A Traveller's Life (11 page)

We came to anchorage off the narrow entrance to Queenstown under a couple of topsails and staysails. It was twelve o'clock ship's time on Saturday, 10 June 1939, and we were ninety-one days out from Port Victoria, having sailed more than fifteen thousand miles.

The Pilot told us that we were first home, and although we did not know it at the time, we had won the Last Grain Race.

When war broke out in the autumn of 1939 it proved remarkably difficult to join the armed forces. All the Royal Navy could offer me was the possibility of signing on for eight years as a rating, so I went to work on a farm near Salcombe in Devonshire and looked after an enormous army of pigs, until one by one all the girls went off to the war in various capacities and a dreadful air of sadness descended on the place. It was as if all the people I had known in that wonderful summer before the war were dead or had never existed. So I returned to London and eventually succeeded in joining the London Scottish, a territorial volunteer regiment affiliated to the Gordon Highlanders, as a private soldier. In order to be accepted it was necessary to prove that at least one parent was of Scottish descent, and this was how my mother, who was born of Devonian stock in Pimlico, London, came to be born, on paper, in Tobermory, Mull.

In the summer of 1940, with the French military alliance palpably collapsing, I was sent much against my inclination (for I enjoyed being a private soldier), to the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, to be trained as an officer. The RMC had only recently become OCTU, an Officer Cadet Training Unit, and the
non-commissioned staff referred meaningfully on every possible occasion to a golden age ‘when the gennulmen cadets were 'ere', although the non-commissioned staff still continued to refer to us as ‘gennulmen', which was rather confusing. At the conclusion of the course I found that I had passed out with an ‘A'.

It was a help that before the final written examinations one cadet had succeeded in obtaining printer's proofs of the papers, which he generously disseminated among the rest of the company; we all contributed to the purchase price! Perhaps the purchase was connived at. Whether it was or not, our officers, warrant officers and non-commission officers on the teaching staff all basked in the reflected glory of a company that had done so well, so everyone was satisfied.

In the autumn of 1941 I arrived in the Middle East from India. There I joined the Special Boat Section, whose job it was to land from submarines on hostile coasts in order to carry out acts of sabotage against railway systems, attack enemy airfields, and put ashore and take off secret agents. Members of the SBS had also made sorties into enemy harbours with the intention of sticking limpets (magnetic mines) on ships at anchor and blowing them up.

My interview for this job took place on board HMS
Medway
in the harbour at Alexandria, the depot ship of the First Submarine Flotilla which provided the SBS with transportation to its target areas. The interviewer was Roger Courtney, the founder of the Special Boat Section, an astonishing officer who had been a white hunter in East Africa and had canoed down the Nile. Over his desk was displayed a notice which read ARE YOU TOUGH? IF SO GET OUT. I NEED BUGGERS WITH INTELLIGENCE. This notice made me fear that I would not be accepted, but I was.

I spent the next few weeks at the Combined Operations Centre at Kabrit on the Suez Canal, learning to handle folboats and
explosives, how to sink shipping, and how to blow up aircraft and trains or otherwise render them inoperative. Learning to sink ships involved swimming at night in the Bitter Lakes – which lived up to their name in the depths of winter – covered with grease and wearing long woollen naval issue underwear, and pushing a limpet towards whichever merchant ship lying at anchor had been chosen as the target, the limpet being supported by an inflated car inner tube with a net inside it. This was Britain's primitive equivalent to the highly sophisticated two-man submarines of the Italian Tenth Light Flotilla, which in December that year succeeded in entering the harbour at Alexandria and exploding charges under the battleships
Queen Elizabeth
and
Valiant
. Both ships were disabled and put out of action for months, seriously affecting the balance of sea power in the Mediterranean.

On my first practice attempt I was sent to attack a Dutch merchant ship at anchor in one of the Bitter Lakes. I reached it, thinking myself undetected in brilliant moonlight but wondering how anyone on board could possibly fail to hear the noise made by my chattering teeth. To set the limpet in its correct position on the ship's side it was necessary to dive deeply and as I did so I found myself enveloped in the contents of an entire Dutch lavatory pan which someone with a grotesque sense of fun and a remarkable sense of timing had released by pulling the chain.

‘Better luck next time,
mynheer
,' a voice from the deck said as I came up spluttering. ‘I should joose a dark night, if I was you, and dry not to make so much noise, even if it is so cold.'

Next door to our camp at Kabrit was David Stirling with his SAS, Special Air Service. As his success and power increased, David sometimes gave the impression that he was contemplating a takeover bid for SBS. We used to make use of some of his training facilities – he had a testy genius in charge of his explosives
department, a Royal Engineer called Bill Cumper. He also had a lofty tower from which embryonic parachutists were expected to launch themselves parachuteless, and they also had to jump off the back of trucks going at about thirty miles an hour. His camp was definitely no place for the chicken-hearted. There was also a band of anarchists from Barcelona whom no one knew what to do with. They had murdered so many Egyptian taximen and buried them in the sand, instead of paying their fares like any normal persons, that it was now almost impossible to get a taxi from Kabrit to Ismailia and back during the hours of darkness, which was a bore.

One day, having climbed this tower to admire the extensive view and counting myself lucky that I was not called upon to jump from it, I was about to descend by the way I had come when I heard the voice of one of David's sergeants from far below say in Caterham
¹
accents, ‘No officer or man, sir, who has ever climbed that tower, has ever walked down the stairs! Once up there you have to jump, sir!'

So I jumped. I had no choice, and because I had not learned the basic facts about parachuting (which was not a condition of membership of the SBS), I hurt myself.

That winter, as part of a detachment of SBS, I was sent to Tobruk to operate with a flotilla of motor-torpedo-boats. Tobruk was extremely noisy. The Germans were intent on rendering it unusable as a supply port for the Eighth Army, and each afternoon Stukas, sometimes in large numbers, would come screaming down out of the sun with their sirens going full blast and with everything in and around the harbour firing flat out at them. In these
moments, aboard one of the American-built MTBs which were loaded to the brim with three thousand gallons of 100 octane fuel and 21” torpedoes, or on board the flotilla's minute depot ship, one felt curiously exposed.

While we were in Tobruk four of us received orders to report without delay to the Directorate of Combined Operations at GHQ in Cairo; its Director was an excellent sailor, popular with the SBS, named Admiral Maund. We reached it late in the afternoon of the day we set off from Tobruk, after a hair-raising drive of more than four hundred miles down the desert road, or what was left of it, in a thirty-hundredweight Bedford truck. We then went off to eat ice-creams at Groppi's Café before reporting to the DCO, in case we were being sent back to Europe in one of the high-flying Liberators (which at that time provided a regular service between Britain and the Middle East), to sink the
Prinz Eugen
with our limpet mines and would not have another chance.

At the DCO we were only asked if we possessed prismatic compasses, and when we said that we did we were told to report to the Naval Officer in Charge, NOIC, at Beirut without delay. Before the shops shut in Cairo that evening I bought two guide books, one to Palestine, the other to Syria and the Lebanon, and
The Quest for Corvo
, by A. J. A. Symons.

We drove all night in turns – it was a close fit for all four of us in the cab of the truck – stopping to doze uneasily for a couple
of hours during the interminable crossing of the Sinai Desert, which was even more perishingly cold at night than the Western Desert. Early on the morning of the second day out from Tobruk, we arrived at Gaza: we had covered about eight hundred miles since setting out from Tobruk, which was not bad, considering the terrible state of the desert road.

Then we were in Palestine and suddenly it was spring: the countryside in the coastal plain was a green paradise with burgeoning fields of wheat and barley; meadows and gentle hillsides were scattered with wild flowers; and everywhere there were groves of lemons and oranges, of which we bought whole box-loads, afraid that this other Eden might be only a temporary phenomenon and might be succeeded by yet another dusty wilderness as we drove northwards. After the Western Desert, where it was still winter, after Sinai, where we had lain shivering in the cold grey hours before the dawn in the duffel coats we had wangled from the navy, to be in Palestine was to be born again. Armed with the guide book to Palestine, I was able to persuade my companions to make a number of short detours from the main road in order to visit places, some of which I had learned about in Divinity at school, none of which I had ever expected to set eyes on. Thus I saw Askalon of the Philistines, whose goddess was the mermaid, Ashtoreth. Conquered and despoiled innumerable times by Egyptians, Assyrians, Jews, Macedonians, Persians and Romans, re-edified by Herod who was born there, the city was finally demolished by Crusaders and Saracens. By the time we arrived, ancient Askalon was nothing but some heaps of stones and broken pillars scattered among the mimosa and groves of pine and citrus on a cliff, below which the Mediterranean crashed on a then deserted shore.

Next door to it was Asdod, another of the five cities of the Philistines (the others were Gaza, Gath and Ekron), where they
had worshipped Dagon, a god of fertility in the form of a merman, an idol with the head of a man and the tail of a fish. The Egyptians had besieged it unsuccessfully for twenty-nine years. Now there was even less of ancient Asdod than there was of ancient Askalon.

More extensive were the ruins of Caesarea Palestinae,
¹
established by King Herod to be the seaport of his inland capital, Samaria. By this time, as a result of haggling for boxes of oranges, shopping in Tel Aviv, which I thought had a distinctly Eastern European air about it (although I had never been to Eastern Europe), visiting ruins, in fact generally behaving in a thoroughly unmilitary way, some of the impetus had gone out of our expedition.

When we reached Caesarea the sun was setting, drenching everything, including the remains of a Roman aqueduct which stood among the dunes that had engulfed what remained of the ancient city, in a brilliant ochrous yellow light. Waves were breaking over the remnants of the ancient harbour works, and down on the foreshore where the air was full of flying spume, a man on a camel, dressed in rags which were streaming in the wind, was the only other human being in sight. It was here that I began rooting about underfoot with a stick, turning up potsherds and iridescent fragments of what may have been Roman or Byzantine glass. In the meantime, whoever was driving kept the motor running and a brother officer shouted as he had done all day whenever I had found a ruin to my taste, ‘For Christ's sake get a move on, Eric, we can't stay here all bloody night!' while the sergeant cried rather more plaintively, ‘Oh, do come on, sir!'

That night we slept at Zikhron Ya'aqov, a village on the southern flanks of Mount Carmel. It was surrounded by vineyards planted by Baron Edmond de Rothschild and was what I imagined, aided by memories of photographs in
The Children's Colour Book of Lands and Peoples
, a Central European Jewish village might have been like before the war. That evening, sitting there in the twilight with the bats flittering overhead, drinking the excellent red wine, and eating the flat bread and a substantial soup called
kreplach
made with chopped meat and dumplings, the Western Desert, with its graveyards of bombed, shelled and blown up vehicles, and its huge, lethal minefields, seemed far away.

The next day, the third since leaving Tobruk, we drove on northwards. At Acre we looked down into a dungeon in which the despot Jezzar Pasha, who had successfully defended the place against Napoleon, used to pelt his prisoners with cannon balls through a hole in the ceiling. It was a tough campaign. In the course of it Napoleon ordered the mass executions of prisoners by firing squads. As we flashed by on what had been the Roman road to Syria we saw milestones, inscriptions recording innumerable wars and conquests, fragments of altars, gaping catacombs, plundered sarcophagi and other ruins of the past.

One of these remains, at which I was allowed a brief stop, was a sarcophagus said to have contained the remains of King Hiram of Tyre, a splendid Phoenician tomb chest with a pyramidical cover, set on a pediment ten feet high. Another even more fleeting halt was made for my benefit at Alexandroscena, Alexander's tent, where the Macedonian camped while conducting the siege of Tyre. There was no tent any more, only a now disused
caravanserai
for the reception of travellers, their animals and goods. The only visible remain of ancient Alexandroscena was a spring gushing in a rock basin. Yet it was a magic place, and one at which I would have dearly liked to linger.

Tyre, captured by Alexander after a seven-month siege, was another truly ruinous ruin. As was Caesarea, most of Tyre was covered with drifts of sand, and the most visible remains were numbers of huge pillars lying where they had either been thrown down or collapsed of their own accord. Even comparatively modern remnants of Tyre were scanty. Once there was a great basilica, built by the Venetians on the site of an earlier one and supposed to contain the remains of Frederick Barbarossa, who was drowned in 1190 at the mouth of a river on the coast of southern Turkey while on his way to the Third Crusade. Now all that remained was a crumbling wall on some waste ground on the outskirts of the town, used by some local inhabitants and a horde of mangy dogs as a convenient place to relieve themselves. Most of its stones, as those of Caesarea and Askalon, had been carted away to build Acre.

Ancient Sidon, older than ancient Tyre, was even more ruined, in the sense that it was even more effectively buried beneath Crusader, Muslim and other remains. Its streets were narrow trenches spanned by arches and full of Arabic-speaking Jews, but it was surrounded by delightful gardens in which oranges, lemons, apricots, medlars and almonds all came to maturity in due season. Offshore on an island was a ruined Crusader castle, the Castle of the Sea.

‘Oh, do get a move on!' the others said, or words to that effect. There was no time to see the necropolis of ancient Sidon, no time for a detour to see the monastery which had been the home of Lady Hester Stanhope and the place where she was buried. In less than an hour we reached Beirut and, together with other SBS who had already arrived, received from the NOIC the details of Operation Aluite.

To us Operation Aluite seemed pretty defeatist. It implied that a German advance into Syria through Turkey, a recurrent British
nightmare, one brought on by the continued presence of von Papen as German ambassador at Ankara, would be followed inevitably by the Allied evacuation of Syria and the Lebanon, probably that of Palestine, and eventually, by implication, that of Egypt.

In an endeavour to stem such an invasion a great fortress was being built near the port of Tripoli, north of Beirut, where the northern arm of the Iraqi pipeline came in. In the event of such an invasion being successful, it would be the task of the SBS, working from Cyprus, if Cyprus had not itself fallen, to act as guerrillas and sabotage the German lines of communication. In anticipation of such a disaster, we were to sound every inlet in which a clandestine landing could be made, to map the hinterland leading up to the main road and the railway, and to make an assessment of every bridge and other important installations with a view to blowing them up, on the two hundred and fifty miles of coast between the Turkish-Syrian frontier and the Lebanese-Palestinian frontier, north of Haifa. We were also to seek out suitable hiding places for caches of explosive and ammunition. All this had to be done without the knowledge of our French allies in these parts, which seemed impossible.

In order to assist in the concealment of such dumps, an enormous quantity of artificial, lightweight rock of the same colour and texture as that found on the coasts of Syria and the Lebanon had been manufactured from papier-mâché. What conclusion a wandering goatherd or even a German
feldwebel
would come to when he found himself walking on artificial rocks made from papier-mâché will never be known as they were never put to the test.

‘Personally, I think the whole thing's rather a waste of time,' the NOIC said, ‘although you should have fun. Nevertheless I don't envy you. As you know, the Free French have only recently taken over the country from Vichy and some of the permanent
members of the administration are thoroughly untrustworthy and hostile and loyal to what they call “La France de la Metropole”. The coastguards are said to be particularly trigger happy. If they shoot at you I should shoot back and ask questions afterwards. Oh, and take plenty of rubbers and pencils.'

That evening, together with another officer from SBS, I put up at the St George Hotel on the waterfront where we met a couple of extremely forward Greek girls who were living there. They told us that they had managed to escape from Athens when the Germans moved in and had ended up at Beirut. Soon we were on terms of some intimacy with them and we arranged to see them again when we returned to the hotel at the end of the following week.

The following morning the four of us, including the sergeant who had said ‘Oh, do come on, sir!' in such a pained voice, now himself transformed into an enthusiastic ruin-fancier, left Beirut in the thirty-hundredweight truck to start work on mapping the section of coast south of the Turkish frontier, while others began on the coast south of Beirut. We had been given enough money to enable us to live off the country without having recourse to other military organizations, so much in fact that we decided to take with us a Sten gun as well as pistols, just in case there were robbers about.

All that day we drove north, crossing the Nahr el Kelb, the Dog River, guarded in ancient times by a savage dog with a bark so loud that it could be heard six miles off. In its gorge, where it entered the sea, we saw inscribed slabs recording the passage of Egyptian Pharaohs, Assyrians, Babylonians, Greeks and Romans, the Emperor Caracalla and the Third Gallic Legion, British and French troops in July 1918, and a triumphant one recording the entry of the French into Damascus in July 1920 when they expelled King Feisal and the Arabs. Seeing these great
steles
I realized that
we were just another band of marauding soldiers. We saw the ruins of ancient Byblos, the principal city of the Giblites, claimed by an ancient Greek, Philo, to be the oldest town in the world, with a square Crusader castle above it on a hill, ruins among which we later lived for some days while making our survey.

On the outskirts of Tripoli work was proceeding on the construction of the fortress, which looked pretty feeble to us, and all along the coast hordes of men were working away on the Naquara – Beirut – Tripoli railway which we were already making plans to destroy.

Early in the afternoon, four and a half days from Tobruk, we reached the outskirts of Latakia. By now all of us were suffering from an accumulation of fatigue. There, travelling at nearly sixty miles an hour, whoever was driving encountered a horse-drawn vehicle lumbering towards us on the crown of the road which he would have almost certainly have been able to avoid if whoever was sitting next to him had not momentarily lost his head and grabbed the wheel. As a result we crashed clean through the parapet of a bridge – which, fortunately as it turned out, had the effect of slowing us up – and down into what turned out to be, equally fortunately perhaps, the dried-up bed of a river, where the vehicle performed a somersault before coming to rest lying on its left side with the only available exit door on the driver's side jammed tight, its engine still running merrily, and its windscreen unbroken.

At this moment none of us was sufficiently in command of his faculties to switch the engine off but fortunately, before the truck had time to burst into flames, we were rescued by members of an Australian gunner unit who had witnessed the accident. They broke the windscreen and one of them switched off the engine with the words, ‘You jokers ought to have a sign out, “Frying tonight”!'