His Second War Page 9

  56

  BOULOGNE, 20 MAY 1940

  There was no longer any pretence at work. There was no telephone line to Paris. The D.M.I. was forward, organizing out of stray units the force of “odds and sods” whose intervention at Le Cateau, by staying the German advance for a few hours, saved who can say how many lives on the beaches of Dunkirk. There was nothing that I.C.(11) could do in Boulogne.

  They held a conference that morning. There was, they agreed, only one thing to do, to get round to Paris, to a place where there were telephones, where they could organize their section. In the absence of the D.M.I. they had applied to P.R. to be allowed to leave on the following morning. The B.B.C. representative, who was a regular reservist and a major, had gone, since he had the knack for that kind of thing, to see in advance what transport he could find, to lay in a store of rations.

  The remainder sat at the table, not really pretending to do anything, exhausted after a week of air raids and of sleepless nights. Depressed, too, by the sense of their own futility. The greatest battle in history was being waged, a battle that was going badly for British arms, and they were not doing anything. They were doing less than nothing. They were encumbrances. Dejectedly they leant forward, half dozing across the table, while “alerts” and “all clears” succeeded each other in such swift succession that they had long since lost count of which was which. Only the senior I.O. was occupied. He had found abandoned by a previous tenant, in a drawer of his hotel bedroom, a work of fiction written by Bishop Bircher, published by the Erotikon-Biblion Society, and entitled, Lady Jane’s Seminary. His interest in the work was, he maintained, strictly academic. He was endeavouring to date it. The illustrations, he said, both as regards the clothes and style of decoration were definitely 1890. The psychology, however, struck him as more modern.

  57

  THE EVACUATION, 21 MAY 1940

  In the gutters every few yards were sweepings of blue splintered glass.

  There were no waiters in the station buffet which, since the war, had been employed as an officers’ club. The lounge had not been swept up. The night before there had been a heavy party; an R.A.F. administrative unit had been embarked. The tables were littered with empty champagne bottles and dirty glasses and emptied biscuit tins.

  The wharves were thick with discarded blankets.

  Through the streets of the upper town the flood of refugees was growing so thick that every street had become a one-way street. Young men on bicycles, riding four abreast, swept past like the advance guard of an army. The grass slopes beside the citadel looked like Hampstead Heath on a Bank Holiday, with its crowd of miscellaneous picnickers. Every few minutes the siren would be going, either for the alert or the all-clear. Children and elderly people stood grouped at the entrance of the shelters, afraid of being caught in the open.

  In their small office beside the citadel, I.C.(11) busily burnt their files and photographs and records. The permission to go to Paris had come through, but the road to Paris had been cut. They had been ordered to embark that night. In silence they tore and burnt the documents.

  “We’ll take only one thing,” the G.3 ordered—the long wooden box to which he alone possessed the key, which contained documents so secret that he alone of the Section knew what was in it.

  58

  BOULOGNE, THE DOCKS. 21 MAY 1940

  They got their luggage to the quay. The B.B.C. liaison officer who combined with the débrouillard efficiency of the soldier, the privileged authority of the bureaucrat, had managed to requisition a small car. In an hour’s time three boats were due. Enemy aircraft cruised above the town. Every few minutes there would be the thud of an explosion, the rattle of antiaircraft fire. The quay was crowded for the most part with administrative sections who had nothing any longer to administer. But there were a few “real soldiers” too. Infantry men who had lost their units, stranded R.A.S.C. personnel, some of them under N.C.Os, the majority of them on their own. The half of them were wounded. On many faces there was the blank dazed look of men who had long since ceased to understand what it was all about. They were there with their packs and rifles; that was all.

  “No luggage,” the order ran, “except what you can carry on by hand.” Himself he had in addition to his valise a suit-case and a curious plaid satchel handbag—an article which might have belonged to Sherlock Holmes—that he had bought that morning for 90 francs, the last receptacle for clothing to be found in the town’s main shopping street.

  He stared at his luggage, trying to remember what he had put in the suitcase, what he had put in the valise. He must, he told himself, get everything that was of any value into the suitcase and the satchel. He tried to decide what articles he valued most—boots and shoes would be the costliest to replace, blankets did not matter, a tunic was more important than a pair of trousers, pyjamas more valuable than shirts.

  He opened the valise; he started to sort things out. Slowly a covey of aeroplanes wheeled overhead. From all sides guns opened fire. There were spurts of water from the docks where fragments of shrapnel and shell-casing scattered. The majority of the waiting troops hastily clustered into the cementlined subway, the rest lay low upon their faces.

  Now that the end had come, or had so nearly come, a nearpanic touched him. “I’ll be furious if I get killed now,” he thought.

  He shrank from the task of packing. He just wanted to lie and wait. In another hour the boat would come. What did it matter, with those aeroplanes in the sky above, what he took on with him?

  “Yes,” he thought, “that’s what I’m thinking now. I shall think very differently in two days’ time when I go out to buy myself a new pair of shoes. Come on, now,” he adjured himself, “be practical.”

  59

  THE SECRET BOX

  In the end they got their kit aboard. The ship proved to be one of the larger of the regular cross-channel steamers. There was room on it and to spare. It was simply, when it came to the point, a question of slinging the valises over the side.

  Last of all came the turn of the secret box. It was too large and cumbersome for the narrow gang-plank. The two section-clerks who had flung over the valises picked it up. It had handles at each end. Its weight was evenly dispersed. Perhaps because the tossing of it was so much easier an operation than the loading of the valises they took less care of it. Something anyhow went wrong; their arms did not swing forward simultaneously: a handle slipped. The box went forward, not on a level but diagonally, to hit against the taffrail, to slip, to slither, to slide finally between quay and ship, the thin match-boarding splintering as it fell.

  As the ship drew out from the quay the box fell open, and the collection of secret papers floated out into the harbour.

  60

  A BUREAUCRAT IN KHAKI

  Among the fifty officers who travelled back from Boulogne was one about whose activities he had, during the last week, experienced some concern.

  Two days before the battle started he had finished the last chapter of a novel on which he had been working during the spring in Dorchester. It was a story of life in the West Indies that he had started before the war, in an escapist mood. It was unpolitical, uncontroversial, untopical. It was, in fact, “just a story.” When the battle had begun in earnest, anxious to get the manuscript back to England, he had taken it to be censored and sent home.

  The censor to whom he had taken it was a thin, pale-faced young man of thirty with spectacles and a pointed nose, who wore his uniform as though, as was probably the case, he had never been on a barrack square. He viewed the manuscript with some apprehension.

  “It’s very small handwriting. There seem quite a number of corrections. I’ve a great deal on hand just now.”

  “But you don’t need to read it very carefully. There’s nothing about the war in it. You can see that by running your eye over it.”

  “I can’t affix the censor’s stamp to anything I haven’t read.”

  “But it’ll have to be censored anyhow in England b
efore it’s published.”

  “That is not my concern. My business is to see that nothing goes out of this G.H.Q. that couldn’t fall with safety into anybody’s hands.”

  “But the war isn’t even mentioned in this book.”

  “That is a point on which I shall have to satisfy myself before I can affix the stamp. If one were to start making exceptions the censorship would lose its point. I can promise though that I will deal with the matter as expeditiously as possible.”

  More than once during the last week the author of that manuscript had found time to wonder about its fate.

  It was with some relief that he saw the censor in question on the boat.

  “Well,” he asked, “and did you get back that manuscript?”

  The censor shook his head.

  “I’m afraid in the general pressure of work that I had not the time to give to it. But you need not worry,” he added reassuringly, “it is quite safe. I left it properly indexed and labelled in a big black box in Amiens.”

  61

  WAR OFFICE, 28 MAY 1940

  The Belgians had capitulated. The wedge between the French and the British armies had become a breach; with both flanks exposed, the British army was fighting its way backwards to the sea. In England the word invasion was in the air. The L.D.V. were rapidly enrolling.

  In the midst of all this action, in a quiet War Office annexe off the Haymarket the G.3 and I.O. writer of I.C.(11) sat reading the morning’s papers. While the rest of the section had been sent on leave they had been attached to the press section of the War Office to work on an idea long under discussion for a weekly B.E.F. bulletin, a kind of magazine for the troops, half instruction, half entertainemnt. They had got out a dummy number. It had been submitted to and approved by the G.1.

  A month before, the prospect of such a production would have been exciting. They had little belief now that their paper would be ever published. By the time it appeared, where would be its public? Once again in the hour of action they were inactive.

  Slowly the morning passed.

  Shortly before twelve they were visited by one of the G.3’s from the main office.

  “I’ve got a job for you fellows,” he announced. “The G.2 would like you to knock off a couple of articles before five o’clock, one on ‘The Battle of Marengo,’ the other on ‘Cromwell’s Ironsides.’”

  “Ironsides, the Battle of Marengo?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why Ironsides?”

  “General Ironside. The L.D.V.s. A kind of parallel.”

  “Ah, the Battle of Marengo?”

  “Example of a battle that first seemed a defeat then became a victory. That kind of thing.”

  “About how long?”

  “Oh, please yourselves—four hundred, eight hundred words—the way it comes.”

  “You haven’t any particular newspapers in view?”

  “Good heavens no, they’re simply hand-outs.”

  “Do you think anyone will want to print them?”

  “I shouldn’t think so. Ninety per cent of our things never see the light. Just the drill of the thing, you know.”

  He strutted out with a brisk parade-ground step. The G.3 and I.O. writer of I.C.(11) exchanged a look, rose simultaneously, and repaired to the libraries of their respective Clubs, to return at five o’clock with their respective contributions, “the drill of the thing” performed.

  62

  JUNE 1940

  To be idle against one’s will, to be inactive in the hour of action, to be a noncombatant when one’s heart is in the battle; if man has a worse fate he did not know it.

  In retrospect reliving those last two years as the liner that was taking him to the Middle East swung slowly southwards, that month of June seemed still the worst thing that in his whole life he had ever known. During the whole of that month, during the feverish days when England was improvising its defences against invasion, when men were training, when men were digging, when every factory was working overtime, it was his fate, through no fault of his own, to contribute not one hour’s work to the joint effort.

  While the battle of Dunkirk was still being fought, he was posted away from the War Office to the G.H.Q. of the new B.E.F. that was hastily being formed. For a week he kicked his heels at Aldershot awaiting orders, while each day driblets of advance parties were sent ahead. For a week he stayed there, listening to contradictory reports. They were going Tuesday, no, they were going Thursday. No, after all it would be Wednesday.

  On the Sunday they were posted back to London, to the Duke of York’s Barracks, Chelsea. No longer as G.H.Q.; as H.Q. L. of C. But by then they were pretty sure that they would never sail. The French had ceased to fight. There had ceased to be a line. One by one the more senior officers were posted to new appointments; only a small residue remained of officers like himself who had had little, if any, training in “Intelligence,” who had been rushed out hurriedly as he had been to France, to fill newly-made appointments, and for whom there were now no vacancies on the home establishment.

  At the end of the first week he applied to rejoin his regiment. The application was never answered, but he was informed unofficially that he must now regard himself as being permanently attached to “I.” On the 30th June the B.E.F. was formally disbanded. On 1st July he was ordered to report to the M. P. Sports Ground, Hendon, in order to keep fit with a mild P.T. Course. He was instructed to take with him, in addition to rubber shoes and shorts, a No. 2 iron and a tennis racket.

  It was not till half-way through July that he was posted to a War Intelligence Course. For six of the most momentous weeks in England’s history he was, that is to say, unable to make one hour’s contribution to his country’s efforts. In comparison with those six weeks, the inaction and the monotony of the nine weeks’ journey fifteen months later round the Cape was a very mild experience.

  Not that he himself was inactive. Much of his life during the last fifteen years had been spent in ships. Much of his writing had been done in ships. It was easy for him to slip back into a familiar routine of alternating work and exercise and relaxation, to think out his stories during his morning’s and his evening’s walk, to settle down to his desk soon after breakfast, to write during the long afternoon which the remainder were “sleeping off,” to think himself to sleep with plans for his next day’s schedule, so that his brain should work while his body slept, so that he should wake fresh to new ideas.

  During the first spring of the war, while he was at Dorchester, he had finished a novel of which he had written the first third during the preceding summer. But for eighteen months he had not only not attempted to write, he had felt no urge to write. No plots had come to him. There had been times when he had wondered anxiously whether he would ever be able to get back to writing. It was a relief to find how easily the old habit of work, how easily plot and dialogue returned the moment he reimposed the discipline of the desk, the moment he was free from the bondage of day-to-day, hour-to-hour responsibilities.

  By the end of the trip he had achieved what he considered a fair peace-time production for two months’ work, in three fulllength short stories, one of which he really liked; that was as good a story, he thought, as he had ever done, the kind of story which he would be in the mood to write once every three years or so, for which the idea would come to him in a flash, which he would write without any real effort in a week, of which he would not need afterwards to alter a single paragraph, the kind of story that made one think that writing was an easy job. A story that he liked so much that he was genuinely sorry that for personal reasons he could not publish it in England, anyhow for several years.

  It was that story that he had written last. The other two were of the kind that reminded him that four hours of writing involved more exacting work than eight hours at an administrative desk. They were both “war stories” as the last had been: one was an air raid story, the other covered that period of June 1940 that in retrospect was to seem to him the worst six weeks
in his life. It was called Cleared Decks.

  63

  ‘CLEARED DECKS.’ A STORY

  ONE

  It happened within thirty seconds; in the time that it takes to walk from a head-waiter’s desk to a table in a window.

  He had arrived late for lunch. The head-waiter pointed out the table.

  “Over there, Captain, in the window, where the Brigadier is.”

  Beside the Brigadier, a girl was sitting, her face was in quarter profile under the brim of a low-fitting hat. He could see no more than a brief outline of nose, chin, mouth, but in the set of her head, in the poise with which her shoulders turned, there was an air of youth, of elegance, of “panache”: a sense of gaiety and independence that made the world seem suddenly a richer place, a place well worth living in. “Thank heavens,” he thought, “they didn’t get me at Dunkirk,” and then just as he was thinking that, she turned, lifted her head, looked across the restaurant. Her eyes met his. By the time he had reached the table, it had happened.

  There were eight guests in all and she was sitting across the table from him.

  She was dark with blue eyes and a magnolia pale skin. She was not pretty. She was too striking to be pretty. A portrait painter could have made her beautiful, but she was not really beautiful. It was not of the looks, though, that he was conscious; not of her looks but of herself: her vitality, her independence, her sense of attack on life. He tried to judge her age. She might be twenty. She might be twenty-eight. He glanced at her left hand. There was no ring on it. He wondered who she was. He wondered what she was doing here. It was one of those miscellaneous ill-assorted parties that Londoners were giving at hazard in the June of 1940, when no one knew what was to happen next, when people felt the need for activity no matter what, the need to see people no matter whom, when the one thing one could not face was to be alone. He made a quick speculative reconnaissance of the table. She did not seem to “belong” to anyone. She was an “odd” girl presumably, asked at the last moment to fill a gap.