His Second War

By Alec Waugh

Alec Waugh, who served in the last war as a regular army officer, was recalled to his regiment in September 1939. After a few months of regimental duties he has filled a succession of Junior Staff appointment, with the B.E.F. in France, in London during the Blitz, with the M.E.F in Syria and Egypt and latterly with the Persia and Iraq command. This book is the narrative of his four years in khaki. It makes no attempt to be sensational, but the range and variety of those experiences have provided ample scope for that capacity to convey character, atmosphere and landscape which has made Alec Waugh so popular a novelist.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Dec 17, 2012
• ISBN: 9781448211081

Alec Waugh

Alec Waugh (1898-1981) was a British novelist born in London and educated at Sherborne Public School, Dorset. Waugh's first novel, The Loom of Youth (1917), is a semi-autobiographical account of public school life that caused some controversy at the time and led to his expulsion. Waugh was the only boy ever to be expelled from The Old Shirburnian Society. Despite setting this record, Waugh went on to become the successful author of over 50 works, and lived in many exotic places throughout his life which later became the settings for some of his texts. He was also a noted wine connoisseur and campaigned to make the 'cocktail party' a regular feature of 1920s social life.

Book preview

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. Even 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.

What was in his valise after all? Three blankets and a sleepingbag. He could always wangle a couple of blankets from the store. A gas cape—what on earth would he want with that? A suit of battle-dress was easily replaced. He had lugged camp kit round with him for two years now and had not needed it since his first week in camp. He had not worn his webbing equipment once. Binoculars, and map cases and drawing-boards, how likely was he to miss them? The socks and shorts, the shirts and handkerchiefs, what were they but reserves? He could stock up when the need came for them. One should travel light. Was that valise really anything more than an encumbrance? Was he not lucky to be rid of it? Was not its loss another reason for bearing gratitude to that later train?

He tried to trace it: he telephoned here and there. He left messages through the E.S.O. with every R.T.O. in the north of England. But in his heart he prayed that it might not turn up in time. His prayer was granted.

9

s.s. —VILLE

He had been posted to a Belgian ship, an eleven-thousand tonner built shortly before the war, for the West African run from Antwerp to the Guinea Coast. She was a luxury liner, the flagship of the line. She carried pre-war advertisements of cruises to South America and aeroplane passages to the Congo. She was decorated with murals of brown rivers and green hills: of natives carrying gourds upon their heads. The notices in the lounges were in Walloon and French.

She had a Belgian captain and a Belgian crew; the same crew and captain that had sailed the ship out of Casablanca on a mid-May morning eighteen months before, to change their course suddenly in mid-channel heading west for Plymouth instead of east for Antwerp. For eighteen months none of the crew had seen their families, few had had any word from them. They were living in the familiar atmosphere of their ship and of the sea: each man was doing exactly what he had been doing in the autumn of 1938. Yet no men’s lives could have been more uprooted. They were living in a void, a vacuum. It was their fate until the war was won, till their country’s liberties had been restored, to travel as strangers between foreign ports, on a succession of blind voyages, not knowing whither they were bound, headed for nowhere, with nowhere to return to, with no port that they could think of as their home. One had the feeling of being on a ghost ship.

10

RIVER MOUTH, 31 SEPTEMBER 1941

In the middle of the third night he woke to the gentle shiver of vibrating engines. We’re off, he thought.

It was a grey cold morning. It had rained in the night. It would be raining again by noon. They were moving slowly up a narrow river. On one side the fields stretched flat and featureless into the obscured outlines of an autumn mist. There were buildings on the other side and men bicycling along a towpath to their work. As the troopship passed they waved at it.

It was a little after seven. Half a dozen fellow-passengers leant in silence against the taffrail. One of them turned away. This gives me the willies, he said, and went below.

11

CHARACTERS ON BOARD

I. O.C. Ship. Tall, thin, cadaverous, with a stiff black moustache, wearing tartan trews, and looking like Groucho Marx, he was a man of fifty with all the last-war medals including the M.C. He was a war-substantive Major, a temporary Lieutenant-Colonel: a local Colonel. On the first evening he paraded the officers in the lounge.

I do not know where we are sailing, he said. But this is my fourth trip. I have normally found that it takes ten weeks to get there and, though this does not concern you, I have found that it takes rather longer to get back.

He had a nice dry humour.

For the first six days at sea, he said, "you will be in danger of attack both from air and submarines. You will therefore sleep in your clothes. That does not mean, of course, that you may not sleep with your pyjamas under your trousers, provided that your trousers are near at hand.

"You are not allowed to bring more than ten pounds aboard with you. A great many of you have brought a great deal more. I am going to assume, however, that you have obeyed the regulations, and the finances of the ship will be run upon that basis. There will be no treating. That does not mean, of course, that if an officer wishes to celebrate his birthday or his wife’s birthday or some friend’s birthday, he may not place a bottle of wine upon the table.

Gambling is not allowed on board. That does not mean that officers may not play a quiet game of bridge or poker or pontoon. I put up a notice ‘No gambling’ because, well, because there must be no gambling.

2. The Count. It was the obvious nickname. He was young, slim, short, dapper, ambassadorial, bilingual. He had an immense Parker fountain pen, an inch and a half in circumference: and a shaving brush which was three inches long when out of use, but whose brush unscrewed and fitted into its own hilt, doubling its length for use. He wrote amusingly libidinous verse and was at work upon a novel of aristocratic life in eighteenth-century Germany. He spent two hours a day polishing his boots and belt. He was always ready to work up a friend’s boots for him provided they had been made out of expensive leather. He wore an eyeglass. In the third week out he shaved off his small black moustache. He asked everyone whether the change suited him. No one however had noticed any change. One had never been conscious of his moustache. One had thought of him as the man with the eyeglass.

3.