The Mule on the Minaret (2 page)

A hard man to place. How often had not that been said to him during the last two years; at the end of each of the various courses
—at Matlock, Swanage, Hendon—to which he had been sent by colonels despairingly confident that there must be the right niche for him somewhere.

A hard man to place. Who could recognize it better than himself? And hadn't he, each time he had been forced to take stock of himself, been exposed to the same sense of guilt, the inner voice that whispered, ‘You've no right to be here. You're doing no good. The army hasn't any use for you. You are an encumbrance. You ought to be in Winchborough, teaching.'

How eagerly after a year as staff-captain in the military section of the Ministry of Mines, to which he had been posted as the result of a chance meeting in a cricket match, an appointment for which by taste and training, he could scarcely have been more unfitted—where he had fulfilled subordinate clerical duties for which in peacetime an untrained eighteen-year-old girl would have been hired at fifty shillings a week, how eagerly he had welcomed this appointment to the Spears Mission for which he had been selected on the grounds of his French and his historical familiarity with the area. At last, at last; here was work which would justify his remaining in the army. He could shelve his problems for a little longer. He had sailed with a clear conscience and a high heart; now once again he was back where he had started.

‘Don't feel despondent,' Colonel Weston was concluding. ‘It's now just after three, and the
Chargé d' Affaires
wants to see you at five o'clock. The General, by the way, has gone back to London. There are two things that I must explain: firstly this is a Legation; that is to say though you are soldiers under military discipline we are under civilian control. General Spears is now a Minister and except on special occasions, will wear civilian clothes. Secondly, because this is a Legation and also because we are here mainly for liaison purposes, we do not live in messes but in hotels and flats. We find it easier to meet the Lebanese that way and it's easier with the French. Their
popote
is very different from our mess. They prefer their club, where they can entertain women. You, of course, are all honorary members of it, so I've arranged for you to stay in hotels and pensions for the first few days. That won't be inexpensive and in a week or so when you've found your feet you'll be able to make more suitable arrangements for yourselves. I've put the elder ones into the St. Georges, the younger ones into a convenient pension.'

He picked up a list from his desk and read out his dispositions.

‘I suggest, therefore, that you go to your billets and get settled in. Back here, don't forget, by five o'clock. The
Charg
é
d' Affaires
is Cartwright, Frank Cartwright, seconded from the Sudan Service. Oh, yes, I forgot. There's some mail for some of you; it came by air and beat you to it.'

The letters were spread out on a table. One of the envelopes was addressed to Reid, in a familiar back-sloping script. At the sight of it, he half-closed his eyes. Rachel. It had all begun again, the resumption of a domestic problem across two thousand miles.

*   *   *

The St. Georges was on the waterfront, modern, five-tiered, set like a citadel, each bastion turned to catch the sun. The rain had ceased, but the sky was overcast and the sea beat choppily against the shingle.

Johnson, a Sandhurst contemporary of Reid's, though they had been in different companies, fell into step beside him.

‘Bad show,' he said.

Johnson was large, corpulent, balding, red-faced, with heavy features. He and Reid had spent a good deal of time together on the ship. He was the kind of Englishman who will maintain a strict barrier of reserve for days, and then suddenly late at night, after a fifth whisky, tell you the whole story of his life. Reid could guess at what was passing in his mind.

Johnson, like himself, had set high store by this appointment, though for different reasons. Johnson had had a difficult time during the 1930s. He had transferred to the Reserve in 1931 because he had seen no future in the army. Promotion was slow, pacifism was in the ascendant. Men who had commanded brigades during the war were still commanding companies. But 1931 had not offered favourable auguries to a man of thirty-four with no civilian experience. The motor firm in which he had invested half his retirement gratuity went into liquidation. His second venture in real estate, undertaken during the boom in luxury flats, fared better, but the boom did not last. Too many blocks of flats were built. Johnson had welcomed his recall to khaki.

But the last two years had been no more satisfactory than the preceding eight. He was out of touch with the training and tactics of the modern mechanized army. He was not sent to join his regiment in France. He was found, instead, a number of administrative posts. But he had never been to the staff college; he was
unfamiliar with staff duties. Younger men slid ahead of him. He had begun to anticipate a dreary, routine war that would leave him at its close several years older, less receptive, less elastic, with no compensating record of achievement. He had seen his transfer to the Middle East as the door of opportunity.

‘Anything may happen there,' he had said to Reid in one of his hours of expansion. ‘Britain is going to consolidate the Middle East. The French have had their day. The Arabs will turn to us. Through the Mission we shall meet important people; that's how you get on, through meeting the right people.'

He was in a roseate mood, half-way through his fourth whisky. Fantastic dreams out of the Arabian Nights circled in his imagination. Anything might happen, anything. And now the cloud-based castle had dissolved.

They walked down the hill in silence. As they turned into the carriage drive Johnson sighed. ‘There are times when I envy the man who has a safe job waiting him after the war.'

*   *   *

Frank Cartwright was on the brink of fifty. He was of medium-height, thin, grey-haired, clean shaven. He had the drawn look of a dedicated man. He received the new arrivals in a room that was no larger than Colonel Weston's but that looked larger because it was furnished in the style appropriate to the reception of local dignitaries. There was a carpet on the floor; there were comfortable arm chairs; there was a long settee. The posters of the King and Churchill had been framed. Cartwright was neatly but unobtrusively dressed in a dark grey suit.

‘I welcome you on behalf of General Spears,' he said. ‘He wanted me to assure you how happy he is that you are here. He is very sorry not to be able to welcome you in person; he had a great deal to settle up in London; he does not expect to get back till February. He is confident that when he does, he will find each and every one of you happily and usefully employed. The Middle East is an expanding area.'

For a couple of minutes Cartwright enlarged on what Colonel Weston had already said. His manner was friendly, but diplomatically remote. Reid sensed in him the man who had had, all his life, to weigh his words; to strike a balance between what he himself believed, what his hearer wanted to hear, and what authority
in the background required of him, so that he could best persuade his hearer, who often was an adversary, that the interests of that hearer and of the authority in the background were in the last analysis identical. Walking a tight-rope, he had remained an honest man.

He echoed and amplified Colonel Weston, then he changed his appeal. ‘I imagine,' he said, ‘that you are all familiar with the general background, with the T. E. Lawrence legend. In the First War the Arabs were roused against the Turks; they were promised their independence, but at the Peace Conference the Arab World was divided up into spheres of interest; France getting one chunk, Britain getting another; while a national home for the Jews was set up in Palestine. There are very many mixed opinions on the wisdom of those treaties. You'll form your own opinions. Nearly everyone who comes out here becomes a violent partisan on one side or another. That doesn't concern us at the moment. We can't go back to first causes. We have to consider the present situation in terms of wartime needs.'

He explained the genesis of those needs. Britain had promised independence to the countries over which she had been given a protectorate, and she had kept her promises. Iraq was independent by 1931, though it had remained a sphere of influence with British technical advisers in the ministries and with Britain retaining naval, military and air force bases. France on the other hand, though it had granted independence to the Lebanon, had not implemented its guarantee. That had been the position in September 1939, with the French maintaining a large body of troops in the Levant, just as the British were in Egypt.

‘The eastern flank of the Mediterranean was,' Cartwright explained, ‘well protected, of course, but the situation changed completely in June 1940 after the Armistice, with Syria and the Lebanon under the control of the Vichy Government. Our lines to India were threatened; so was our conduct of the whole war in the Western Desert. The Germans had designs upon Iraq. There is a very strong pro-German element in Iraq, just as there was an anti-British element in Beirut. We had to move first, and fast. I think history will show that we forced the war in Iraq, before the pro-Germans and anti-royalists in Baghdad were ready, while here in a joint action with the Free French we attacked the Vichy Levant.

‘We won the campaign, but we put ourselves in a very awkward
situation diplomatically. In the first place the French have always been touchy about our position in the Middle East. They consider that they were here first. Perhaps they were. You remember their song, “Partant pour la Syrie.” The French are resentful because the entire campaign in the First War in Mesopotamia was organized and fought by us. They've put up a statue to themselves along the waterfront, but they did in fact very little fighting. They've always believed that we had designs on Lebanon, and on Damascus. Read a novel like Pierre Benoit's
Châtelaine du Liban;
and they have this argument in their favour. Feisal, who was our protégé, laid claim to Damascus. Anyway they are convinced that now we're here, we're going to stay here. We have to convince them that that is not our game at all. And it isn't, I'm convinced on that point. Sometimes in the diplomatic world one has to give answers that aren't wholly true. This isn't one of them. But the French distrust us. You've got to remember that.'

He paused; he looked round him with an easy smile. He had delivered a lecture but it had not sounded like a lecture. ‘And now,' he said, ‘I'm going to add something that you are at liberty to ignore. It's my particular hobby-horse. But you must remember that I have been living in this area all my adult life. I came here in Allenby's army in 1917. My roots are here. I tend to see issues through Arab eyes. I want you to remember this. We are in Arab territory, not our own. The Arabs are for the most part our friends, though they have deep reason to distrust us. They are very different from us; in culture, in religion. Many of them think of us as infidels. Our war is not their war. We, as English, have only one concern, to defeat the Axis powers. But for the Arabs, the defeat of the Axis is incidental. It is a part of their long history. In 1914 they had no concern with European politics. We, because we were at war with Turkey, fomented and aided the simmering Arab revolt against the Turks; we made the Arabs certain promises which we did not keep. They feel, many of them, that they were tricked. This time they are on their guard. They do not care whether European democracy survives, apart from its effect upon the Arab World. One of our first duties is to persuade them that an Allied victory is to their advantage; but there is a further, in my opinion, very important point. The problem of Anglo-Arab, perhaps I should say Arab-European relations, will not end with the defeat of Hitler. You see that notice over the mantelpiece, “Think, plan, act in terms of March 1942”. That is very sound advice. Take a
short view in wartime. But remember that in terms of Anglo-Arab relations what we are doing today will have its repercussions in 1965. Take a long view there.

‘That's all I have to say,' he finished. ‘I expect you'd like to have a look round the place. I'm handing you over for the evening to one of our officers in the economic section. He'll show you the ropes. Tomorrow's free, of course. If you'll come round on Monday around ten, we'll see what news we have for you. Reid, if you'd stay behind a minute . . .'

The moment the room was empty he drew up a chair behind his desk. ‘Now this is a pleasure,' he began. ‘I've always hoped that we should meet one day. I was delighted when I heard that you were coming out here, but tell me, when they posted you out here from London, do you know what exactly you were posted to? I mean, what did they think that you were coming here to do?'

‘They talked about the publicity and propaganda section. They thought that as a historian philosopher I'd be able to understand the Arab point of view.'

‘That certainly makes sense, but in point of fact we don't have a propaganda section; we have on paper, as part of the establishment, but that section is mainly occupied with making digests out of local papers and B.B.C. reports and looking after the security of the building. We aren't issuing any propaganda, at the moment, though that may come later. I don't think that that section is at all your tea. We've got to find exactly the right thing for you. After all, you're in a different category from these other chaps.'

Reid's heart sank. Here it was again: the same old story. A special person for a special job: with a special job that nobody could find.

‘I've arranged,' the
Charg
é
d' Affaires
went on, ‘that for the first few weeks you should work in the political section, which is my special pigeon. One of our chief jobs is to prepare a bi-weekly summary of political events, which is sent out on a limited, high level distribution list. This summary is a digest of the reports that are sent in weekly by our political officers all round the country. It is a job that needs doing carefully. It isn't a dogsbody's job, far from it; at the same time it isn't a whole time job. It'll give you plenty of spare time and I'd suggest that you read up some of our back files and also one or two of the specialized histories that may have missed your notice. In that way you could put in a couple of months, very profitably, until the General returns. He's bound to
have a number of new ideas. Till then we're in the position of a caretaker administration. We can't undertake anything drastic or decisive. I know he'll be very pleased to find you here: as I am; and one day next week I'd like you to come up to dinner at my house. We might fix the day now. Let's make it Wednesday. In the meantime there's a chap here who wants to meet you. Nigel Farrar. He knows friends of yours. I'll take you to his office.'