Officers and Gentlemen

  ‘Eddie’s tight.’

  ‘We’re both tight as owls.’

  ‘We’ve got to take some girls dancing, but we’re too tight.’

  ‘Why not lie down for a bit?’ said Claire.

  ‘Exactly what I thought. That’s why I brought Eddie here – to have a bath.’

  ‘Might drown,’ said Eddie.

  ‘Charming girls,’ said Bertie. ‘Husbands away at the war. Must sober up.’

  ‘Sleep would be the thing.’

  ‘Sleep and bath and then dance with the girls. I’ll get some rooms.’

  ‘It’s odd,’ said Ivor Claire, ‘I feel absolutely no urge to get tight now I’m allowed to. In that ship I hardly drew a sober breath.’

  ‘Let’s walk.’

  They sauntered out into the town.

  ‘I suppose one or more of those absurd stars is called the Southern Cross,’ said Claire, gazing up into the warm and brilliant night.

  ‘It’s the kind of thing one ought to know, I suppose, for finding one’s way in the dark.’

  ‘The dark,’ said Claire, ‘the black-out. That’s the worst thing about the ship. It’s the worst thing about the whole war.’

  Here everything was ablaze. Merchandise quite devoid of use or beauty shone alluringly in the shop windows. The streets were full of Hookforce. Car-loads of soldiers drove slowly past laden with the spoils of farms and gardens, baskets of oranges and biblical bunches of grapes.

  ‘Fair-day,’ said Guy.

  Then there was a sterner sound. The soldiers on the pavement, reluctant to lose their holiday mood, edged into doorways and slipped down side turnings. A column of threes in full marching order, arms swinging high, eyes grimly fixed to the front, tramped down the main street towards the docks. Guy and Claire saluted the leading officer, a glaring, fleshless figure.

  ‘B Commando,’ said Guy. ‘Colonel Prentice.’

  ‘Awfully mad.’

  ‘I was told that he always wears the stockings his great-great-grandfather had at Inkermann. Can that be true?’

  ‘I heard it. I think so.’

  ‘Enclosing every thin man, there’s a fat man demanding elbow-room.’

  ‘No doubt he’s enjoying himself in his own fashion. One way and another, Guy, Cape Town seems to have provided each of us with whatever we wanted.’

  ‘Ali Baba’s lamp.’

  ‘We needed it. Where to now?’

  ‘The club?’

  ‘Too matey. Back to the hotel.’

  But when they got there Claire said: ‘Too many soldiers.’

  ‘Perhaps there’s a garden.’

  There was. Guy and Claire sat on a wicker seat looking across an empty illumined tennis lawn. Claire lit a cigarette. He smoked rather seldom. When he did so, it was with an air of conscious luxury.

  ‘What a voyage,’ he said. ‘Nearly over now. How one longed for a torpedo at times. I used to stand on deck at night and imagine one, a beautiful streak of foam, a bang, and then the heads all round bobbing up for the third time and myself, the sole survivor, floating gently away to some nearby island.’

  ‘Wishful thinking. They cram you into open boats, you go mad from drinking sea-water.’

  ‘What a voyage,’ said Claire again. ‘We’re told, and we tell our men, that we have to hold Egypt so as to protect the Suez Canal. And to reach Suez we go half-way to Canada and Trinidad. And when we do get there we shall find the war’s over. According to the chap I had lunch with, they can’t build cages quick enough to hold the Italian prisoners coming in. I dare say we shall be turned on to guard duties.’

  This was February 1941. English tanks were cruising far west of Benghazi; bankers, labelled’AMGOT’, were dining nightly at the Mohamed Ali Club in Cairo, and Rommel, all unknown, was even then setting up his first headquarters in Africa.

  Of the nine weeks which had passed since X Commando sailed from Mugg, five only had been spent on the high seas. In the war of attrition which raged ceaselessly against the human spirit, anticlimax was a heavy weapon. The Commando, for all the rude haste and trickery of departure, sailed exultingly. By noon on the second day rumour had it that the rendezvous with the navy was off. Rumour was right. At the second dawn they sailed into Scapa Flow and lay-to beside the sister ships which carried their fellow Commandos. There had been sinkings and diversions and counter-orders; a German capital ship was haunting the Western Approaches. Brigadier Ritchie-Hook appeared and for a month his force relentlessly ‘biffed’ the encircling hills, night after long night. He brought with him a Halberdier Brigade Major who instructed Guy in the otiose duties of Intelligence Officer. Guy chalked the nightly wanderings of the Commandos on the talc face of his map and recorded them next day in the War Diary. On these exercises the Brigadier seldom spent long at his ‘battle headquarters’. Guy and the Brigade Major shivered alone on the beaches, while Ritchie-Hook roamed the moors alone with a haversack full of ‘thunder-flashes’.

  Guy was sorrowfully conscious that his old hero cut a slightly absurd figure in the eyes of X Commando. They were quick with injurious nicknames in that group. Someone dubbed Ritchie-Hook ‘the Widow Twankey’ and the preposterous name stuck.

  Trimmer and his section were absent. They had momentarily slipped through one of the cracks in the military floor.

  Hookforce remained at twelve hours’ notice for service overseas. There was no leave; no private communication with the shore. Christmas and New Year passed in dire gloom. The RN officers stood aloof from the RNVR, touchy young men in beards. The bar, which might have been a place of sympathy, proved the centre of contention, for the navy were limited by rank in their wine bills, while the army were not. Below decks there was no wet canteen and gross rumours circulated there of orgies among the officers. It was not a happy ship. At length they sailed on their huge detour. Brigadier and Brigade Major returned for further conferences in London, to join them by air in the Middle East. Trimmer and his sappers arrived at Hoy two days later.

  ‘I wonder,’ said Guy,’ were we rather bloody to the navy? *

  ‘They are such awful pip-squeaks,’ said Claire without animosity. ‘The little ones with beards particularly.’

  ‘It didn’t help when Bertie referred to the Captain as “that booby on the roof”.’

  ‘The name stuck. It didn’t help, of course, when the Pay-Master took Eddie’s place in the ward-room and Eddie told him he didn’t expect to find a ticket collector in a restaurant car.’

  ‘Eddie was tight that evening.’

  ‘Colonel Tommy messing with the Booby-on-the-Roof had no idea what we had to suffer.’

  ‘He always took our side when there were complaints.’

  ‘Well, naturally. We are his chaps. The pip-squeaks complained altogether too much.’

  ‘The sergeants have been awful.’

  ‘All successful mutinies have been led by NCOs.’

  ‘I shouldn’t be surprised if Corporal-Major Ludovic turned out to be a communist.’

  ‘He’s all right,’ said Claire, automatically defending his own man.

  ‘His eyes are horrible.’

  ‘They’re colourless, that’s all.’

  ‘Why does he wear bedroom slippers all day?’

  ‘He says it’s his feet.’

  ‘Do you believe him?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘He’s a man of mystery. Was he ever a trooper?’

  ‘I suppose so, once.’

  ‘He looks like a dishonest valet.’

  ‘Yes, perhaps he was that too. He hung about Knightsbridge Barracks and no one knew what to make of him. He just reported at the beginning of the war as a reservist and claimed the rank of Corporal of Horse. His name was on the roll all right, but no one seemed to know anything about him, so naturally they wished him on me when the troop formed.’

  ‘He was the éminence grise behind the complaint that “Captain’s rounds” violated the sanctity of the sergeants’ mess.’

  ‘So they do. I won
der,’ said Claire, changing the subject delicately, ‘how the other Commandos got on with their sailors?’

  ‘Quite well, I believe. Prentice makes his officers keep to the same drink ration as the navy.’

  ‘I bet that’s against King’s Regulations.’ Then he added: ‘I shouldn’t be surprised if I didn’t get rid of Ludovic when we reach Egypt.’

  They sat in silence for some time. Then Guy said:

  ‘It’s getting cold. Let’s go inside and forget the ship for one evening.’

  They found Bertie and Eddie in the bar.

  ‘We’re quite sober now,’ said Eddie.

  ‘So we’re just having one drink before joining the girls. Good evening, Colonel.’

  Tommy had entered behind them.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘well. I thought I’d find some of my officers here.’

  ‘A drink, Colonel?’

  ‘Yes, indeed. I’ve had the hell of a day at Simonstown and I’ve got some rather disturbing news.’

  ‘I suppose,’ said Claire,’ we’re going to turn round now and sail back.’

  ‘Not that, but about our Brigadier.’

  ‘La veuve?’

  ‘He and the Brigade Major. Their aeroplane left Brazzaville last week and hasn’t been heard of since. It seems Hookforce may have to change its name.’

  ‘Your friend, Guy,’ said Eddie.

  ‘I love him. He’ll turn up.’

  ‘He’d better hurry if he’s going to command our operation.’

  ‘Who’s in charge now?’

  ‘It seems I am, at the moment.’

  ‘Ali Baba’s lamp,’ said Claire.

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  Later that night Guy and Tommy and Claire returned to the ship. Eddie and Bertie were walking the decks; ‘walking ourselves sober,’ they explained. They carried a bottle and refreshed themselves every second circuit.

  ‘Look,’ Eddie said. ‘We had to buy it. It’s called “Kommando”.

  ‘It’s brandy,’ said Bertie. ‘Rather horrible. Do you think, Colonel, we might send it up to the Booby?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘The only other thing I can think of is to throw it overboard before it makes us sick.’

  ‘Yes, I should do that.’

  ‘No lack of esprit de corps? It’s called Kommando.’

  Eddie dropped the bottle over the rail and leant gazing after it.

  ‘I think I’m going to be sick, all the same,’ he said.

  Later, in the tiny cabin he shared with the two deeply sleeping companions, Guy lay awake. He could not yet mourn Ritchie-Hook. That ferocious Halberdier, he was sure, was even then biffing his way through the jungle on a line dead straight for the enemy. Guy thought instead with deep affection of X Commando. ‘The Flower of the Nation’, Ian Kilbannock had ironically called them. He was not far wrong. There was heroic simplicity in Eddie and Bertie. Ivor Claire was another pair of boots entirely, salty, withdrawn, incorrigible. Guy remembered Claire as he first saw him in the Roman spring in the afternoon sunlight amid the embosoming cypresses of the Borghese Gardens, putting his horse faultlessly over the jumps, concentrated as a man in prayer. Ivor Claire, Guy thought, was the fine flower of them all. He was quintessential England, the man Hitler had not taken into account, Guy thought.

  BOOK TWO

  In the Picture

  1

  MAJOR-GENERAL Whale held the appointment of Director of Land Forces in Hazardous Offensive Operations. He was known in countless minutes as the DLFHOO and to a few old friends as ‘Sprat’. On Holy Saturday 1941 he was summoned to attend the ACIG’s weekly meeting at the War Office. He went with foreboding. He was not fully informed of the recent disasters in the Middle East but he knew things were going badly. Benghazi had fallen the week before. It did not seem clear where the retreating army intended to make its stand. On Maundy Thursday the Australians in Greece had been attacked on their open flank. It was not clear where they would stand. Belgrade had been bombed on Palm Sunday. But these tidings were not Sprat’s first concern that morning. The matter on the ACIG’s agenda which accounted for Sprat’s presence was ‘Future of Special Service Forces in UK’.

  The men round the table represented a galaxy of potent initials, DSD, AG, QMG, DPS, and more besides. These were no snowy-headed, muddled veterans of English tradition but lean, middle-aged men who kept themselves fit; men on the make; a hanging jury, thought Sprat, greeting them heartily.

  The Lieutenant-General in the chair said:

  ‘Just remind us – will you, Sprat? – what precisely is your present strength?’

  ‘Well, sir, there were the Halberdiers.’

  ‘Not since last week.’

  ‘And Hookforce.’

  ‘Yes, Hookforce. What’s the latest from them?’ He turned to a Major-General who sat in a cloud of pipe-smoke on his left.

  ‘No one seems to have found any use for them in ME. “Badger”, of course, was cancelled.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘That is hardly their fault, sir,’ said Sprat. ‘First they lost their commander. Then they lost their assault ships. The canal was closed when they reached Suez, you remember. They were put into temporary camps in Canal Area. Then when the canal was cleared the ships were needed to take the Australians to Greece. They moved by train to Alex.’

  ‘Yes, Sprat, we know. Of course it’s not their fault. All I mean is, they don’t seem to be exactly pulling their weight.’

  ‘I rather think, sir,’ said a foxy Brigadier, ‘that we shall soon hear they’ve been broken up and used as replacements.’

  ‘Exactly. Anyway, they are MEF now. What I want to get at is what land forces do you command at this moment in UK?’

  ‘Well, sir, as you know, recruiting was suspended after Hookforce sailed. That left us rather thin on the ground.’

  ‘Yes?’

  Hands doodled on the agenda papers.

  ‘At the moment, sir, I have one officer and twelve men, four of whom are in hospital with frost-bite and unlikely to be passed fit for active service.’

  ‘Exactly. I merely wanted your confirmation.’

  Outside, in the cathedral, whose tower could be seen from the War Office windows; far beyond in the lands of enemy and ally, the Easter fire was freshly burning. Here for Sprat all was cold and dark. The gangmen of the departments closed in for the kill. The representative of the DPS drew a series of little gallows on his agenda.

  ‘Frankly, sir, I don’t think the DPS has even quite understood what function the Commandos have which could not be performed by ordinary regimental soldiers or the Royal Marines. The DPS does not like the volunteer system. Every fighting man shall be prepared to undertake any task assigned him, however hazardous.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  The staff officers pronounced judgement by turn.

  ‘… I can only say, sir, that the special postings have put a considerable extra strain on our department….’

  ‘… As we see it, sir, either the Commandos become a corps d’élite, in which case they seriously weaken the other arms of the service, or they become a sort of Foreign Legion of throw-outs, in which case we can hardly see them making very much contribution to the war effort…’

  ‘I don’t want to say anything against your chaps, Sprat. Excellent raw material, no doubt. But I think you must agree that the experiment of relaxing barrack discipline hasn’t quite worked out. That explosion at Mugg…’

  ‘I think, if you’ll allow me, I can explain…’

  ‘Yes, yes, no doubt. It’s really quite beside the point. I’m sorry it was brought up.’

  ‘The security precautions at the embarkation…’

  ‘Yes, yes. Someone put a foot wrong. No blame attaches to HOOHQ.’

  ‘If we could start another recruiting drive I am sure the response…’

  ‘That is just what Home Forces do not want.’

&nb
sp; ‘The Ministry of Information …’ began Sprat desperately, most infelicitously. The doodling hands were still. Breaths were momentarily caught, then sharply, with clouds of smoke, expelled. ‘The Ministry of Information,’ said Sprat defiantly, ‘have shown great interest. They are only waiting for a successful operation to release the whole story to the press. Civil morale,’ he faltered, ‘… American opinion…’

  ‘That, of course,’ said the chairman, ‘does not concern this committee.’

  In the end a minute was drafted to the CIGS recommending that no steps were desirable with regard to Special Service Forces.

  Sprat returned to his own office. All over the world, unheard by Sprat, the Exultet had been sung that morning. It found no echo in Sprat’s hollow heart. He called his planners to him and his liaison officer.

  ‘They’re out to do us down,’ he reported succinctly. He need not name the enemy. No one thought he meant the Germans. ‘There’s only one thing for it. We must mount an operation at once and call in the press. What have we got that’s suitable for one rather moderate officer and eight men?’

  The planners at HOO HQ were fertile. In their steel cupboards lay in various stages of elaboration and under a variety of sobriquets projects for the assault of almost every feature of the enemy’s immense coast line.

  A pause.

  ‘There’s “Popgun”, sir.’

  ‘“Popgun”? “Popgun”? That was one of yours, wasn’t it, Charles?’

  ‘No one was much interested. I always thought it had possibilities.’

  ‘Remind me.’

  ‘Popgun’ was the least ambitious of all the plans. It concerned a tiny, uninhabited island near Jersey on which stood, or was believed to stand, a disused light-house. Someone on the naval side, idly scanning a chart, had suggested that supposing the enemy had tumbled to the tricks of RDF this island and this ruin might be a possible choice of station. Charles reminded Sprat of these particulars.

  ‘Yes. Lay on “Popgun”. Ian, you’ll be up to the neck in this. You’d better get into touch with McTavish at once. You’ll be going with him.’

  ‘Where is he?’ asked Ian Kilbannock.

  ‘He must be somewhere. Someone must know. You and Charles find him while I collect a submarine.’