Jerusalem and Hamadan, Caesarea and Damascus and Aleppo—in all those I could have lived and been content. But in Ur and Babylon and the valley of the Nile no raising of eyes to the glory of ziggurat or pyramid could have prevented me from packing upon my asses such wives as they could accommodate and departing like Abraham to find the God of the hills. Even Nineveh, where rolling grasslands at least feel their way towards the mountains of Kurdistan, would have been home enough. Yet Nineveh contributed to civilisation little but a savage military aristocracy. Perhaps the long, tranquil periods of history can only be attained under the flat sedative of mud.

North and east of Nineveh and Mosul, Iraq becomes a land of poplar and willow and rushing water, with a distant glint of snow. At Mosul was a splendid section, almost entirely concerned with civil security. Among their responsibilities were the wild Turkish frontier, the Persian frontier where enemy agents were active, the Baghdad Railway and the town of Mosul, always smouldering with the ancient enmity between Kurd and Arab. I found them isolated, grossly overworked, learning the local languages and apparently enjoying every changing month. I could do no more than see they had all the comforts which could be given, and a very fair share of the small secret fund.

A long tour took me to Basra and Abadan, and twice across Persia. The vital road to Russia was intolerably dangerous. It was only wide enough for two vehicles carefully to pass, and up and down the hills hurtled the lorries of the United Kingdom Commercial Corporation, driven by reckless Persians until brakes and springs fell apart. Added to these terrorists were the American trucks, nearly all with coloured drivers. It seemed to be the American plan to keep the transport in first-class condition but to work the drivers into the ground. There were many cases of these tireless and gallant negroes falling asleep at the wheel. At least they were generally believed to have fallen asleep. There was seldom anyone left to confirm the truth.

My driver and I decided to take a more ancient road across the mountains and live to fight another day. There, instead of the frantic lifting of supplies to Russia, we caught up the summer migration of the Lurs. It was a scene from the long past of humanity, and by now, except in the heart of Central Asia, it may have vanished from the world.

I could no more number the tribe than Moses. There may have been ten thousand; there may have been fifty thousand. They were dark, eager-looking men and women, all with the same peculiar nose—a long, delicate instrument with a curiously arched flair to the nostrils and a slight hook which had neither the beak-like quality of the Semitic nor the solidity of the Roman or the Basque. They were all dressed in black, with little colour. They moved with their herds of sheep, goats and cattle, and all their possessions on the backs of pack animals: ponies, donkeys or camels. It took us a whole day in low gear to get through them, and they were remarkably good-tempered over the intrusion—especially since we had no Persian for politenesses or exhortation and were limited to the common exclamations of soldier’s Arabic, of which they seemed to understand about as much as we did.

At Kasvin we entered the Russian zone, and at last I was face to face with the almost mythical people whose refugees I had comforted as a youth, around whose frontiers, like a gipsy skirting a park wall, I had roamed as a commercial traveller, whose entry into the war as allies had brought us all the certainty that some time, in years to come, the enemy would be exhausted. To us in the garrison of the Middle East the entry of America was not so immediately encouraging. As our parochial minds saw it, the Indian Ocean was likely to be lost to Japan and the Middle East to become the middle of a sandwich.

I cannot imagine what my private excitement wanted from the Russians. I knew they had two legs. I was perfectly familiar with their uniforms and their faces. They did no more than salute me smartly as they raised a barrier to let me in, and salute again twelve miles further on when they let me out. But in my imagination—and that is better than nothing—the world of 1913 had returned.

Teheran was my first taste of civilisation since Jerusalem, for between the two cities there is none except in the eyes of those passionate suitors of the Arab, tragic in their surrender to so elusive a love. The food and wine were superb, for the Persians are among those nations of the world who care profoundly for their bellies. The capital was full of lovely women. I should, I think, have enjoyed myself if fate had led me from the Bank of Roumania to the Anglo-Persian, but the hot-house life of Bucharest would not have been left so far behind as I imagined.

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 responsible 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 sensation 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.

There was a story then current that when Belsen was taken a great trench was dug and the camp guards were ordered to fill it with the bodies of the dead inmates of the camp. While they were down in the trench the bulldozers, without any definite order given, swept back the earth over the guards as well. It is hard to conceive British troops taking into their own hands revenge for outraged humanity; but, if the story is true, I do not think the men concerned have any more reason to reproach themselves, merely because their court of justice was instinctive, than the jury at a murder trial. No civilised man has ever had to weigh such evidence as was presented to them.

Travel had lost the slap-dash quality which normally characterised military driving. Roads off the main axis of the advance were avoided unless the tracks of our own vehicles were plain to see. Roads where the crown but not the verge had been cleared of mines by the indefatigable sappers were taken cautiously; and trucks which a week before would have roared past each other, right-hand wheels off the metal and damn the consequences, edged by, wings almost touching, while each driver tried to avoid forcing the other on to the verge. It seemed a pity to die in the last week of the war. Though on parts of the front there was fighting right up to the cease-fire on the morning of May 5, the main objective of unit commanders was to demonstrate but not to lose a life.

For the nights of May 4 and 5 I was staying at one of the headquarters messes of the Guards Armoured Division. They provided me with a comfortable farm room, some excellent light literature and more than my fair share of the wines captured from the cellars of the Burgomaster of Bremen. I must have tried the perfection of their manners hard. I came from the War Office. I was fifteen years older than any of them. My bar of medal ribbons had fallen somewhere into German mud—so dubious a story that I was compelled to a more than English reticence about myself. And, anyway, they proposed to write the story of their own battles without the help of my department.

Yet never for one moment was I allowed to feel an intruder upon the celebrations with which they ended their war; nor, I hope, did any of them perceive a loneliness which could only have surrendered to the wines of Roumania, of Greece, of Syria and Palestine. That final experience of war at last revealed to me its true essence: loneliness among strangers. Hardly ever had I felt it. The army had been to me far more of a home than to my fellows, gathering me again to my own countrymen, permitting the outward pattern of my life to continue and providing it with the illusion of an object.