A Merry Dance Around the World With Eric Newby

The Staff Sergeant detailed to instruct us in the use of the bridge was uneasy. He had never seen anything like it before. It bore no resemblance to any kind of bridge that he had encountered.

‘It’s not an ISSUE BRIDGE,’ he kept repeating, plaintively. ‘Gennul-men, you must help me.’ We were deaf to him. The Army had seldom been kind to us; it was too late to call us gentlemen.

Finally, after rooting in the darkness he discovered a battered manual hanging on a nail behind the door. It confirmed our suspicions that the bridge had been constructed at the time of the Boer War. No surprise at the Royal Military College where a whole literature of the same period – text books filled with drawings of blockhouses with corrugated-iron roofs; men with droopy moustaches peering through loopholes; and armoured trains that I associated with the early life of Mr Winston Churchill – were piled high on the tops of cupboards in the lecture rooms and had obviously only recently fallen into disuse.

With the manual in his hand the Sergeant was once more on familiar ground – if one can use such an expression in connection with a bridge. His spirits rose still further when he discovered that there was a drill laid down for assembling the monstrous thing.

‘On the command “One” the even numbers of the front ranks will about turn, grasp the Caissons with both hands and advance into the water. On the command “Two” the odd numbers of the front rank will peg out the Guys, Retaining Caisson. On the command “Three” the even numbers of the rear rank will pick up the Sections, Decking’ … and so on.

On the command ‘One’ the Caisson Party, of which I was one, moved gingerly into the water, which was surprisingly warm. Some of the more frivolous cadets began to splash one another, but were rebuked by the Sergeant. After some twenty minutes all the Caissons were in position, secured by block and tackle.

‘Caisson Party, about turn, quick march!’ To the accompaniment of weird sucking noises we squelched ashore.

‘Decking Party, advance!’ The Decking Party staggered forward under its appalling load. Standing on the bank, with the water streaming from the bottoms of our trousers, we watched them go.

‘It all seems rather pointless when we’ve already walked across,’ someone said.

‘Quiet!’ said the Sergeant. ‘The next cadet who speaks goes on a charge.’ He was looking at his watch, apprehensively.

‘Decking Party and Caisson Party will retire and unpile arms,’ he went on. We had already performed the complicated operation of piling arms. It was one of the things we really knew how to do. ‘Now then, get a move on.’

We had just completed the unpiling when Sergeant-Major Clegg appeared on the far side of the lake, stiff as a ramrod, jerkily propelling one of our gigantic bicycles. Dismounted, standing half-hidden in the undergrowth, he looked more foxy than ever.

He addressed us and the world in that high-pitched sustained scream that even now, when I recall it at dead of night years later, makes me come to attention even when lying in my bed.

‘SAAAAN ALUN!’

‘SAAAAH!’

‘DOZEEEE … DOZEEEE … GET THOSE DOZY, IDUL GEN-NULMEN OVER THE BRIDGE … AT … THER … DUBBOOOOL!’

‘SAAAAH!’ shrieked Sergeant Allen and wheeled upon us with a face bereft of all humanity, ‘PLATOOOON, PLATOOOON WILL CROSS THE BRIDGE AT THER DUBOOL – DUBOOOOL!’

Armed to the teeth, bowed down by gas masks, capes anti-gas, token anti-tank rifles and 2” mortars made of wood (all the real ones had been taken away from us after Dunkirk), we thundered down the bank and on to the bridge.

The weight of thirty men was too much for it; there was a noise like a succession of pistol shots as the Guys, Retaining Caisson parted, the central span of the bridge surged away and the whole body of us crashed into the water. It was like the end of the Gadarene Swine, the Tay Bridge Disaster and the Crossing of the Beresina reproduced in miniature.

As we came to the surface, ornamented with weed and surrounded by the token wooden weapons which, surprisingly, in spite of their weight, floated, we began to laugh hysterically and what had begun as a military operation ended as a water frolic. The caissons became rafts on which were spread-eagled the waterlogged figures of what had until recently been officer cadets, who now resembled nothing more than a band of lascivious Tritons. People were ducking one another; the Ponts were floating calmly, contemplating the sky as if offshore at noon at Eden Roc …

Gradually the laughter ceased and a terrible silence descended on us. A tall ascetic figure was looking down on us with a mixture of incredulity and disgust from an ornamental bridge in the rustic taste. The Sergeant was saluting furiously; Sergeant-Major Clegg, foxy to the last, had slipped away into the undergrowth – only his bicycle, propped against a tree, showed that he had ever been there. The face on the bridge was a very well-known face.

Without a word General de Gaulle turned on his heel and went off, followed by a train of officers of high rank. His visit had been unannounced at his special request so that he could see us working under natural conditions. What he must have thought is unimaginable. France had just fallen. It must have confirmed his worst suspicions of the British Army. Perhaps the intransigence that was later to become a characteristic was born there on that bright morning beside a steamy little lake in Surrey.

For Sergeant Allen the morning’s work had a more immediate significance. His career seemed blasted.

‘You’ve gone and done me in,’ he said sadly, as we fell in to squelch back to the Old Buildings.

In the autumn of 1941 I arrived in the Middle East from India. There I joined the Special Boat Section, whose job it was to land from submarines on hostile coasts in order to carry out acts of sabotage against railway systems, attack enemy airfields, and put ashore and take off secret agents. Members of the SBS had also made sorties into enemy harbours with the intention of sticking limpets (magnetic mines) on ships at anchor and blowing them up.

My interview for this job took place on board HMS Medway in the harbour at Alexandria, the depot ship of the First Submarine Flotilla which provided the SBS with transportation to its target areas. The interviewer was Roger Courtney, the founder of the Special Boat Section, an astonishing officer who had been a white hunter in East Africa and had canoed down the Nile. Over his desk was displayed a notice which read ARE YOU TOUGH? IF SO GET OUT. I NEED BUGGERS WITH INTELLIGENCE. This notice made me fear that I would not be accepted, but I was.

I spent the next few weeks at the Combined Operations Centre at Kabrit on the Suez Canal, learning to handle folboats and explosives, how to sink shipping, and how to blow up aircraft and trains or otherwise render them inoperative. Learning to sink ships involved swimming at night in the Bitter Lakes – which lived up to their name in the depths of winter – covered with grease and wearing long woollen naval issue underwear, and pushing a limpet towards whichever merchant ship lying at anchor had been chosen as the target, the limpet being supported by an inflated car inner tube with a net inside it. This was Britain’s primitive equivalent to the highly sophisticated two-man submarines of the Italian Tenth Light Flotilla, which in December that year succeeded in entering the harbour at Alexandria and exploding charges under the battleships Queen Elizabeth and Valiant. Both ships were disabled and put out of action for months, seriously affecting the balance of sea power in the Mediterranean.

On my first practice attempt I was sent to attack a Dutch merchant ship at anchor in one of the Bitter Lakes. I reached it, thinking myself undetected in brilliant moonlight but wondering how anyone on board could possibly fail to hear the noise made by my chattering teeth. To set the limpet in its correct position on the ship’s side it was necessary to dive deeply and as I did so I found myself enveloped in the contents of an entire Dutch lavatory pan which someone with a grotesque sense of fun and a remarkable sense of timing had released by pulling the chain.

‘Better luck next time, mynheer,’ a voice from the deck said as I came up spluttering. ‘I should joose a dark night, if I was you, and dry not to make so much noise, even if it is so cold.’

Next door to our camp at Kabrit was David Stirling with his SAS, Special Air Service. As his success and power increased, David sometimes gave the impression that he was contemplating a takeover bid for SBS. We used to make use of some of his training facilities – he had a testy genius in charge of his explosives department, a Royal Engineer called Bill Cumper. He also had a lofty tower from which embryonic parachutists were expected to launch themselves parachuteless, and they also had to jump off the back of trucks going at about thirty miles an hour. His camp was definitely no place for the chicken-hearted. There was also a band of anarchists from Barcelona whom no one knew what to do with. They had murdered so many Egyptian taximen and buried them in the sand, instead of paying their fares like any normal persons, that it was now almost impossible to get a taxi from Kabrit to Ismailia and back during the hours of darkness, which was a bore.

One day, having climbed this tower to admire the extensive view and counting myself lucky that I was not called upon to jump from it, I was about to descend by the way I had come when I heard the voice of one of David’s sergeants from far below say in Caterham

(#litres_trial_promo) accents, ‘No officer or man, sir, who has ever climbed that tower, has ever walked down the stairs! Once up there you have to jump, sir!’

So I jumped. I had no choice, and because I had not learned the basic facts about parachuting (which was not a condition of membership of the SBS), I hurt myself.

That winter, as part of a detachment of SBS, I was sent to Tobruk to operate with a flotilla of motor-torpedo-boats. While we were there four of us received orders to report without delay to the Directorate of Combined Operations at GHQ in Cairo; its Director was an excellent sailor, popular with the SBS, named Admiral Maund. We reached it late in the afternoon of the day we set off from Tobruk, after a hair-raising drive of more than four hundred miles down the desert road, or what was left of it, in a thirty hundredweight Bedford truck.

At the DCO we were only asked if we possessed prismatic compasses, and told to report to the Naval Officer in Charge, NOIC, at Beirut without delay. Before the shops shut in Cairo that evening I bought two guide books, one to Palestine, the other to Syria and the Lebanon, and The Quest for Corvo, by A. J. A. Symonds.

Early on the morning of the second day out from Tobruk, we arrived at Gaza: we had covered about eight hundred miles since setting out from Tobruk, which was not bad, considering the terrible state of the desert road.

Then we were in Palestine and suddenly it was spring: the countryside in the coastal plain was a green paradise with burgeoning fields of wheat and barley; meadows and gentle hillsides were scattered with wild flowers; and everywhere there were groves of lemons and oranges, of which we bought whole box-loads, afraid that this other Eden might be only a temporary phenomenon and might be succeeded by yet another dusty wilderness as we drove northwards. After the Western Desert, where it was still winter, after Sinai, where we had lain shivering in the cold grey hours before the dawn in the duffel coats we had wangled from the navy, to be in Palestine was to be born again. Armed with the guide book to Palestine, I was able to persuade my companions to make a number of short detours from the main road in order to visit places, some of which I had learned about in Divinity at school, none of which I had ever expected to set eyes on.

By this time, as a result of haggling for boxes of oranges, shopping in Tel Aviv, which I thought had a distinctly Eastern European air about it (although I had never been to Eastern Europe), visiting ruins, in fact generally behaving in a thoroughly unmilitary way, some of the impetus had gone out of our expedition.

When we reached Caesarea the sun was setting, drenching everything, including the remains of a Roman aqueduct which stood among the dunes that had engulfed what remained of the ancient city, in a brilliant ochrous yellow light. Waves were breaking over the remnants of the ancient harbour works, and down on the foreshore where the air was full of flying spume, a man on a camel, dressed in rags which were streaming in the wind, was the only other human being in sight. It was here that I began rooting about underfoot with a stick, turning up potsherds and iridescent fragments of what may have been Roman or Byzantine glass. In the meantime, whoever was driving kept the motor running and a brother officer shouted as he had done all day whenever I had found a ruin to my taste, ‘For Christ’s sake get a move on, Eric, we can’t stay here all bloody night!’ while the sergeant cried rather more plaintively, ‘Oh, do come on, sir!’

The next day, the third since leaving Tobruk, we drove on northwards. At Acre we looked down into a dungeon in which the despot Jezzar Pasha, who had successfully defended the place against Napoleon, used to pelt his prisoners with cannon balls through a hole in the ceiling. It was a tough campaign. In the course of it Napoleon ordered the mass executions of prisoners by firing squads. As we flashed by on what had been the Roman road to Syria we saw milestones, inscriptions recording innumerable wars and conquests, fragments of altars, gaping catacombs, plundered sarcophagi and other ruins of the past.

At Beirut we received from the NOIC the details of Operation Aluite. To us Operation Aluite seemed pretty defeatist. It implied that a German advance into Syria through Turkey, a recurrent British nightmare, one brought on by the continued presence of von Papen as German ambassador at Ankara, would be followed inevitably by the Allied evacuation of Syria and the Lebanon, probably that of Palestine, and eventually, by implication, that of Egypt.

In an endeavour to stem such an invasion a great fortress was being built near the port of Tripoli, north of Beirut, where the northern arm of the Iraqi pipeline came in. In the event of such an invasion being successful, it would be the task of the SBS, working from Cyprus, if Cyprus had not itself fallen, to act as guerrillas and sabotage the German lines of communication. In anticipation of such a disaster, we were to sound every inlet in which a clandestine landing could be made, to map the hinterland leading up to the main road and the railway, and to make an assessment of every bridge and other important installations with a view to blowing them up, on the two hundred and fifty miles of coast between the Turkish-Syrian frontier and the Lebanese-Palestinian frontier, north of Haifa. We were also to seek out suitable hiding places for caches of explosive and ammunition. All this had to be done without the knowledge of our French allies in these parts, which seemed impossible.

In order to assist in the concealment of such dumps, an enormous quantity of artificial, lightweight rock of the same colour and texture as that found on the coasts of Syria and the Lebanon had been manufactured from papier-mâché. What conclusion a wandering goatherd or even a German feldwebel would come to when he found himself walking on artificial rocks made from papier-mâché will never be known as they were never put to the test.

‘Personally, I think the whole thing’s rather a waste of time,’ the NOIC said, ‘although you should have fun. Nevertheless I don’t envy you. As you know, the Free French have only recently taken over the country from Vichy and some of the permanent members of the administration are thoroughly untrustworthy and hostile and loyal to what they call “La France de la Metropole”. The coastguards are said to be particularly trigger happy. If they shoot at you I should shoot back and ask questions afterwards. Oh, and take plenty of rubbers and pencils.’

The following morning the four of us, including the sergeant who had said ‘Oh, do come on, sir!’ in such a pained voice, now himself transformed into an enthusiastic ruin-fancier, left Beirut in the thirty hundredweight truck to start work on mapping the section of coast south of the Turkish frontier, while others began on the coast south of Beirut. We had been given enough money to enable us to live off the country without having recourse to other military organizations, so much in fact that we decided to take with us a Sten gun as well as pistols, just in case there were robbers about.

All that day we drove north, crossing the Nahr el Kelb, the Dog River, guarded in ancient times by a savage dog with a bark so loud that it could be heard six miles off. In its gorge, where it entered the sea, we saw inscribed slabs recording the passage of Egyptian Pharaohs, Assyrians, Babylonians, Greeks and Romans, the Emperor Caracalla and the Third Gallic Legion, British and French troops in July 1918, and a triumphant one recording the entry of the French into Damascus in July 1920 when they expelled King Feisal and the Arabs. Seeing these great steles I realized that we were just another band of marauding soldiers. We saw the ruins of ancient Byblos, the principal city of the Giblites, claimed by an ancient Greek, Philo, to be the oldest town in the world, with a square Crusader castle above it on a hill, ruins among which we later lived for some days while making our survey.

On the outskirts of Tripoli work was proceeding on the construction of the fortress, which looked pretty feeble to us, and all along the coast hordes of men were working away on the Naquara-Beirut-Tripoli railway which we were already making plans to destroy.

The next weeks were the best that any of us had so far experienced in the course of the war, and the best that many of us were ever likely to experience: swimming about in lonely coves, taking soundings with long canes cut in some convenient plantation; pacing out base lines and using our compasses to make triangulations across the fields of wheat and barley; searching out caves and rock tombs, in which the coast abounded, that might serve as caches for explosives; swinging about like apes among the girders of railway bridges; meeting primitive-looking goatherds, one of whom, a rather elderly Sunnite Muslim I found sitting on a rock, had been an itinerant pedlar in the United States before returning home to marry a Syrian girl, a marriage which he said he had arranged by post.

In the course of our travels we encountered a remarkable diversity of religions and nationalities. There were Alawites, Druzes and Ismailites, whose religions contained elements of Muslim, Christian, Indian and Persian beliefs. There were Armenians who had either been deported from Turkey during the First World War by the Turks or who had left it of their own volition to avoid being slaughtered – it was some Armenian Orthodox Gregorians who invited us to a village near the Turkish frontier for a play in Armenian lasting eight hours, which was a kind thought but a great trial to all of us. There were Armenian Catholics and Maronites and Greek-Catholic Melkites and Syrian-Catholic Syriacs and Chaldean Catholics and Roman Catholics and Greek Orthodox and Syrian Orthodox, which included Jacobites and Nestorians, and there were even some Protestants. There were Sephardic Jews and there were Sunni and Shiah Muslims, the latter so fanatical that if they were forced to feed an infidel they destroyed the crockery as soon as the visitor had departed. And in Syria there were some very odd people indeed, whom we never saw, called Yezidis, who believed that God had passed the administration of the world over to the Devil, which on second thoughts did not seem odd at all. None of these conflicting sects seemed particularly fond of one another.

One night we slept among the ruins of Marqab, one of the castles of the Knights Hospitallers. Built of black basalt and reached by a spiral track nearly four miles long, it occupied a fantastic situation, high on a spur of an extinct volcano. It looked impregnable but it had finally been captured by Qalaun in 1285 after a forty-day siege, although it had food supplies for five years; but even so it was a much better site for a fortress than the one that was being built down the hill in Tripoli, as good as Monte Cassino, and as difficult to take.