MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
T is seldom that one reads a fully satisfactory account of any I military operation. Men of action are rarely men of letters, nor
are they often able to relate their own experience either to the background to which it furnished the foreground or to the interest-
ing adjustment of the individual to the mass. In most operations of war, moreover, there is a constant confusion both of space and time: the narrator is unable to say where exactly his theme developed or where it ended: it is difficult for him to decide where to begin and where to place his conclusion. Occasionally in warfare there occur campaigns which are sharply sundered from the general con- duct of war both by the geographical and the time sequence. Such a campaign was the amazing conclusion of the Battle of Africa. Yet it is always a delight for me to come across some description by a soldier and a man of action of an operation which is self- contained. Most minds become blurred by the intricate organisa- tions of modern battle and grow confused between what was vital at the moment and what, after the conclusion of the episode, is interesting for the outsider to read. Stendhal, Tolstoy and even Thackeray have confessed and demonstrated that it is impossible to view battles objectively, and that the subjective approach is no more than a fragment of a broken mirror reflecting but a segment of the whole. Yet it is agreeable when a man of literary susceptibility is able to describe an operation of war from the subjective angle ; it is even more welcome when the operation he describes is clean-cut, rapid and decisive. I have thus derived much enjoyment from Mr. Somerset de Chair's The Golden Carpet, in which as a man of letters he tells again the story of " Kingcol," namely, the story of the column under General Kingstone which dashed in 1941 from the Mediterranean to Baghdad. It is an expensive book, since even in the cheap edition it costs three guineas. But it is a pleasure in these days of shoddy production to read and handle a volume as beautifully printed and devised as this on which the Golden Cockerel Press have lavished so much expense and trouble.
Mr. de Chair is a young Tory—one of the breed that may in future be able to do much to elucidate and refine our post-war problems. Having achieved what he gaily calls " the leisure of wounds," he has been able, while still a fighting soldier, while still an active Member of Parliament, to record his experiences in literary form. But he is something more than an Intelligence Officer and something more than an active legislator. He is a romantic, and one who is gifted with a forcible and vivid power of expression. My interest in his book has been enhanced by two fortuitous circum- stances. In the first place, I have for many years been attracted by the intrepidity which Mr. de Chair has manifested in the House. In that dim museum of compromises it is always welcome to find somebody who is vivacious and extreme. In the second place, he tells of a forlorn area of the earth's surface, of that pumice-strewn gap between the Mediterranean and the lush plains of Mesopotamia, which I have twice traversed and which live to this day in sharp outlines in my memory. I do not think, however, that I am exag- gerating, from subjective sympathy, the literary value of a work which is passionate and acute. I do not fall a ready victim to romanticism, and least of all to that moonshine form of romanticism which sees colour in the drab and festering East. But I like zest. And I forgive Mr. de Chair for his schoolboy illusion that Baghdad (surely the dingiest of all riverside resorts) was, in fact, the golden-domed city of the Caliphs. That he should have felt so childishly about it is what gives to his book its adolescent charm.
* * * * It was the time, in the spring of 1941, when Raschid Ali, instigated by German agents, raised the banner of revolt in Iraq. Our Ambassador in Baghdad was isolated in his Embassy beside the river. German planes and advisers poured in from Syria. It appeared for a moment that the whole of Mesopotamia might be handed over to the enemy. We had few resources and we stood in dire need. But somehow, with almost incredible resourcefulness and bluff, we managed to pull through. The most dramatic element in our sudden effort was represented by the column sent rapidly across the desert from Palestine. Mr. de Chair, in his capacity of Intelligence Officer, was perfectly aware of the drama which their escapade presented. " The gleaming story," he writes, " will emerge of a little army that marched from the shores of the Mediterranean to the Euphrates across a tract of waterless desert never before in all history crossed by a conquering army and struck onwards to the very banks of the Tigris to capture Baghdad and enter the city of the Caliphs." " I was too tired," he writes again, " to go into details ; but I replied, ' You can say with confidence that this is one of the greatest marches in history, and that it is the first time since the days of Alexander the Great that any army has succeeded in crossing the desert from the shores of the Mediterranean to the banks of the Euphrates.' "
It is a splendid story, and he has written it well. It has its beginning in the incertitude of the early start ; it has its glorious end when, in the hour before the dawn, Mr. de Chair himself entered the Embassy in Baghdad and informed the Ambassador, Sir Kinahan Cornwallis, that the army of liberation was at the gate. I enjoyed that passage particularly. It reminded me of the relief of the Residency of Lucknow, of the relief of the Legations in Peking. The fountain which stands in the main hall of the Baghdad Embassy (and in which in my day floated the heads of countless purple roses) tinkled in that dawn hour when Mr. de Chair strode in ; he climbed the very English staircase which leads to the upper bedrooms ; he roused the Ambassador from his sleep. It was a fine occasion, and Mr. de Chair has told it finely. But being a man of letters as well as a politician, he has been able to add to his narrative certain other touches of observation which render his story more interesting than any record of successful events. He is fascinated by the relations between the professional soldier and the amateur. He indicates with skill the conflict, and the ultimate under- standing, between his Brigadier and Glubb Pasha, the creator of the Desert Patrol. Even more audaciously he describes the relations between a junior intelligence officer (who is also a Member of Parliament) and the same Brigadier. The psychology of that relation- ship is subtly and sympathetically indicated. The professional soldier has, I fear, a deep-rooted prejudice against legislators, nor do senior officers take kindly to the intellectuals who are attached to their staffs. But it often occurs that the first phase of suspicion develops into a phase of curiosity and finally of appreciation. The officer discovers to his surprise that the intellectual is not either cowardly or undisciplined : the intellectual finds that the reticence of the professional soldier does not necessarily imply any blankness of mind. Mr. de Chair throughout is impertinent but not impenitent.
* * * *
The value of this book, however, is to be sought in its romanticism. I admit that the fort at Rutba Wells is one of the most romantic of all modern buildings--rising like Bodiam Castle with its huge oaken door. I admit that the first sight of the golden dome of Kadhimain is an impressive occasion, and that, after so much loneli- ness, the sense of the festering city gives a thump to the heart. But what I like about Mr. de Chair is his constant awareness of the past in the present : " Another evening when we saw high up against the pale blue of the evening sky three light-green Heinkel bombers flying over . . . we went down to the lake to bathe." I am not surprised that Mr. de Chair, enjoying his " leisure of wounds," should have returned to his green-backed dairy and written again the experiences of those triumphant thirty days. For who can blame him if he reads into that dust-strewn anabasis the glamour of The Golden Carpet? Or that he should feel, as he fingers his diary :
Thus was our fable, like a mirage grown From something small to a great weird unknown.
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