A Merry Dance Around the World With Eric Newby. Eric Newby
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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,