The Sword of Fate (11 page)

“Mother, it’s quite true. Paolo, I’m sorry, terribly sorry, and if you hadn’t surprised me we should have avoided this most unpleasant scene. I meant to tell you or write to you tonight. I should like to have parted friends, but if that’s impossible it can’t be helped, and in any case I absolutely forbid either of you to fight. You must release me from my engagement. I can never make you happy because I don’t love you and I intend to marry Mr. Julian Day.”

Her ice-cold words seemed to douse Paolo’s anger, and he was now staring at me with more curiosity than hate. The feeling that we had met somewhere before grew in me, and with sudden apprehension I remembered that he was a diplomat. It was quite possible that we might have been
en poste
in the same city during the short time that I spent in His Britannic Majesty’s Diplomatic Service. He spoke abruptly in Italian:

“‘Julian Day’! No—that is not your name.”

My breathing quickened; my heart seemed to shrivel up
inside me. My worst forebodings were to be realised. I stood there white and speechless as he went on in a tone of such jubilant conviction that I knew it must sweep away all doubt in the minds of his hearers:

“I remember you now. Your name is Fernhurst and you were a junior attaché at the British Embassy in Brussels. You and another man named Carruthers sold your country’s secrets to a gang of international espionage agents. When your treachery was discovered Carruthers at least had the decency to commit suicide, but you preferred to live on in dishonour and were expelled from the British Diplomatic Service with ignominy. Thief! Traitor! Scum! How dare you pollute with your presence any respectable house! Get out!”

For what seemed an age there was an utter silence. The Italian was glaring at me with confident fiendish triumph in his dark eyes. Madame Diamopholus had one hand pressed to her forehead. Daphnis’ face was a white mask of agony and fear. She was fighting against belief, I knew, and urging me with all the power of her will to say something—to give Paolo the he—to deny this ghastly thing of which I had been accused. But what could I say? Certainly nothing that Madame Diamopholus or Paolo Tortino would believe.

“Is—is your name Fernhurst?” Daphnis asked in a whisper.

“It was,” I murmured. There could be no purpose in denying that now.

There was another awful silence. Then a calm English voice suddenly cut in, breaking the tension as swiftly as the flick of a finger would snap an overtaut violin string. It was the British naval captain, and he had just appeared in the doorway. Either he did not sense the tragedy that was being enacted there, or in view of what he had to say deliberately chose to ignore it.

“Sorry if I’m interrupting,” he said in a casual tone, “but I’ve just received a belated message from my ship. The fool of a marine who brought it got himself lost in the town. Mussolini made a declaration at eight o’clock, our time, that Italy will enter the war against Britain tomorrow night. All British officers are ordered to return to duty immediately. I have a car here, Day, so I thought I could give you a lift back to your hotel on my way down to the harbour.”

“Thank you, sir,” I said, and swallowing hard I stepped past Daphnis. The captain was already out in the passage, but I was still crossing the threshold as she staggered and fell fainting into Paolo’s arms.

I Shall never forget the night and day that followed. For a well-proportioned blend of physical discomfort and acute mental distress I have never lived through their equal. First in darkness and later under a torrid, gruelling, merciless midsummer North African sun the endless chain of cars and lorries of which my vehicle was one stopped and started, crawled and spurted, hour after hour, along the coast road to Mersa Matruh.

We passed the old railhead at Hammam while it was still dark and reached El Imayid just before dawn. El Alamen, with its tattered palms and mud-walled houses, showed clear in the cool early-morning light, but by the time we reached El Daba we were already sweating, and after that the journey was positive unadulterated hell.

As I was not driving I had not even the job of keeping the car to its place in the steady stream of traffic to occupy my mind, and my thoughts revolved ceaselessly round that awful scene with Daphnis in which I had cut so sorry a figure.

It was largely my own fault for having kept my past concealed from her. I had meant to tell her the whole story of the tragedy which had ruined my promising career at its very outset as soon as a suitable opportunity occurred; the trouble was that I had really spent such a very little time with her, and Major Cozelli’s suspicions had caused me to force the pace in a way that I should never otherwise have done.

How right he had been about the possibility of the Italians’ coming in and how wrong everybody else’s complacence, including my own! Perhaps he was right, too, in his guess that Daphnis was concerned in conveying information to—yes, they were now quite definitely the enemy. I closed my eyes and my heart went sick at the thought. I tried not to believe it, fought against its acceptance with all my will, yet the damnable suspicion persisted. But if I had the least shadow of a doubt about my love for her it was gone now. Whatever she was, whatever she had done, made no difference. I loved her as I had never loved anyone before or should ever love again. I knew that to the very depths of my being, now that I had lost her.

My exposure by Paolo Tortino could not have been fuller or possibly have occurred at a more decisive moment. As the long
sweltering hours dragged by I tried to face up to it that my chances with Daphnis were now utterly ruined. If only I had been able to get hold of her and talk to her on the morning after the scene there might have been some hope for me; but the sudden call to return to duty had put that out of the question. I could write to her, but I had little hope that a letter reaching her days later could undo the terrible blow to her pride and belief in my decency that she had sustained.

As soon as I was back with the battalion—and could get a few moments to myself—I did write to her. In a letter I could not say very much except that, while there were things in Paolo’s statement which I could not deny, I did deny absolutely that I had ever betrayed my country’s secrets, and that the facts he had related were capable of a completely different explanation from the one which he had put upon them. I said that I had been meaning to tell her of this wretched affair which had caused certain people to misjudge me at the first chance that arose and begged her to have faith in me. I told her that, during the great summer heats, there was little likelihood of any major operations taking place on the Libyan border, so that, my week’s special leave having been cut short, as soon as the excitement of Italy’s coming into the war had died down, I thought that I would be able to get twenty-four hours in Alex to give her a full explanation. All I asked, before applying for leave, was that she should send me one line saying that she was willing to give me a hearing.

Perhaps it was stupid of me to have asked her consent and I should have strained every nerve to see her without waiting for it; but, in the mood of black pessimism which had settled on my mind like an evil fog, I felt robbed of all self-confidence and half-convinced, even before I sent the letter, that I should receive no reply to it.

Six days went by, then a letter arrived for me addressed in that same thick angular hand as the note that I had received in the hospital, and which I knew instantly to be Daphnis’. My feelings were so stirred at the very sight of the writing that I dared not trust myself to open it in the mess, where it was handed to me. Hurrying to my tent, I ripped open the envelope with shaking fingers. It had no beginning and no end, and every world of it burnt into my brain.

On the day after we first met I had the sands read for me. You came out most clear, but very plain there lay a sword between us. Already I am injured to my heart. That shall heal because it is not
cut too deep, but no way can the sword that Fate place there be turned aside. We are not for each other and it is hopeless for both that we make a war with Destiny. Do not attempt again to see me, please. Our paths lie different ways and this is good-bye
.

Daphnis had never told me that she had consulted a fortune-teller on the day after our first meeting, and in view of his gloomy prognostications it seemed that she must have been greatly attracted to me from the very beginning, since she had gone against his warning in order to meet me in her garden; but that was little consolation now. Still half-stunned by the catastrophe which had wrecked our swiftly-blossoming love, I saw no alternative but to accept her decision; although I knew that it would be easier to forget that episode in the past which had changed the whole course of my life than to put her out of my mind.

The days and weeks that followed were sheer hell for everyone at Mersa Matruh, and our outposts which, right up to the Libyan border, provided a screen for the main army. No action took place for the simple reason that the soul-destroying heat made all movement during the daytime, and therefore any sustained military operation, utterly impossible to both sides.

If it had not been for the organised bathing parties at Mersa Matruh, God knows how the troops would have survived through those stifling weeks. The wells there are good and sufficient for the basic needs of a considerable army, but it would have been quite out of the question to provide even the scantiest fresh-water baths and sometimes we changed shirts and shorts that were sopping wet with sweat as many as four or five times a day.

Dust and flies completed with heat the triumvirate of enemies that scourged us during those ghastly summer months. It was risking acute inflammation of the eyes and temporary blindness to go anywhere without goggles as sandstorms occurred with monotonous, heart-breaking frequency. Great waves of sand would beat against the tents and the hutments, driven so fiercely that in a matter of a quarter of an hour they would scour every scrap of paint off the body of a car. While the storms lasted, one seemed to move in a pea-soup fog, and afterwards the fine grit would be found to have penetrated everywhere. Hair, nose and ears were full of it; boots, blankets and baggage were powdered inside and out, and it was impossible to protect even our food and drinks from their quota. To add to the gaiety of nations in this charming campaign, during which neither side had as yet
fired a shot, the sandfleas, coming from God-knows-where in myriads and swarms to this desert, which had been virtually uninhabited until the coming of the Imperial Forces, bit us and battened on us relentlessly.

To these physical discomforts was added the by no means small mental strain of wondering what in hell was going to happen in Western Europe. With longer and longer faces we listened to the broadcasts following the French withdrawals south of the Marne, south of the Seine, south of the Loire. Then the ignominious surrender which made us positively seethe with disgust and anger.

The French still had a great army in North Africa and another in Syria. They had their vast Empire, a powerful battle fleet and huge resources lying outside France itself. Why in God’s name, we asked each other, hadn’t they the guts to transfer their Government to Algiers and fight on with us? The Poles, Norwegians, Dutch and Belgians had all done the courageous thing in establishing Governments in London for the purpose of rallying their nationals and their resources all over the world against the common foe. With such admirable examples offered by smaller peoples why should not France, with her far vaster powers to assist in the defeat of the menace to all freedom, have done so too?

At first we were just amazed and puzzled, but gradually the true answer began to trickle through. Two-thirds of the French Army had never fired a shot. In the break-through at Sedan they had suffered practically no casualties and fled, not from the bombs of the diving aeroplanes, but from the noise they made. Scores of French regiments had thrown their arms down at the first sight of the Germans, and refused to fight.

That was the whole awful truth. It was not simply that a little caucus of venal politicians had sold France. It was that the great bulk of the French nation was absolutely rotten. The military leaders, the aristocrats and the rich industrialists were almost all openly Fascists who preferred what they considered the lesser evil of a France under Hitler to Communism, but the French masses were little better and had played every bit as large a part in the betrayal. They had been the two million French soldiers who never fired a shot, and the five million Communist-Socialist workers who thought more of politics than patriotism, and with criminal folly had followed a policy of go-slow in industry so that they could get more out of the masters instead of getting down to the job of turning out the tanks and ’planes.

Quite obviously the French treachery would have such vast
repercussions that its full effects could not possibly be measured at once. It was not only the direct threat to Britain through occupation of the French Atlantic coastline by the enemy or the loss to the Allies of France’s man-power which must render the initiation of any fresh land campaign on the continent of Europe foredoomed to failure through disparity of numbers.

There was no sphere of war in which the blow would not be felt. France’s merchant marine could no longer carry for the Allied cause. All the valuable minerals and other resources of her colonies would no longer be at our disposal. In the Near East we had counted upon the French Army in Syria as a solid tangible factor in strengthening the resolution of our friends the Turks to resist aggression. That prop had now been knocked away. Formerly at least six magnificent bases in the South of France, Corsica and North Africa were at the disposal of the Royal Navy, and from these the Allies could dominate the whole of the Western Mediterranean. Now there lay no place at which units of our Fleet could shelter, repair, remunition and fuel between Portsmouth and (three thousand miles distant) Alexandria; with the exception of Malta, where the harbour was now rarely free from attack by enemy aircraft, and Gib., which could be rendered untenable to shipping at any time that the Axis Powers might persuade Spain to come in on their side.