The Great War for Civilisation (61 page)

At the battle of Shalamcheh, Mouffak was stranded between the Iraqi and Iranian front lines, trapped with Iraqi soldiers who would have to surrender, hiding in shell holes and protecting his drunken friend Talal. He was ordered to fly in a helicopter—on Saddam's personal orders—to film close-quarters battles between Iraqi and Iranian troops outside Basra, “so close that they were stabbing each other with bayonets and we could not see which was an Iraqi martyr and which was an Iranian martyr. Saddam had ordered me to take two rolls of Arriflex [film] and I used two whole rolls and later Saddam rewarded me with $3,000 and a watch.” Attached to the 603rd Battalion of the Iraqi army in 1987, Mouffak found himself climbing a mountain in Kurdistan to film the scene of an Iraqi victory. But, lost on the mountain in the dark, he stumbled into a killing field. “There were so many bodies, I couldn't tell whether they were Iraqis or Iranians.”

In 1985, Mouffak was to lose his own brother.

Ahmed was twenty-nine and one of his comrades had a wife who was expecting a child, so Ahmed volunteered to do his job for him while his friend went to Baghdad to see his newborn. It was May 5th, 1985. My brother escorted an ammunition convoy to the front and it was ambushed and we never learned any more. I went to the front there and spoke to his commanding officer, Lt. Col. Riad, and he said he did not know what happened. “I do not know his fate,” he said to me. Perhaps there was an explosion. We got nothing. No papers. No confirmation. Nothing. I was in Baghdad when the war ended in 1988. I heard shooting in the air. People said that the war was over. I went to have a drink—whisky and beer. I thought that people would be happy and we would survive. I thought of my brother—we had a hope that he would return if he was a prisoner. We waited for years and years but no one came. He was lost. There was no letter, nothing. He was married with two daughters and a boy and his family still wait for him to come home. They are still waiting for news. Because there was no body, because there were no details of his death, his name was not even put on the war memorial.

Mouffak would survive to film Iraq's invasion of Kuwait and then, under sanctions and no longer able to buy his beloved Kodak film—he still believes that film gives a definition that video will never provide—he was reduced to taping a documentary on reconstruction. Until, that is, he was reactivated as a news cameraman to film the 2003 Anglo-American invasion of his country. Yet he remains, even today, haunted by the brutality he witnessed, especially by two deeply painful experiences during the war with Iran. In Suleimaniya in northern Iraq, Saddam's army suffered a serious defeat on Maout mountain in 1987.

There were military police on the roads below the mountain and they had express orders from Saddam: that anyone who was found retreating must be executed. Unfortunately, they caught three soldiers and they were to be shot. I didn't have to watch. But I was a witness. I couldn't film. They were between twenty and twenty-six years old. All three said the same thing: “Our brigades collapsed—we retreated with the commanders.” They were all crying. They wanted to live. They couldn't believe that they would be executed. There were six or seven in the firing squad. Each of the men had his hands tied behind his back. They just went on weeping, crying and sobbing. They were shot as they cried. Then the commander of the firing squad went forward and shot each one of them in the forehead. We call this the “mercy bullet.” I vomited.

Yes, the “mercy bullet,” the
coup de grâce
. How easily the Iraqis learned from us. Outside Basra, another young soldier was accused of desertion and again Mouffak was a witness:

He was a very young man and the reporter from
Joumhuriya
newspaper tried to save him. He said to the commander: “This is an Iraqi citizen. He should not die.” But the commander said: “This is none of your business— stay out of this.” And so it was the young man's fate to be shot by a firing squad. No, he did not cry. He was blindfolded. But before he was executed, he said he was the father of four children. And he begged to live. “Who will look after my wife and my children?” he asked. “I am a Muslim. Please think of Allah—for Saddam, for God, please help me. I have children. I am not a conscript, I am a reservist. I did not run away from the battle— my battalion was destroyed.” But the commander shot him personally—in the head and in the chest. Then he lit a cigarette. And the other soldiers of the Popular Army gathered round and clapped and shouted: “Long life to Saddam.”

CHAPTER NINE

“Sentenced to Suffer Death”

Et puis mon souvenir s'éteindrait comme meurt
Un obus éclatant sur le front de l'armée
Un bel obus semblable aux mimosas en fleur
And then my memory would fade
As a shell blooms, bursting over the front line,
Magnificent, like mimosa in blossom

—Guillaume Apollinaire, “Si je mourrais là-bas,” written on 30 January 1915, Nîmes

WHEN I WAS A BOY, my father would take me on his knee and place one of my fingers on a very small dent in his forehead. Running from it was a thin, old scar. “That's where the Chink got me with the knife,” he'd say. And there would follow an odd story about how Bill Fisk had to solve a problem with a Chinese man during the First World War and how after he was attacked he shot dead his assailant with a revolver. “My Dad shot a Chinese man,” I used to tell my friends at school. I could never explain why.

My father had a strange relationship with the 1914–18 war. He rarely wanted to talk about his own brief participation in the conflict, but all his life he read every book on the subject. He read the poems of Wilfred Owen—who, like my father, lived in Birkenhead—and he studied every official history of the Western Front. I can still remember his gasps of horror as he was reading the first critical biography of Earl Haig and realised that a man he once regarded with veneration was a proven liar. In a nursing home where he was recovering from cancer in the mid-Eighties, I asked him to recall his own memories of the trenches. “All it was, fellah, was a great, terrible waste.”

My father called me “fellah” from the first day he saw me in my cot. He had been reading P. C. Wren's saga of the French Foreign Legion, Beau Geste. When one of the heroes bravely suffers a wound in silence, his comrade calls him “stout fellah.” Never realising that
fellah
was an Arabic word for peasant or farmer, Bill always addressed me as “fellah” or “the fellah”—which was irony enough, since I would be spending half my life in the Arab world. Indeed, I was in Beirut when Bill Fisk died in 1992 at the age of ninety-three, unafraid of death but an increasingly angry and bitter man. He had been faithful to my mother, Peggy—his second wife—and he never lied or cheated anyone. He paid his bills on time. For about thirty years, he was Borough Treasurer of Maidstone in Kent. Every Sunday morning, he would wait for my mother to accompany him to All Saints' Church, striding up and down the hallway singing the 23rd Psalm. “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil.” He was a patriot. In 1940, he unhesitatingly agreed to a request from MI6 to form a resistance cell in Kent when it seemed likely that German troops would invade south-eastern England. At school, I used to show off his plans—to the envy of every boy in my class—for blowing up Maidstone East railway bridge while a German troop train was passing. Had the Nazis arrived, of course, Bill Fisk would have been shot as a “terrorists.” For years, Karsh of Ottawa's great photograph of Churchill speaking over the wartime BBC from Downing Street loomed over our sitting-room in Maidstone— until, after my father's death, Peggy mercifully replaced it with a gentle water-colour of the River Medway.

Unfortunately, there were two sides to Bill Fisk. While he was loyal to my mother, he was also a bully. He would check her weekly housekeeping expenses as she waited in fear at his side for a word of criticism. If I interrupted him, he would strike me hard on the head. And his patriotism could quickly turn racist. In later years, and to my increasing fury, he would call black people “niggers” and when I argued with him he would turn angrily upon me. “How dare you tell me what to say?” he'd shout, while Peggy stood wringing her hands in the doorway. “Nigger means black, doesn't it? Yes, I'm a racist, and proud of it. I am proud to be English.”

My mother would try to soften his language and would sometimes end up crying. At the age of nine, I was sent away to boarding school. I hated it—its violence as well as its class distinctions—and pleaded with my father for weeks, for months, for years, to take me away. My mother appealed to him too. In vain. Boarding school would enable me to stand up for myself, he told me. I was to be a stout fellah. His pride when I passed exams was cancelled out by his ferocity when confronted by a son who would not obey him. My clothes, my ties, my shoes were all to be chosen by him. Years later, when I told him I was sick of hearing his racist abuse—he had taken to cursing the Irish—he threw a table knife at me. My mother once told me that Bill had punched a council official on the jaw when he thought the employee was making a pass at her. Only after Peggy's death did my aunt tell me that it was the Mayor of Maidstone whom father laid out.

I was usually an obedient child. My father was for me—as fathers are for all young children—a protector, as well as a potential tyrant. I liked him when he was self-effacing. I tried to soften his temper by calling him “King Billy,” which somehow satirised his dominating personality. And when he called himself “King Billy”—acknowledging his flaws with self-deprecation—he became an ordinary human. He taught me to love books and history, and from an early age I learnt of Drake and Nelson, of Harold of England and of the Indian Mutiny. His choice of literature could range from
Collins's Children's History of England
to the awful G. A. Henty. By the time I was sent to boarding school, I knew about the assassination of an archduke at Sarajevo that had started the First World War and I knew that the Versailles Treaty of 1919 brought an end to the First World War but failed to prevent a second. So it was that at the age of ten, the “fellah” was taken on his first foreign holiday—to France, and to those battlefields that still haunted my father's mind.

When my mother died in 1998, I discovered the little scrapbooks she had compiled of this 1956 holiday, a cheap album with a green fake leather cover in which she had stuck a series of small black-and-white snapshots: Bill and Robert standing by our car—an Austin of England, it was called, and I can imagine why my father chose it—outside Dover Marine station, waiting for the old British Railways boat, the
Shepperton Ferry
, to take us to Boulogne; Robert in his school pullover sitting beside Bill, the car boot open and a paraffin stove hissing beside us; Robert loco-spotting French steam trains; and Bill and Peggy together by the car, slightly out of focus, a picture that must have been taken by me.

But it was clear where my father's mind was. “Through Montreuil, Hesdin, St. Pol, Arras,” Peggy wrote in the album as she mapped our journey, “to—Louvencourt.” And beside the word “Louvencourt” was a photograph of a road, framed by tall trees, with on the far side a barn with a sagging roof. I knew what this was. My father spoke of it many times later; he had found the very house on the Somme in which he slept on 11 November 1918, the last day of the First World War. On our 1956 holiday, my father had been too shy to knock on the door. Another snapshot shows him standing before a memorial of 1914–18 to the French dead from Louvencourt. He is wearing the tie he always wore, at work and on holiday, for seventy-two years: the navy-blue and maroon tie of the King's Liverpool Regiment.

He was wearing that tie one night in our hotel in Beauvais, waiting for my mother to join him at the bar. I had been suffering from food poisoning and Peggy had stayed with me until my father suddenly opened my bedroom door and said to her: “I want to speak to you—now.” I listened at the thin wall that partitioned my room from theirs. “How dare you leave me waiting like that? How dare you?” he kept asking her. Then I heard Peggy weeping. And my father said: “Well, we'll say no more about it.” He used that same phrase many times to me in later years. Then he would refuse to talk to me for weeks afterwards as punishment for some real or imagined offence. He didn't talk to Peggy for several days after he was kept waiting at the hotel bar. In the holiday scrapbook, we are always smiling. There were other holidays and other snapshots later, always through the battlefields of what Bill called the Great War. We went to Ypres many times. And to Verdun. By then, my mother was taking early colour stock home movie film. And in those pictures, too, we were always smiling.

Although Bill was reluctant to speak of his war, I had several times pestered him to tell a few stories. He had, it turned out, been bitten by a rat in the trenches in 1918. For several nights he lay in a first aid station actually inside Amiens Cathedral, its roof blown off by German shellfire—he remembered looking up at the stars as medieval gargoyles stared back at him. He had once shown me a photograph he had taken of the Western Front, a tiny, inch-long picture of muck and dead trees. My father had—against every military rule—taken a camera to the war in 1918. It sounded quite unlike the Bill I knew, who was usually as subservient to authority as he was jealous of his power in his home. He didn't say much about the war in the trenches—he had only arrived in August 1918—but when, in 1976, I was leaving to cover the Lebanese civil war for
The Times
, Bill turned to me and said: “Remember, fellah, it's not the shells you have to worry about—it's the snipers you have to watch out for.” Advice from the trenches of the First World War. And he was right.

Not long before he died, he told me of his first marriage—it had been a secret from me until I discovered in Maidstone cemetery one day, by chance, his first wife's grave. She had been a childhood sweetheart, but when he had married her she had not returned his love, not even on the first night of their marriage. Matilda Fisk died in 1944, during the Second World War, which is how Bill came in 1946 to marry Peggy. She was twenty-five. He was forty-six.

But there is another story he told me, an astonishing one, quite out of character. At the very end of the war in 1918, he said, he had been ordered to command a firing party to execute a soldier. He had refused. Then, with the war over, the army punished him by forcing him to help transport the corpses left lying on the front lines for burial in the great British cemeteries. All the time I knew him, Bill hated things that rotted. A dead bird, a dead dog in a road would make him turn away. My father's insubordination sounded unlike him. But I admired him enormously for it. Indeed, as the years went by, I came to the conclusion that my father's refusal to kill another man was the only thing he did in his life which I would also have done.

For my twenty-eighth birthday, he bought me William Moore's
The Thin YellowLine
, one of the first histories of capital punishment on the Western Front. My mother told me that Bill had read the book from beginning to end in total silence. He had wanted me to read of the fate of the 314 men executed by the British in the Great War. It seemed to prey on his mind. Not long before he died, I asked him if he knew the identity of the doomed soldier he refused to shoot. He was an Australian, my father replied, who had got drunk and then murdered a French gendarme. Someone else had commanded the firing squad.

That was all. I once asked Peggy to talk to my father about the war, to interview him as if she were a journalist, to find out about this missing segment of his life. She promised that she would. Yet on his death in 1992, all I found were nine short pages of notes in his own handwriting—in pencil—about the history of his family. “Born 1899 at ‘Stone House,' Leasowe, Wirral, Cheshire,” it said. “Father, Master Mariner Born 1868. Mother, Market Gardner's [
sic
] daughter, born 1869. Earliest record [of the Fisks] Danish professor, came to England 1737. [I] attended Council School. Won Scholarship to High School. Father unable to support me there, so no alternative but to leave school and compete for work in Borough Treasurer's Department. Examination (25 entrants) for 6 shillings per week—was successful and commenced two weeks before my 14th birthday in 1913.” So no wonder my schooling was so important to Bill. The notes failed to mention that his father Edward had once been first mate on the
Cutty Sark
, the great tea-clipper now permanently in a Greenwich dry dock. There was another short entry, recording that only after the First World War was over did Bill discover that his own grandfather—his father Edward's father—had also served in the same conflict, as a naval reservist at Zeebrugge in 1918, when the British blocked the Belgian harbour to prevent its use by German U-boats and destroyers.

It would be another six years before I learned more. For when my mother lay dying in the autumn of 1998, I found in the roof of her home in Maidstone a tin box of the kind that families sent to soldiers in the Great War with soap and shaving brushes. On the front, the words “Parfumery Chiyotsbaki” were stamped above a painting of a young, half-smiling woman with roses in her hair. Inside the box were dozens of photographs from the 1914–18 war. Some were postcard-sized pictures of Bill's long-dead army friends in the uniform of the King's Liverpool Regiment, all of them with the solemn faces of doomed youth. “Lads from Preston” it said on the back of a large card. Others had been taken by Bill with his illegal camera. One I had seen before—the picture of the shattered countryside of the Western Front. “North of Arras 1918,” Bill had written on the back. Another showed a young officer on horseback with the words “Self on Whitesocks near Hazebruck” on the reverse side. There was a French money coupon and a photograph of fifty young soldiers with my father, hatless, lying sprawled at the front, hobnailed boots towards the camera. A dramatic snapshot showed the 4th Battalion of the King's Liverpool Regiment on parade in driving snow at Douai in northern France, bayonets fixed amid the blizzard, another—much faded and probably poorly developed—showed the Douai artillery school, a vast Napoleonic building confronting a parade ground filled with British troops and horses and gun carriages. “Major General Capper inspects ‘B' Company,” he had written on the back.