View of the World (29 page)

Deep divisions and animosities had developed among the prisoners as a result of their sufferings in the camps, where it had been every man for himself; and I soon came to the conclusion that only Ivan Golik could keep them in order, and that our dependence upon him was total. Two days out from Taranto the interpreter, Benjamin, told me that Golik had asked to see me alone and I had him brought to my cabin.

A discussion was conducted with some difficulty in a mixture of Russian and German, and Golik told me that a mutiny was being planned by a mullah, who was held in great awe by the Asiatics. This mullah’s official name on the nominal roll was Sultanov, but he was known to the prisoners as Haj el Haq (the Pilgrim of Truth). Although enlisted as a mere private in the Red Army, he had been a member of the royal family of the Emirs of Bokhara, who had been such a thorn in the side of the Kremlin, until the Russians had entered the city in the early twenties and had this man’s murderous old great-uncle thrown from the tower of his own palace.

The mullah, a detester of all Russians, and enthusiastically
pro-German
, managed to convince most of the Muslim soldiers that Adolf Hitler was working secretly for their cause and had made the pilgrimage to Mecca. Golik explained that a leadership struggle had developed between him and the holy man, with both pulling in opposite directions. ‘I am determined,’ Golik said, ‘to take these men home. I am their guardian angel. Haj el Haq believes in paradise. He wants us all to die.’ Golik’s view was that the mullah would be shot as soon as he set foot on Russian soil, and therefore the mullah had nothing to lose by instigating a revolt. Golik believed that as soon as he gained enough following, the mullah would order the men to force their way past the guards up on to the deck, and there commit suicide by throwing themselves into the sea.

As part of his strategy, he said, the mullah had ordered the men to resist the reintroduction of army discipline and to reject all orders given them either by Golik himself, or by the two junior lieutenants, or by men who had previously held non-commissioned rank in the Red Army. He believed that the mullah’s influence could only be combated by the transformation of this rabble into something like the semblance of a fighting force. The argument came back to the British uniforms. If the prisoners got them all would be well, because the mere wearing of them would proclaim to the Soviets when they arrived at the end of their journey, that the British had recognised them as their allies. The new uniforms, worn with Red Army badges of rank would transform sluggards into soldiers and banish day-dreaming and despair. Golik wanted to be
able to hold inspections, arrange parades, award punishments, do a little ceremonial drilling on deck if that could be sanctioned, as soon as the uniforms came. If they did not, the mullah would have won, and the men would fall in behind him.

I asked for the mullah to be pointed out to me, and we went below together. Despite the late season, the weather remained hot. The
ventilation
had failed and the prisoners, crammed into the holds, and stripped to their underpants, lay in rows, as African slaves must have done, their limbs shining with sweat. The wooden partitions dividing up the holds released an ingrained sourness adding to the sharp odour of so many bodies in close confinement. There was a great shortage of water, because all the Muslims were obliged to wash ritually six times daily. One or two spaces had been cleared for the men to squat in circles to listen to their storytellers, and Golik called my attention to the mullah seated
cross-legged
in one of these circles, a small man with a polished ivory head and a face full of scepticism and malice. It was the mullah who led the audience’s formal outcry of astonishment or alarm whenever the storyteller reached a dramatic crisis in his narrative; and whenever a man had to pass behind him he went over to kiss the prayer beads the mullah dangled from his hand. We noted men at prayer, taking care, Golik said, to make their prostrations well within the mullah’s view. This in itself was a bad sign, he said, for public prayer was discouraged in the Red Army, and could cost a man promotion. If no uniforms came, they would all fall back in prayer.

The journey from Taranto was slow and tedious with the ever present threat of trouble brewing in the holds. A hot wind from Africa breathed on the ship night and day. The Mongul Buryat tribesmen chanted interminably about death and paradise, and the water dripped ever more slowly from the latrine pipes. Golik felt his authority draining away. The two junior lieutenants, Pashaev and Genghis Khan (there was also a private with this distinguished name) pretended no longer to hear his orders, while the mullah terrified the men by his trances during which he prophesied doom for all of them.

On 28th October we reached Port Said, where we were told that there would be a delay of some days during which we would trans-ship to the
Devonshire
. Here we were joined by two more interpreters, Private Shor from Aleppo, and a Bulgarian Jew, Sergeant Manahem, who had led the twelve-man demolition team in Colonel Keyes’ unsuccessful commando raid on Rommel’s headquarters.

With the arrival of these fluent Russian speakers I saw my presence on the
Devonshire
as unnecessary. I had never been given any indication, except by the mad major at Taranto, as to what I was expected to do, and I had had virtually no contact with the OC Troops, who was in all probability himself completely mystified as to what I was doing there, and had at no time sought to make use of my services.

I therefore visited Movement Control at Port Said to request
permission
to return to Naples, hoping to be favoured by the technicality that the movement order issued in Taranto instructed me to accompany the
Reina del Pacifico
to its destination, and made no mention of a further voyage on the
Devonshire
. My reception by the Movement Control Officer was a bleak one.

Seeing that my arguments were without effect, I produced for the first and last time an extraordinary identity document issued to members of my previous North African section when sent on the more absurd kind of missions. This authorised the bearer to wear any uniform and called upon all persons subject to military law to assist him in any way, etc. The effect on the officer was less than electrifying. He took the paper, glanced at it, and threw it down. ‘This may have worked for you in North Africa,’ he said, ‘but it won’t here, and it won’t in PAI-Force, where you’re going. Get back to the ship.’

Aboard the
Devonshire
again, I found that in my absence the British uniforms had arrived. Bound to the wheels of the military machine which, once set in motion could not be stopped, the quartermaster’s department had spewed forth a wild assortment of stores, including not only the so-long-desired uniforms, but all the complex and in this case useless impedimenta supplied to troops, including anti-gas equipment, entrenching tools, camouflage netting, long-johns, to say nothing of razors and shaving brushes, the uses of which were mysterious to these hairless men.

The prisoners swarmed like bees, buzzing with excitement over the piles of equipment dumped in their midst. Suddenly the fog of inertia and depression had been dispersed. Golik, in an evilly fitting battle dress, but full of martial zest, had become the hero of the day. Morale was ebullient, and even the heat and stench of the holds seemed to have subsided. When the men could find space to walk among these crowded bodies, they did so more briskly, and had straightened themselves up. The mullah had retired to the latrines, ‘to await a great vision,’ and here he remained for the rest of the day.

Within a few hours the last of the Russians had been kitted out as British soldiers, and the tailors among them were given shears and set to work adapting garments made for the big-boned well-fed men of the West to the smaller bodies of Asiatics bred in the main from generations of mare-riding nomads. With their upgrading, the prisoners were to be given full army rations too, and although these men had eaten human flesh, they refused the liver – which was all the meat we ever received – on religious grounds.

Our fully-fledged Russian Allies, as they now were, seized with the greatest delight on the three-fourths of this gear, which one would have supposed to be quite useless, and began to convert these to their special purposes. Working with extreme ingenuity and skill, they dismantled such objects as zinc water-bottles, mess-cans, and above all tooth brushes, nail brushes and combs; and pierced, spliced and amalgamated them to produce a variety of miniature musical instruments: strange antique-looking fiddles, lutes, pipes and rebecks. Soon the bowels of the ship quivered with the wild skirl of oriental music.

We sailed from Port Said on 2nd November with hope fizzing like an electric current through the ship. Golik, transfigured with optimism, had one more request to make. Included in the kit issued to each Russian was a truly superb Canadian blanket of the finest and fleeciest grey wool, and Golik now asked if he could be permitted to have a pair of these transformed by the tailors into a Red Army-style officer’s great-coat, in which he would like to make his appearance at the celebrating concert to be given by the ex-prisoners next evening. This, he assured me, would set the final stamp upon his authority.

It was hard to refuse Golik anything, especially as in any case our interests interlocked. All that mattered was to come to the end of a trouble-free journey. The coat was made in a day: a garment fastening high in the neck, and falling to within six inches of the wearer’s toes. It would have conferred dignity upon a trader in the old camel market at Ismailia. He came on deck to show it off when it was ready, standing at the rail against the hot glitter of the sea and the incandescent Arabian coast-line, and a couple of off-duty members of the escort, sunbathing nearby, got up awkwardly as if undecided whether to stand to attention. When we went below most of the prisoners saluted him.

The concert given by the Asiatics was unlike anything I had ever seen before, or have seen since. It was an entertainment to fill the steppes’ great emptiness, and hollow in time, transplanted perfectly here in the faceless surroundings in which we crouched. The art of the nomads had grown up without the aid of stage props, and depended on mime and masquerade, plus a dash of shamanistic witchery; it lifted the mind clear away from unacceptable reality to glowing new worlds of the imagination. Costumes were procured by magical adaptations of camouflage netting and gas capes. Supreme theatrical art had transformed a man who had tasted human flesh into a tender princess, stripping the petals from a lily while a suitor quavered a love song; we heard the neighing of the horses and the thundering hooves of a Mongol horde on their way to sack the town. Whatever these men had suffered in the camps, nothing had been able to take their art away. It was to be understood that this spectacle devised for the entertainment of the princes of Central Asia would have little appeal for the soldiers of the British escort, for not a man attended. What was less easy to understand was the boredom of a European Russian like Golik, who, sweltering in his coat, fell almost instantly asleep, snoring heartily to the accompaniment of arcadian pipes.

Next day the process of rehabilitation went ahead according to Golik’s plans. The Russians were allowed up on deck in batches, and a little space was set aside for Golik to conduct token inspections, check hair-cuts, and lecture his NCOs on military tactics. The OC Troops making his rounds of the Russians’ quarters in the holds, noted that at
last these had been scrubbed out to his complete satisfaction, and Golik was complimented, and some further relaxations decreed. The mullah had been forcibly put into a British battledress, and for the moment little more was heard of him. We all began to breathe more easily. This interlude of calm was disrupted by a most singular happening.

The three interpreters were profoundly oriental in their
backgrounds
, an influence which especially showed in their attitude to gold. This they appeared to regard as a magical substance, quite apart from any value it possessed for its purchasing power. Sergeant Manahen wore a signet ring made from gold wrenched from the jaw of a dead Italian on the battlefields. This had become like an African ju-ju for him –
something
invested with its own spirit. He did not like the ring to be touched, and complained of feeling a slight headache whenever he removed it from his finger to wash his hands. Shor, from Aleppo had been give his first bath as a baby in a bath into which one hundred gold coins had been showered; and his parents, holding his arms and legs, had made him go through the motions of swimming ‘so that he should swim in gold for the rest of his life.’ Benjamin had spent his boyhood in a religious community in which only the Rabbi handled money, and it was an unfortunate chance for all of us that this young man, for whom gold until now had been a legend, should have been the one to have smelt out its presence on the ship.

Benjamin was cheerful in appearance and sympathetic in manner, and the prisoners confided in him more freely than they did with us. It was this special intimacy that had sprung up that clearly induced one of them to show him a gold coin he possessed, and Benjamin borrowed it from the man and brought it to me, agog with excitement, for a ruling as to whether it was genuine. Of this there was no doubt. The coin was an Edward VII sovereign, but the mystery was where it had come from, and I asked Benjamin to do his best to find out. Questions were met with a smokescreen of conflicting stories, designed it was to be supposed, to cover up guilty facts. Piecing the evidence together, we concluded that the sovereigns had been taken from a British agent parachuted into Northern Italy, who thereafter, in all probability, soon vanished forever.
We knew that agents sent behind the lines were normally supplied with gold, either in the form of sovereigns, or five-dollar pieces which had an accepted value wherever they might be offered.

What proved to be of fundamental importance in these events was that Benjamin, by his probings, discovered the existence, and eventually the whereabouts, of many more coins – about fifty in all, and immediately set about devising a method of persuading the prisoners to part with their treasure.