His Second War Page 12

  Closely he pressed her arm.

  He recalled the picture that had risen before his eyes last night at his club when he had read Mary’s message: he thought of the telephone call he had planned to make that afternoon. He thought of Stella, perhaps at this very moment laughing across a lunch table with some friend over the entanglement she had dodged. “A near shave,” she would be saying, “a desperately near shave.” She would never know how nearly she had been subjected to a most resolute attempt to wheedle her into the kind of mess she had sworn so resolutely to avoid. He remembered the mood in which, on that night after his lunch with Stella, he had laid his hand on Mary’s shoulder. He had felt sorry then: sorry for all three of them. It was not only his children who were on their way to safety. They too had a lucky escape, Mary and he, and Stella. A lucky escape the three of them.

  Not, though, that it was in terms of escape that he saw the moment.

  There was gratitude and pride and hope, resolve and faith and expectation in his heart as he walked up the platform with Mary’s arm in his. They were starting a new life, a new work together. He had the sense that he was moving, that they were both moving—with cleared decks to meet a destiny—as indeed at that moment a whole Empire was.

  64

  LONDON, THE SECOND WINTER

  “But what was it really like in London then. Out here in South Africa we could get no idea. Was it worse than one imagined, or not so bad. Did ordinary life go on at all? Did the newspapers exaggerate or understate? Is there anything left of London?”

  It was the question that person after person was to ask him during the five days while the ship docked at Cape Town. It was a question so large that it was difficult to answer it unobliquely. He would shrug his shoulders to the question. “It was rather,” he said, “like being in a fairly quiet part of the line in the last war, when one never really expected to get casualties on one’s own immediate sector, but where, by the law of averages, one knew that sooner or later they must come.”

  In a sense that was the only answer. The war books of 1929 and 1930 had given, with their insistence upon the physical horrors of the battlefield, as distorted a picture of a campaign as had the cheerful “Agincourt”-type stories of 1914-15, against which Siegfried Sassoon and the later war poets had reacted.

  War had not been all horror. There had been the mud and misery of Passchendaele, but that had been ten days out of a hundred. Whole weeks in the line had been little more arduous than garrison duty under uncomfortable conditions. Often during the winter of the blitz, as he had walked back along the Embankment from his office in Westminster to his flat at the Adelphi, with the guns thudding, with searchlights swinging, with the burst of shells pinpointing the sky, with an occasional group of flares floating slowly down, he had the sense of being back in the last war in France. In a way his answer that London in the blitz had been like a fairly quiet part of the line in France, was adequate.

  It gave, though, only a partial picture. It did not take into account the separate stages, the separate phases of the blitz; phases which made the London of October a different city from the Londons of December and of March.

  Himself, he had been in London on leave during the last week of August. He had returned from a course on the 14th September. With the exception of two short leaves he had remained uninterruptedly in London till he had received orders to sail for the Middle East. For him, that winter and that spring were marked in a succession of distinct and separate phases.

  There had been that last week of August when reconnaissance aeroplanes had cruised over London, when alert after alert had gone, but when no bombs had fallen: a week that provided a parallel with the eight months of the “phony war”; when one was exasperated by petty restrictions, by shops closing, by trains moving at quarter-speed, by station restaurants refusing to serve meals, by government offices closing their doors, and, if one was in the building, refusing to let one out; when it had seemed that a single aeroplane could immobilize the work of an entire city.

  There had been, then, the incessant bombardment of late September when one had lived upon one’s nerves, when no one had really slept, when one had worked at full pressure, one had not known how, because one was living on one’s nerves, because it was an hour of trial, because one felt that a bombardment upon this scale must be the prelude to invasion; when one lived from day to day, from hour to hour, making no plans ahead.

  By mid-October another phase had started. Either the blitz had become less acute or people had become used to it: had come anyhow to accept it as the framework of their existence, as the atmosphere in which they had to live and work; when people stopped sleeping in their basements or their garden shelters; when restaurants that had basements began to fill.

  Within another month life had become almost normal. In October there had been special taxi ranks that for a double fare would drive you anywhere at any time. Now taxis were generally available. There were still daylight raids, but London offices were regarded as front-line posts. Work was not interrupted by the siren. Offices had fire-spotters and it was only when aeroplanes were in actual danger-range that one went down to shelter. At night people walked the streets. There were such things as parties.

  Then there came the incendiary raid on the last Sunday of 1940, and after that the start of fire-watching.

  Each month had in retrospect its own special associations and all the time people were continuing their private lives.

  He had planned but never written a story to be called Idyll in the Blitz. A story which would show the changing phases of the blitz against the changing phases of a love affair; a love affair that would be both created and conditioned by the blitz.

  He had visualized a couple, stranded by friends and relatives, in a small block of service flats from which everyone but themselves had been called away. He had pictured them alone there, without cook or service, with only a daily char to “do for” the whole building, working each of them in London offices, returning at night to a house empty but for themselves. They would have been during the hours of the black-out as much isolated as any two refugees from a torpedoed ship cast upon a desert island. There would be nothing that they would not share.

  At one moment they would be heating themselves up some cocoa, at the next throwing sand over an incendiary bomb that had pitched in the backyard. There were times when a pane of glass would be smashed in by blast. They would return from dinner to find a lump of shell-casing on the kitchen floor. There would be the whine over their heads of a screaming shell, and before the noise of the explosion reached them, under the impact of its explosion the house would be quivering in its foundations. They would be walking back from dinner, and just as they were turning the corner of a street there would be a quick succession of explosions, and the street into which they had been about to turn would be a cloud of rubble. They would be completely dependent on each other.

  They would share danger, they would share fear. When the all-clear went they would share the exhilaration that soldiers know when they have survived a battle. There would be a last-time sense about every moment, with danger rendering every sensation more acute. It would be in different moods that they would face the bombing. There were times when simultaneously they would feel that they wanted to dive under tables; there were times as they had sat over a glass of sherry before going out to dinner, when the roar of the aeroplanes would so get upon their nerves that they would gulp down their sherry and almost scurry to the shelter of a basement restaurant. There were other times when the roar of the aeroplanes would be a sedative, when they would fancy themselves to be sitting at some “plage” with the murmur of the sea as a perpetual background to their talk, with their talk punctuated, every now and then, by the crash of a larger wave against the pier.

  It would be a picnic life that they would share, doing their own house-work, making up the stove, fixing their own breakfasts, sometimes cooking themselves a kitchen supper, ringing themselves up during the day to decid
e the shopping. Sometimes dining out expensively—on nights when the blitz was particularly heavy—at restaurants like Boulestin’s, giving a happy laugh of relief and anticipation as they hurried down the steps; at any rate they would be able to enjoy their dinner. Sometimes going cheaply to a Lyons’ Brasserie, never going outside a five minutes’ radius, never seeing anyone except themselves, with no one, between the hours of half-past six and half-past eight, existing for them except themselves. They might just as well have been upon a desert island.

  It would have been an idyll as his story told it.

  And for a fortnight, for three weeks, for a month, it would have stayed an idyll, or rather it would have stayed that kind of idyll. Its nature would have changed, though, with the blitz. Bit by bit little changes would have come, the proprietor of the building would have installed a housekeeper. One by one tenants would have returned to their abandoned flats. The blitz would have lessened, or Londoners would have got used to it. Londoners would have come to realize that they had lives of their own to lead; they would start to ring up their friends; meetings would be arranged; there would be soldiers and sailors coming up on leave. London during those days would be still something of a desert island. But there would be a number of other shipwrecked mariners upon it.

  Bit by bit, each day, each week, that vie à deux would be cut into, imposed upon. Its nature would change as the nature of the blitz changed. Their love affair would both mirror the blitz and be a mirror of it.

  Such was the story that he had planned to write.

  He never wrote it though. He did not know how to finish it. He did not know how the story ended.

  65

  STAFF CAPTAIN, MINISTRY OF MINES, SEPTEMBER 1940

  Himself, he had spent the year of the blitz from 14 September 1940 to 17 September 1941 as Staff-Captain to a military section that was attached to the Ministry of Mines. It seemed in retrospect as unsuitable an appointment as could have been found for him, and in fact it was. But at the time the offer of it had seemed an unbelievable piece of fortune. When the blitz began on the first Saturday of September he was half-way through a Security Course in an Intelligence School. On the Wednesday when his impatience at being away from London was at its height, he had been called to the telephone, in the interval between two lectures, by a trunk call from London, at a time when only calls of the highest military priority could be booked, to speak to Col. M—.

  Col. M—had been the head of P.R. in France. His daughter was a considerable friend of his. He had himself seen quite a little of the Colonel while he had been in London. The Colonel’s voice was as always friendly and hearty and amiably insistent.

  “That you? That’s fine. Hell of a job it’s been getting through to you. The post office people seem to think the war’s stopped just because a few bombs are falling. Now listen, what I want to know is this. I’m more or less running a section attached to the Ministry of Mines. I can’t tell you what it is over the phone. Fearfully hush-hush and all that; and with you on as a security specialist, you’d be getting me court-martialled if I tried; but Yvonne tells me you’re at a bit of a loose end and we’re looking for a staff captain. You’re not a technician, I know that—that doesn’t matter in the least. We want someone with regular army training to keep things straight. And you would find quite a bit to do in your own line. We’ll want someone to write our things up for the Home Guard. I don’t know how that appeals to you.”

  He did not hesitate about his answer. He was tired of courses, of being an unposted officer. He wanted to get back to work. More than anything he wanted to be back in London, in his own city, in his city’s trial. He had been born there, he was at heart a Londoner—where else would a Londoner want to be?

  “I think that’s fine, sir. If you can fix it with the ‘I’ people, I’m your man.”

  66

  P(W)D

  The section to which he was in due time posted, and which was listed for reference purposes as P(W)D, had been begotten by the same stick of bombs that, pitching on and outside the Imperial Hotel, Boulogne, had nearly ended its staff captain’s life. The mail lorry that had been set alight had continued to blaze right on till morning, and when later at a conference in London, Geoffrey Lloyd, Secretary for Petroleum, had discussed what steps were to be taken in the event of an invasion to prevent supplies of oil from falling into enemy hands, Col. M—, recalling that flaming lorry, had suggested that if oil were to be burnt, it might as well be burnt offensively. Why not fire cars at road-blocks, for example.

  As a result of that conference, a military section was attached to the Ministry of Mines to investigate the various ways in which petroleum and the products of petroleum might be employed as a war weapon, particularly in the services of the Home Guard.

  The department was founded early in July. Himself, he did not join it till the middle of September. But before he had been there a week, he was finding himself astonished by the amount of work that had been got through in ten weeks in a time of crisis by a staff hastily selected from the pool of officers and officials who were finding themselves at a temporary loose end after the collapse of France and the disbanding of the B.E.F.

  No staff could have been chosen more haphazardly. The most suitable men were not available. The best use had to be made of those that were. Yet by the time he joined it in September it was to find a very occupied body working at full pressure, with some achievement at its back and the prospect of genuine achievement imminent.

  A year later when he sailed for the Middle East it was to leave behind him a fully equipped organization with an establishment that included, in addition to a number of soldiers and scientists, an experimental station in the country.

  It was indeed largely because of its impromptu, improvised characteristics that the P(W)D managed in so short a time to achieve so much. The department was, and knew itself to be, on trial. Its brief from the Treasury, the charter of its existence, amounted to little more than a permission to conduct such experiments as might be required by the three service ministries. For which purpose, liaison officers from the three ministries were invited to attend weekly meetings to state what those requirements might be.

  That was the theory of the thing. For actual practice the task of the P(W)D was to sell the idea of petroleum as a weapon to the three ministries; and the Admiralty, the War Office and the Air Ministry were not going to be interested till they had had it proved to them that there was something to be interested in. The department, that was to say, had first to show what to it could do. When it had shown the potentialities of petroleum as a weapon, it could expect advice and guidance from the ministries as to the direction in which those potentialities might be examined.

  It was uphill work. It was a starting from scratch. It was a starting moreover in the face of opposition. For the department knew very well that the service ministries regarded the whole thing as so much “ministerial nonsense”—a knowledge that gave its individual members a corporate sense of being embarked upon a joint adventure. Ordinarily one’s job in life is to maintain tradition. By one’s family, one’s school, one’s regiment, and later in one’s profession, one’s duty is presented to one in terms of the torchbearer and the race. It is rare to be in at the start of anything. And it was from scratch that P(W)D started in July 1940.

  67

  OFFICE ROUTINE

  A soldier’s life is imagined to be a healthy out-of-door existence. Nothing could be more sedentary or unhealthy than the life of a staff officer at a G.H.Q. Keeping fit is a major problem. He works longer hours than the work actually requires because he has to be accessible. Operations are a twenty-four-hour business. Someone who can give the answer has always to be at the telephone. Moreover, the staff officer has the self-conscious feeling that he is living in comfort and in safety while his friends are not. In this war, as a result of bombing and the vulnerability of H.Qs., staff officers are less subject to this criticism than they were in the last war. But so much was written and
said against “brass hats” and “red tabs” in the last war that the present-day staff officer is sensitive about his position. He feels that the only answer to this criticism is to work long hours.

  As regards long hours P(W)D provided no exception to the rule. It did, however, provide variety. During those first months anyhow its staff seemed to be working simultaneously on a dozen things, and in half a dozen places. There was first of all their own headquarters in Whitehall, there was S—, where the experimental section of an oil company was working with blueprints and drawing-boards on their ideas. There were two civilian experimental stations on the coast. In Hampshire there was a military experimental station where most weeks a demonstration of some kind was held. Throughout the country there were a number of representatives, one to each command, to demonstrate the department’s devices to various Home Guard units. And in addition to Col. M—and the D.G. there were at that time only four officers in the department, one at least of whom would be out of the office on duty of some kind or other.

  It was a hectic time. The telephone was always ringing. Each had to know the other’s work; each had to do the other’s work. No one was, strictly speaking, allotted any special work. Each took a share of what work was going; the actual duties they were given occupied a small part of their time. Work devolved on them.

  Apart from his own actual “dog’s-body” chores of making out allowances and travelling claims for the other officers, the staff captain was kept busy arranging invitations for the department’s various demonstrations, fixing the transport for the guests, supervising the security of the demonstrations, seeing that the demonstrations were filmed by a team from the Shell Film Unit, acting in liaison between the cameramen and the military, collaborating with the Shell Film Unit’s directorate in drawing up scenarios in which the various details of the demonstrations were arranged into a coherent sequence, drawing up scenarios for instructional films, writing the captions for them, escorting highly-placed staff officers to showings of the films—that was the routine work roughly. In addition to all that, he was at all times of the day answering inquiries as to the composition of various petroleum mixtures, as to the pressure power of a Sultzer pump, as to the specification of a flame thrower, as to the whereabouts of this or the other officer, as to the name of the B.G.S. of a certain command, as to the telephone number of a salvage depot. He did, in fact, pretty nearly everything during those first months except “write up our stuff for the Home Guard.”