The Sword of Fate (34 page)

“What’s all this about the Battalion re-equipping and going on a new show?” I asked, before he could say anything further.

“D’you mean to say that in your job you don’t know?” he asked incredulously.

I shook my head. “I’ve been too darn’ busy for the last few weeks to think of anything except my own work.”

Toby lowered his voice again. “It’s so secret that I only know because I’ve been taken on to do Assistant Adjutant while we’re down here. For God’s sake don’t even whisper it to anyone whom you wouldn’t trust with your life; but we’re going to Greece!”

With a great effort I suppressed a start of surprise and managed to mutter, “When are you off?”

“Word hasn’t come through yet, but the re-equipping was completed two days ago and permission to leave camp is not being granted to officers or men for more than three hours at a stretch and never after sundown; so we may embark any night. Isn’t it thrilling? We’ll be able to get a crack at those blasted Nazis at last, and that’ll be much more fun than chivvying these spineless macaroni-eaters.”

“Rather!” I agreed, with a heartiness that I did not feel, and I went on earnestly, “Listen, Toby, I’d give my eyes to go with you and the rest of the crowd in this new show, and I think I can fix it.”

“Splendid!” he beamed. “But how?”

“As an interpreter, of course.”

“Arabic won’t be any good there, or Italian, unless we pick up some Italian prisoners.”

“Perhaps not; but I speak German and quite enough Greek to arrange about billets and that sort of thing. The point is—have you yet had a Greek interpreter attached to you?”

“No. You’ve got a clear field there and it would be absolutely grand if you could come. But what about your other work? This hush-hush stuff you’re on?”

“I’ll have to see what can be done,” I replied cautiously; “and there’s one way in which you can help me. Directly you hear definitely that the Battalion’s got its marching orders, ring me up at the Cecil so that I can make a last eleventh-hour effort to get permission, should I have failed in the meantime. Naturally you’ll have to be careful what you say over the telephone. You’d better ask me out to dinner, and if you know the hour at which
the embarkation is due to start you can give it to me by saying that you’ve got two or four or ten other people coming to the party.”

“Right, I’ll do that,” he agreed at once. “Let’s have another drink to the success of your efforts.”

We talked on, mainly about other things, for the best part of half an hour, and before we parted I impressed upon Toby that, for reasons which at the moment I could not disclose, it would be very much better if he did not tell ‘Long Willie’ or any of the others that he had seen me or that I had any intention of trying to come to Greece with them.

There was no point now in going down to the docks, so after leaving Toby I went straight to the Cecil, where I saw the manager, who by this time was an old friend of mine, and explained my sudden disappearance. I told him that on the night of February the 19th, without receiving any warning at all, I had been despatched on a special mission which had taken me right through Palestine into Syria; hence, as I had just returned from a neutral country, the fact that I was wearing civilian clothes. He had had my things packed up after I had been absent for two days, and now he had them sent up to another room, upon which I went upstairs and got back into uniform.

After lunch I called upon my prospective mother-in-law, who appeared anxious to see me, although she was obviously worried and anxious about the turn events had taken and the second postponement of her daughter’s marriage.

The interview was a difficult one, as I had no means of knowing how much she knew as to the true state of affairs, and I did not wish to alarm her unduly. She quite obviously connected my sudden disappearance with the visit of the police to question Daphnis on the night that I had roused them out of bed, but had accepted the explanation given her that I had been sent away from Alex without warning.

I soon found that she believed that Daphnis and I had had a quarrel, which was not sufficiently serious for us to decide on breaking off our engagement but quite enough for us to agree on my sudden enforced absence being an adequate excuse to postpone our wedding indefinitely. Daphnis had suddenly declared her intention of going to Greece as a nurse, and made everybody’s life a misery until her stepfather had agreed to take her with him to Athens. Nobody appeared to have suggested that my own absence from Alexandria would be indefinite, whereas, once Daphnis was launched upon nursing the Greek wounded, it might
be months, or even years, before she returned to Egypt, so the deduction that we had had a serious difference was quite a reasonable one.

I tacitly implied that her assumption was correct but that I was still desperately in love with Daphnis, which God knows was the truth, and that I hoped to induce her to return to Egypt so that we could get married in the not-far-distant future. I then obtained the address of the Diamopholi shipping offices in Athens, and after a little polite conversation took my leave.

There was nothing further that I could do until I heard from Toby, so I decided that I’d better sit tight at the Cecil. After listening to the news that night, March the 11th, which was mainly about an attempt to assassinate our Minister to Bulgaria, of an emergency meeting of the Yugoslav Crown Council, which had been called by the Regent, Prince Paul, and of British attacks on the Eritrean stronghold of Keren, I went up to my room. I was almost sick with worry about Daphnis, but I knew that it must be many days before I could get news of her, and that if I was not to become a nervous wreck I must occupy my mind somehow; so I got out my war maps.

I had said nothing to Toby that morning when he had thrown his bombshell about the decision to send Imperial troops into Greece. I’m no defeatist, and the last thing that I would willingly do is to damp the ardour of a keen young subaltern like Toby. But my training for the Diplomatic had necessitated my taking a high degree in history at Oxford, and it is impossible to have absorbed all the main facts about past wars without learning something of the art of strategy.

As long as the French had been with us it had looked as though the Allies would, in time, be able to put into the field approximately the same number of ’planes, tanks and men as the Germans.

But once France had been put out of the game and Italy had come into it, the future presented a very different picture. Any really considerable increase in our Indian Army would create a special problem, and failing that the British Empire simply has not got the numbers ever to be able to put into the field an army of the same size as the combined armies of the Germans and Italians. Their united populations total a hundred and twenty-five millions. The white population of the Empire is seventy millions, including the Irish, and it is doubtful if the fact that they are not fighting with us can be balanced, as far as numbers are concerned, by the oddments of Poles, French, Czechs and other Free Forces who are.

In consequence the major strategy of the war must be governed by this simple arithmetic. Nobody but a lunatic would suggest pitting the armies of a 70-million population against the armies of a 125-million population,
as long as the larger is united under its leaders, has eight years’ start in the armaments race, and air superiority
.

Nevertheless, while it is stupid to underrate the Germans’ strength, initiative and drive, it is equally stupid to allow oneself to be scared into thinking that they can do the impossible.

One thing which is fundamentally impossible is to transport, supply and munition a major army by air. A division or so of air-borne troops may certainly be used with success to establish a first foothold; but their final defeat is absolutely inevitable unless they can be reinforced within a very limited period with heavy equipment, approximately equal in weight to that of the army that they are opposing.

The only way to do this is obviously by sea, and as long as the British Navy remains paramount in the Mediterranean it must continue to be a most hazardous undertaking for the Axis to endeavour to supply any main army across the water.

From this very simple reasoning it is perfectly clear that we might meet a German Army in favourable, or at worst equal, terms, and have a good hope of defeating it in North Africa, or the Middle East; solely because there are definite limits to the numbers of men and the weight of material that the Germans could bring over. On the other hand, no such handicap applies to the Axis Forces anywhere upon the mainland of the European Continent.

The Italians are good enough and numerous enough to be used as garrison troops to hold down the defeated and disarmed peoples of the conquered countries, so this leaves the Nazis free to launch the whole weight of their own vast war machine in any direction that they choose. Clearly, therefore, it would only be asking for the most grievous trouble to attempt to stop Hitler if he decided to march eastward
until he got to the Dardanelles
, or southward
until he got the Straits of Gibraltar
.

It was going to be difficult enough in all conscience to stop him then; but if the Turks stood firm there seemed a really good chance that we might check any attempt by Hitler to break out to the east.

The south was much more tricky, as however well the fortress of Gibraltar might be defended that alone could not stop Axis Forces by-passing it and crossing the narrow waters. But there
was the Moroccan International Zone over which the Spanish had arbitrarily reassumed control, and one hoped that we might feel strong enough to send an Expeditionary Force there immediately the Nazis crossed the Pyrenees, which could contest the landing of Axis Forces in Africa.

Libya was the third possible, but more difficult, road for the Axis, but General Wavell’s magnificent sweep between December and February had carried the outposts of the Army of the Nile nearly six hundred miles further to the west, so all that territory would have to be re-won before Egypt was again threatened.

The fourth and only remaining way out of his cage for Hitler lay through Russia, and if he was desperate enough to take that, whether we liked the Bolsheviks or not, we would have every excuse for cheering our heads off. Any attempt to assess the rear fighting strength of the huge Soviet Army and Air Force could only be sheer guesswork, but it was as plain as the nose on one’s face that even Hitler could not take on 200 million new enemies without crippling himself so severely that it would shorten the war by years, and leave Germany at the mercy of our rapidly-growing Air Force.

In considering the prospect of our success in this Greek campaign one remembered that Hitler was said to have over 180 divisions at his disposal. That meant that if one wrote off 80 divisions for guarding the German eastern frontier against any surprise attack from Russia, and wrote off the whole of the Italian Army as good for nothing more than garrisoning conquered territories, Hitler still had 100 divisions of the finest and best-equipped troops in the world which, within a few weeks, he could concentrate upon any front on the Continent from the Baltic to the Mediterranean and from the Atlantic to the Black Sea.

How many divisions were we in a position to send against this armoured spearhead of the mightiest army that history has ever known? Six, eight, ten, twenty? As a serving officer of very junior rank I was in no position to know, but I was prepared to bet my bottom dollar that we couldn’t put more than a dozen divisions into Greece, and to do that would mean denuding Libya, Egypt and Palestine to a wickedly dangerous degree.

I was prepared to make another bet—that this crazy piece of gallantry was not being undertaken without opposition on the part of Generals Wavell and Wilson, who had proved themselves so brilliant in the Libyan campaign. My third bet was that Mr. Churchill did not like it either, because he is not only an idealist but also a trained strategist and a realist.

Perhaps the answer to this riddle lay in Mr. Churchill’s well-known loyalty to his colleagues. Certain of them were known from their past actions to be men of great ideals; but in Total War it must at least be questioned as to if idealists who have not proved themselves also to be realists make the wisest leaders. On grounds of principle alone it was clearly our duty to support those splendidly heroic Greeks. The idealists in or near the War Cabinet would naturally make a highly impassioned plea that we should do so; but had they paused to count the possible cost? Or was it that some of them had pledged us prematurely?

Looking at the map again it seemed so transparently clear what our strategy should be. To land another Expeditionary Force on the mainland of Europe
before we had air superiority
was to invite certain defeat. But if Hitler attempted to break out of his cage, either into Asia or Africa, we should fight like tigers with everything we had. If we could only keep him in the cage, the blockade would do its work and the R.A.F. would grow until by constant and terrific bombings we could destroy German morale, and cause the captive peoples to revolt. Then, and then only, should we be justified in again landing an army on the Continent, since it would have a decent prospect of waging a victorious campaign and speedily finishing the war.

Therefore, we ought to have said frankly and honestly to the Greeks: “If we send you six divisions, which is about all that we can possibly spare, there can be no hope whatsoever of this support being sufficient to enable you to hold any part of the Greek mainland against the main German Army.

“You have all our sympathy, but we are pitted against a remorseless enemy who for the moment is still more powerful than ourselves. You will recall that less than a year ago we lost all our first-line tanks and equipment by so rashly going to the aid of Belgium. We cannot possibly afford to lose a second mass of invaluable war material. The sole hope of restoring world freedom lies in us, therefore we dare not squander a single ’plane, tank, gun or man in any but a vital issue.

“In the main strategy of the world war the mainland of Greece has no significance. But Crete and the Greek islands of the Aegean which lie on the very doorstep of Asia are of real importance. Don’t ask us to sacrifice our tanks and men in Greece to no purpose, but let us put everything we can possibly spare into Crete and the other big islands, because by so doing, with our Navy to help us, we can bar the road to the East.”