His Second War Read online

  HIS SECOND WAR

  by

  ALEC WAUGH

  FOR

  JOAN DUFF

  WITH ITS AUTHOR’S LOVE

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Chapter 88

  Chapter 89

  Chapter 90

  Chapter 91

  Chapter 92

  Chapter 93

  Chapter 94

  Chapter 95

  Chapter 96

  Chapter 97

  Chapter 98

  Chapter 99

  Chapter 100

  Chapter 101

  Chapter 102

  Chapter 103

  Chapter 104

  Chapter 105

  Chapter 106

  Chapter 107

  Chapter 108

  Chapter 109

  Chapter 110

  Chapter 111

  Chapter 112

  Chapter 113

  Chapter 114

  Chapter 115

  Chapter 116

  Chapter 117

  Chapter 118

  Chapter 119

  Chapter 120

  Chapter 121

  Chapter 122

  Chapter 123

  Chapter 124

  Chapter 125

  Chapter 126

  Chapter 127

  SOME ABBREVIATIONS

  A Note on the Author

  1

  LONDON, 1 JULY 1941

  At six o’clock in the evening in a Whitehall office, a sturdily-built man of forty-three rose from his desk, collected and locked away his papers, made a tour of the offices to see that no files or papers had been left about, satisfied himself that the safes were locked and the windows fastened, then slung his respirator across his chest. He was wearing service dress, with three gilt pips upon his shoulder, and the two ribbons of the Victory and General Service medals were above his left hand pocket. He was a Staff Captain attached for special duties to the Ministry of Mines.

  With a sigh of relief he closed the door behind him. He had arrived there that morning at half-past nine. He had taken a bare forty minutes off for lunch. He had been busy for the full seven and half hours of his working day—answering telephones, reading files, dictating letters, drafting reports, attending a staff conference. In peace-time as a novelist and magazine short story writer, he had usually managed, by waking early, to finish his morning’s work before the majority of his friends had done more than sort out their mail. His friends had considered that he led an easy life. More than one had said during this last year, on hearing that he had been posted to a Whitehall Ministry, “Now at last you’ll discover what work is.” He hadn’t, though. He had learnt instead the difference between long hours and concentration. He had rarely as a Staff Captain found himself “worked out” in the way that as a writer he so often had. He had always suspected that writers worked rather harder than most executives. Now he knew they did. Even so it had been a long hard day and he was tired.

  Outside, on the office steps, he paused. It was a warm and sunny evening. Summer had come at last. The long cold spring, the bleak winter of the blitz were over. There was a briskness of foot, a lightness of eye about the long stream of government employees that hurried past him to their tubes and buses. They were no longer hurrying home to hastily-eaten meals in kitchens, to disturbed and draughty nights in basements and in shelters. Five hours of warmth and sunlight lay ahead of them; five hours of open air, of tennis, of picnicking, of sitting out in gardens. London had emerged from its long hibernation.

  Standing at the corner of the Embankment, he watched the dense stream go by, himself no less relieved that the long warm hours lay ahead. For nine and a half months now, he had worked here in Whitehall. For five of those nine months—getting up each morning in the black-out, working by electric light in a room whose broken windows had been covered with canvas netting, lunching in a basement restaurant, returning at night under a sky studded with bursting shells—he had scarcely known, except over the week-ends, that there existed such a thing as daylight. He was at one with this crowd of workers hurrying home to their earned hours of freedom. For a moment he stood watching, then turned northwards.

  He had made no plans for himself that evening. As he strolled slowly towards the park he deliberated the various choices that lay open. He could take a book into the park, find a chair and read till dinner-time. Theatres were opening now at half-past six. He could get a seat almost certainly at some show or other; afterwards he could go to a small supper club to which recently he had been elected, whose membership consisted largely of young politicians, where he would be certain to hear some interesting “behind the scenes” talk; or again, he could look in at the Savage. Though its front rooms facing on the Mall had been shattered in the previous autumn, the Club’s atmosphere had not been affected. At this hour there would be certain to be half a dozen or so people in the bar; and afterwards he could either have a sandwich at a milk bar, then tube out to Highgate and take his mother and her poodle for a walk over the heath, or he could take a bus up to the Savile—and one of the advantages he had come to find of being over forty, was the impossibility it brought of spending an unplanned evening in a club without meeting someone who had been a part of one’s life once, whom one had not seen for half a dozen years, with whom one could exchange notes on the separate courses that one’s lives had taken.

  Four or five choices lay before him, each agreeable. There was never any lack of alternatives in London. Ev
en in wartime life was new and changing there. No place in the world had the same variety. He had been relearning that fact during these last nine months. Before the war he had led a scattered traveller’s life, constantly on the move, staying in no one place for more than a few weeks. During this last nine months he had spent only ten days out of London. He had become a part of London as he had not been, since fifteen years earlier he had decided to live by his pen alone, had resigned his directorship on the board of a publishing house, sold the lease of his flat, housed his furniture and sailed for the Pacific. For fifteen years he had known London, as he had known New York, as a visitor. During this last nine months he had become again, what he had always been at heart, a Londoner.

  No, there was no place like London. And life here now that summer had come, that the blitz was over, that the menace of invasion had been fought off, was going to be extremely pleasant. Almost too pleasant in fact for war-time.

  Ruefully, regretfully, but with decision he faced the corollary to his reverie. “It’s high time,” he thought, “that I was moving on.

  2

  LONDON, 8 JULY 1941

  Opening of a letter:

  Dear Colonel:

  You have been such a good friend to me for so many months that I hope you will forgive my writing to you personally instead of officially, on a matter that has been worrying me for some little time. And you have been such a good friend to me, that I do not think that you will misunderstand me when I say the time has now come, I feel, for me either to rejoin my regiment or return to the Intelligence depot for re-posting.

  When I joined your department last September, we lived in a world of day to day, hour to hour improvisations. The army was being reformed under the pressure of invasion. There was no time to find the right man for the right job. One had to make the best use of what lay to hand. You needed right away as a Staff Captain someone not too young with some experience of army administration and I at that moment happened to be unposted. I came to you as a stop-gap. And now that we are no longer living in that hour to hour atmosphere, now that we have time to look around for the right man for the right job, I cannot really feel that I am your man.

  It isn’t just that I’ve spent most of my life avoiding the routine of an office desk—in war-time one has to do a great deal one doesn’t like—but that I do feel that this particular job could be so very much better done by someone with the technical experience that I lack. Therefore I feel…

  3

  LONDON, 18 AUGUST 1941

  Telephone message from the I.C. Depot.

  Would Captain— report for an interview with Captain S— Spears’s Mission on August 24 at 15.00 hours.

  4

  LONDON, 24 AUGUST 1941

  Spears’s Mission, he thought, now I wonder what that can be.

  He did not, however, take any of the steps that he would have taken two years ago to discover what it was. He had had enough experience in Intelligence to know that a thing is very rarely what it sounds, and that if you are sent to interview a Captain Flower, the last person you are likely to meet is somebody with that name. When he had read Compton Mackenzie’s Water on the Brain he had thought himself to be living in a charade. He now knew it to be an almost literal translation of the facts.

  To his surprise, however, and somewhat to his disappointment, there was such a person as Captain S——, and the placard of Spears’s Mission was displayed so frequently and so prominently in the building into which he walked that it was hardly possible to believe that it could be “a cover.”

  The interview was conducted by a Colonel with a long row of medals, while Captain S——took down the details. The details were strictly military. He was asked about his service, in this war and the last. He recited the familiar rigmarole. 1915 Inns of Court O.T.C. 1916 a cadet at Sandhurst. 1917 gazetted to the Wessex. July 1917 a machine-gunner with the B.E.F. 1918 a prisoner in the March offensive. 1919 a transfer to the reserve. 1921 recalled for service in the coal strike. Then after the long armistice of twenty years, eight months with his regiment as an instructor. A month with the B.E.F. at G.H.Q. Three months of Intelligence Corps courses. Then his attachment as Staff Captain to the Ministry of Mines.

  “And what about your languages?”

  It was the question that he had expected and that he had feared. His ignorance of foreign languages had always made his posting in “I” a problem.

  He was just about to reply: “I’m afraid not any, sir,” when the Colonel elucidated his requirements.

  “Do you speak Arabic?”

  “No, sir.”

  “What about French?”

  “Adequate, sir.”

  That was not quite true. But he had ceased to regard French as a foreign language. German, Italian, Spanish, Greek—those were foreign languages to “I.” To his surprise, however, the Colonel began to speak in French.

  He was unprepared for it. It was over a year since he had spoken French. He replied with fluency, but with, he suspected, a reckless disregard of genders and subjunctives. There was a pause.

  “Well, and that’s that,” he thought. The Colonel was about, he imagined, to change the subject; to soften the blow of a refusal by turning the interview into a social visit, by talking about books, by asking him if he knew this or the other writer. The Colonel didn’t, though.

  “You know, I suppose,” he asked, “what we are looking for?

  “No, sir.”

  “We are looking for a team of Intelligence liaison officers to send to Syria.”

  It was the last thing he had expected. His surprise was so great that he could not conceal, that he made no effort to conceal, the excitement that the prospect caused him.

  It was, he was to decide later, that sudden jolt of eagerness that got him the appointment. Employers will usually prefer the man who wants the job to the better qualified man who is indifferent.

  5

  EXTRACT FROM WAR OFFICE ORDERS

  Lt. T/Capt.——— (Wessex Rgt. R.A.R.O.) from Staff Captain Ministry of Mines to be I.O. Spears’s Mission, Syria, in an existing vacancy, retaining his temporary rank. W.e.f 17 Sept. ’41.

  6

  FOREWARNED, FOREARMED

  Since he was to serve under General Spears, it behoved him, he decided, to discover under what manner of man he was to serve. For in point of fact he knew extremely little about the General. He knew that Mary Borden was his wife and he had thought it rather grand for an American novelist to be married to a British General. Her son-in-law, who was a publisher, was a friend of his in the way one is the friend of someone with whom one has never prearranged a meeting, but whom one has been in the habit of meeting every few months over a dozen years at clubs and publishers’ cocktail parties and at Lord’s. Had anyone mentioned the name of Spears he would have said: “Ah, yes,” and waited for enlightenment. As is the case so often with public men, with whose names one is perfectly familiar, he would have found it difficult to write on him a biographical paragraph of a hundred words.

  He decided, therefore, to study during the mornings of his embarkation leave, in addition to such histories of Syria as he could find, General Spears’s Liaison and Prelude to Victory.

  7

  LONDON, 27 SEPTEMBER 1941

  And this, he thought, is my last day in London.

  He pulled himself into a dressing-gown and walked over to the window. He had taken, a few weeks before, a one-room flat on the top floor of an eight-story building on the edge of Regent’s Park. How long would it be, he wondered, before he again stood at this window looking out over the green of the Park, planning the details of a London day.

  It had been his habit every morning to catch a bus outside his door, to travel by it as far as Oxford Street, to walk down Regent Street to the Athenæum, breakfast there and walk to his office across the Park. It was strange to think, he thought, as he crossed the quadrant, how exactly the same all this would look to-morrow, with himself a part of it no longer.

 
He paused at the corner of Piccadilly. At just this spot twenty-three and a half years ago, on the last day of his last leave on the eve of the March offensive, he had stood here looking back. To-morrow, he had thought, it will look just the same.

  They had rebuilt Regent Street since then. The lovely lowroofed curve that Pennell’s pencil had traced for the first number of the Savoy had been superseded by the demands of commerce. It looked no different though. The moment felt no different. Twenty-three and a half years ago. The mood and moment were the same.

  8

  PORT OF EMBARKATION, 28 SEPTEMBER 1941

  An admirable through train with restaurant car and sleeping-coach attached left London at half-past eight, to reach his embarkation port in time for breakfast. There was another, a later train that, leaving London at eleven, involved a five o’clock-in-the-morning change of trains and a subsequent five hour journey in a slow local train without a breakfast car. He chose the latter.

  He wanted on this last day to dine quietly in London first, with one from whom he had been long estranged, with whom in this last week he had become partly reconciled. He wanted the last sound that he heard in London to be the viols of a certain voice. And if he is to live to be a hundred, he will remember gratefully in each last detail the minutes of those last hours.

  He did wish, however, fourteen hours later as he stood in the minute cabin that he was to share with another “missionary” for the next ten weeks, that he had devoted four instead of two of those last minutes to the supervision and labelling of his luggage. For whereas he himself changed trains successfully at five o’clock on a raw blacked-out morning, his heavy valise, which was in the van, did not. The kitbag and the suit-case which he had taken with him into the sleeping-car contained his entire wardrobe: a wardrobe that had got to last him in all human probability several years.

  He took an inventory of what he had. He possessed, he found, ten handkerchiefs, six collars, three pairs of thick socks, two of thin. Four pairs of drawers, four khaki shirts, two complete pairs of pyjamas, one pyjama jacket with the trousers missing, one pair of khaki shorts, two suits of khaki drill. “Why on earth,” he thought, “should I want more.”