My life, like so many others’, was completely disrupted by the war. As an officer on the Reserve, I was recalled to my regiment immediately, and after a few months of regimental duties was posted as an Intelligence Officer to the B.E.F. in time for the early stages of the Battle of France. In June 1940, my wife, an Australian, took our three children with her to Melbourne. I, after a year’s Staff Captaincy in London in the Ministry of Mines, was posted to the Middle East; at first to Beyrouth as a liaison officer in Spears Mission with the Free French Forces, later to an Intelligence organization in Baghdad. I remained there till I was demobilized shortly after VE day.
When I arrived in New York in September 1945, a friend of mine asked me if I had had a ‘chic war’. No, I told her, mine was obscure and undistinguished, but it was interesting. I saw a part of the world with which I was unfamiliar; I made friends among the Arabs; during my three years in Baghdad, I was in close touch with the Police authorities and the experience I acquired was to prove very useful when I returned to novel writing.
I wrote practically nothing during the war. When it began I was halfway through a West Indian novel. I finished it during the phoney war when I was stationed at Dorchester. But when I was transferred to Staff work, I found that after eight hours at a desk I needed relaxation. In Baghdad, however, Robin Maugham bought me, as a Christmas present, an elegantly bound manuscript book. It was so pretty that I felt I had to fill its pages; so every morning I jotted down in it, in the form of a continuous narrative, a series of wartime sketches that were eventually published under the title of His Second War. It contained a vignette called ‘Bien Sûr’.