The Mule on the Minaret (43 page)

Reid thought quickly. He had Johnson very much upon his mind. His first instinct was to leave Johnson till the Friday; but he wanted to enjoy that dinner. He wanted to hear about London and discuss mutual friends. He did not want to have to employ diplomacy. He wanted to let the talk flow spontaneously. Best deal with Johnson now.

‘As a matter of fact, there is,' he said. ‘There's a man who came out in the same convoy that I did. A Sandhurst contemporary of mine.' He explained the position in which Johnson found himself. Stallard frowned.

‘Would he be any good at our kind of work?'

‘On the administrative side he would. He knows his way about regulations. He could wangle allowances and cars; that kind of thing.'

‘I see.' He paused, reflecting. ‘You've nothing for him in Syria?'

‘It's a very small organization.'

‘And here in Cairo they've got more bodies than they can really use. Their establishment needs cutting down. The only opening I can see is in Paiforce—the new Persia and Iraq command. We are extending ourselves there.' He explained briefly the situation. ‘Iraq has been an independent country for ten years, but we had certain treaty rights there: an Air Force station, thirty miles from Baghdad at Habbaniya; we had technical advisers and a military mission. We had an intelligence organization, an Air Force one, and when the Rashid Ali revolution came along, it was India—the Tenth Army—that took over. It was all very tentative; we waited to see which way the cat would jump, too many irons in too many fires, but now with Persia under our control, America in the war and a kind of condominium arranged in Tehran with the Russians, Paiforce is going to grow. Yes, I think we could manage with a regular army officer in administration. Johnson, you say. Tell him
to ring me any morning between nine and ten. I'll do my best for him, and I look forward to Friday. I won't ask anybody else. At the Mohamet Ali Club, eight-thirty.'

Relax and enjoy the peace of it, she had said. He did just that; as far as he could, that was to say. He had made his contribution to the conference, now he could accept ‘the glow of after-battle wine.' Cairo had much to offer: golf at the Gezira Club; Groppi's pastries and iced coffee; Martinis at the Turf Club and the knowledge that at any moment he might be running into someone he had known for half a lifetime. There was also the sense of victory in the air. The Eighth Army was sweeping past Benghazi on the way to Tripoli. After three years, first of stalemate and then defeat, the tide had turned; and it was from Cairo that the direction came. Cairo made fun of itself, talked of the ‘gaberdine swine'; wrote Ballades, ‘Up the Gezira, up the Continental'; yet Cairo was the dynamo that drove the war machine. Cairo in the late autumn of 1942 was the most dramatic city in the world. Its atmosphere was contagious, and yet all the time Reid had a sense for himself, of profound unreality. Beirut without Diana. And it was not simply being without Diana during a few weeks. It was Beirut without her permanently, where not only the office, the work in it, the files, but every street and every restaurant in it reminded him of her. He had to reconstruct a life without her, but how could he do that when her ghost was at his side at every crossroads. It was more than he could take. At the moment he was too dazed to know what was happening. He would come out of that daze, but when he did, it must be somewhere that held no memories.

The Friday came and Stallard rose to address the final session.

‘In my speech of welcome, I was very brief,' he said. ‘I wanted to hear what you all had to say. I didn't want, at the start, to impose London's point of view on yours. I knew that I had more to learn from you than you could possibly have to learn from me. The man on the spot knows best. I have been very impressed with the appreciations you have each of you made of your particular situations and problems. In particular I was impressed by the distinction that Major Reid drew between his position in Syria and the Lebanon and the position of other branches in Palestine, Cyprus, Egypt. He presented an admirable over-all picture of the security situation here in Middle East. But that does not mean that I have not learnt a great deal from every
one of you, and we in London will be enormously helped by the deliberations of this conference. I hope that you will find us in the future, I won't say more sympathetic—we have always been that, I hope—but more intuitive in our approach to and in our assessment of your problems. As I said, I have learnt more from you than you could possibly learn from me. At the same time there is something I can give you, and that is a global picture of this war; or rather I can show you the part that Middle East fills in the global picture of the war. The war is directed from Washington and London. That you must bear in mind. Even though at the moment Middle East is the most active area in the war, it is only a part of the war; it is a preparation for the major campaigns that will be launched later on in Europe. Middle East will then play, I will not say a subsidiary role, but at least an ancillary role in the main strategy. But for the next six months at least it is the Middle East that will make the headlines, and by next spring the Axis should have been driven out of North Africa. I do not think that there is any doubt they will be. We have, for the first time, an immense superiority in men and in material; and the inexhaustible resources of America are now being tapped. Winston has said, “This is not the beginning of the end; but it is the end of the beginning.” A new war is beginning and in that new war our security forces will have a new role.

‘Major Reid said very pertinently that in Syria and Lebanon a network had been finally created, but that he was not yet clear as to the best use to make of it. He presented this fact modestly in support of his contention that the other offices had a long start of him. But all of you are in the same boat really. You have each of you a network and you have to put it to a different use. We are now on the attack. We have ceased to be on the defensive. We are no longer protecting ourselves against attack. We no longer need to consider the danger of being overrun by an invasion. During the last two years we have given a great deal of time to the organization of a scorched earth policy and the creation of guerrilla bands to harrass back areas and L. of C. There is no longer any need for that. We are no longer trying to discover the enemy's intentions. We are trying to conceal our intentions from him, to mislead him and to misinform him. In one sense our need for internal security is the greater. We must conceal the presence and the movements of troops. Our order of battle is even more important than it was a year ago. We have to be on our guard against sabotage, particularly
in Paiforce where we have the oilfields of Kirkuk and the refinery of Abadan. There must be no relaxation in postal censorship. At the same time we must not confine ourselves to the defensive. We must be active. We must not only conceal our intentions from the enemy, we must mislead him as to our intentions. Deception. That is our motto for the immediate future. Get the enemy guessing and keep him guessing. We have the initiative. He must never know where we are going to strike. Will Turkey join us and will we launch an attack through the Balkans? Where shall we open the second front or the third front: in Italy, in Greece, in the South of France? As long as the enemy is uncertain of our plans he will have to disperse his troops. His defences will be thinly held.

‘That indeed, gentlemen, is the chief message that I bring to you. Do not relax conventional security, but make deception your middle name.'

For several weeks now the roof garden of the Mohamet Ali Club had been closed. The days were warm but it was chilly in the evening. The high-ceilinged dining-room was ornate with Edwardian decoration. Only a few high ranking British officers were members; it was patronized by Embassy officials, Egyptian notables, and a sprinkling of French refugees. Apart from the uniforms there was no sign that a war was being fought a few hundred miles away. Stallard studied the menu for several minutes. ‘You order what you like. I'm looking for what I can't get in England. Anyhow, we'll have champagne; that goes with anything.'

‘I had a bottle of Krug 1928 at the Turf Club the other night.'

‘You won't get any here. Too many of the members know what's what.'

‘Can you get it still in London?'

‘If you know your way about. I do.'

‘How is London now?'

‘Dreary; and it's going to get drearier. Nothing's happening; and nothing is likely to happen for a while. They talk about the second front next year. I'm not in the know, but I don't think there's the slightest chance of it till ‘44. It's very hard to keep up the spirit of the troops under those conditions. And all the time there are more shortages. Things are wearing out. Clothes look shabby. It's getting harder to get anything done. The food is dull,
and there's not enough of it. You can only get a meal in a black market restaurant, and only the few can afford that. Liquor's getting scarce. Every restaurant is crowded; the streets are full of foreign troops. Everyone's overworked. They have to wait in queues to get to their offices and get back from their offices. Fire-watching and the Home Guard make for a corporate spirit, that I will concede. Class barriers are going down, the blacksmith and the squire meet on equal terms; but it's all a wearing away of nerves and patience. You're lucky to be out here, in many ways.'

‘Would you come out here, if you could?'

‘I wouldn't, but then I'm lucky. I'm having a very interesting war. I meet more important people than I did in peacetime. I'm in the centre of things.'

They continued to talk of England. It was barely fifteen months since he had left, yet to Reid his life there seemed immeasurably remote. He could scarcely believe that the familiar life was going on there much the same.

They talked about personalities. They had not, in fact, a great many acquaintances in common, but they knew about a great number of the same people. He had heard about or met casually a great many of Stallard's friends, and vice versa. It was very true, Reid thought, that England was so small, its social life so interknit that everyone knew or knew about everybody else. He had once pointed out in a lecture that English society often divided itself into the King's set and the Prince of Wales' set; and this cleavage could be observed even in the unaffluent group that was not within range of Court circles; the improvident Bohemian on the one hand and the law-abiding conformist on the other. Two apexes widening to broad bases. In the same way the governing class in London—the word establishment did not then exist—was divided between two types of man: the type that belonged to White's and the type that belonged to the Athenaeum. He and Stallard belonged to different worlds, yet they were members of the same family; in separate pyramids but on the same level; opposite numbers to each other to that extent. It was a relief to meet again someone on that level. He had been able to so seldom since he sailed for the Middle East.

‘Oh, I forgot to mention,' Stallard said, ‘that fellow Johnson. I've fixed him up. He should be all right, shouldn't he?'

‘I don't see why not. Do you?'

‘No,' Stallard hesitated. ‘One can't pick and choose these days.
Besides,' once again he hesitated, ‘one should back the kind of person that one knows.'

They looked at one another. They said nothing. They could talk in shorthand.

‘He's going to Paiforce, is he?'

Stallard nodded. ‘As far as we're concerned, Paiforce is developing. As you know, Paiforce was formed last summer when the Germans were advancing into Russia and it looked as though they might swing southwards through the Caucasus. There's no danger of that now. They were stopped at Stalingrad, and most of the troops who were rushed to Paiforce have been withdrawn to the Western Desert. There's a new development there: aid to Russia through the Persian Gulf. The Americans are creating P.G.C., Persian Gulf Command, at Khoramshar; we've got our base at the Shatt-al-Arab. The security of those bases is of first importance; and so is the security of Iraq and Persia. We don't want unrest on the L. of C. Oh, yes, Paiforce is going to be exceedingly important for the next two years, at least.'

It was the opportunity Reid had been waiting for. ‘Do you think that there'd be a place for me in our outfit there?'

‘For you?'

‘For me.'

‘But I thought you were getting on so well with Nigel.'

‘I am, but there's a personal equation. I've very strong personal reasons for wanting to put quite a stretch of desert between myself and the Levant.'

‘I see.' Stallard looked at him, ruminatively. ‘How'd Nigel take this?'

‘He'd understand, the way I put it to him.'

‘In that case...' Stallard hesitated again, his forehead creased. ‘You're actually the last person that I've thought of moving. You and Nigel were a team. You were the complement of one another. But if you want to move, if you've a personal reason for wanting to move that Nigel would understand, which wouldn't leave him disgruntled... and, as a matter of fact, we are increasing our establishment and the chap I was proposing to send as G.2—he's a sound man, of course, but you'd be infinitely better. I was most impressed by your address on Monday. You are in the top grade, after all. But apart from that, he's from Cyprus. He's not in the Arab picture and a lot of the work in Baghdad is along the same lines as your work in Beirut—as regards Turkey certainly. I see it
as a triangle: Beirut, Ankara, Baghdad. I'd be delighted to have you there; provided you can make it right with Nigel.'

‘I'd prefer to tell him myself, if you don't mind.'

‘Mind? I'd be furious if you didn't. Yes, you can take my word for it, I'm delighted about this. Next year we'll have our conference in Beirut.'

*   *   *

Reid had talked lightly enough to Stallard of how easily he could explain to Farrar that he needed on personal grounds a transfer to Baghdad. He had visualized himself bringing up the subject at the close of a cordial dinner at the Cercle. But it seemed a rather different matter when he was sitting at the office at nine o'clock on a Monday morning, with Farrar asking him about the conference.