Eastern Approaches (2 page)

S
LOWLY
gathering speed, the long train pulled out of the Gare du Nord. The friends who had come to see me off waved and started to turn away; the coaches jolted as they passed over the points, and the bottles of mineral water by the window clinked gently one against the other. Soon we had left the dingy grey suburbs of Paris behind us and were running smoothly through the rainswept landscape of northern France. Night was falling and in my compartment it was nearly dark. I did not switch on the light at once, but sat looking out at the muddy fields and dripping woods.

I was on my way to Moscow, and, from Moscow, I was going, if it was humanly possible, to the Caucasus and Central Asia, to Tashkent, Bokhara and Samarkand. Already, as I watched that drab, sodden countryside rushing past the window, I saw in my imagination the jagged mountains of Georgia, the golden deserts, the green oases and the sunlit domes and minarets of Turkestan. Suddenly, as I sat there in the half light, I felt immensely excited.

In many ways I was sorry to be leaving Paris. It had been an ideal post at which to begin a diplomatic career, and the years I had spent there had been uninterruptedly happy. It had been, too, an agreeable city to live in. There was the broad sweep of the Champs Elysées and the Avenue du Bois; the magnificence of the Place Vendôme and the Place de la Concorde; the grey stone of the buildings gilded by the sunlight; the green of the trees; the life and noise of the streets less overwhelming, more intimate than the roar of the London traffic. There were those pleasant walks on summer evenings along the banks of the Seine, under the trees, to the Ile de la Cité friends’ houses with their cool panelled rooms; the lights reflected in the river, as one went home at night.

And then there was the enjoyable sensation of being permanently
at the centre of things. Something was always happening; somebody was always arriving or leaving. We lived in an atmosphere of continual crisis. It might be Mr. Ramsay MacDonald and Sir John Simon, looking a little shaken after a rough crossing, on their way to talk things over with Signor Mussolini at Stresa; or Sir Samuel Hoare, always so neat and tidy, come to see Monsieur Laval, intelligent, olive-skinned and leering, with his discoloured teeth and crumpled white tie; or Mr. and Mrs. Baldwin, hurrying home from Aix-les-Bains, the serenity of their summer holiday disturbed by talk of sanctions and the threat of war; or Mr. Eden, travelling backwards and forwards to Geneva; or Mr. Churchill, then a private Member of Parliament, unfashionably preoccupied with questions of defence, come to talk to the French soldiers about their eastern frontier.

All these distinguished visitors had to be met, fed, supplied with the latest reports on the situation, and sent off again by air or train with their retinue of secretaries and detectives. At all hours of the day and night the shiny black official cars crunched the gravel of the Embassy courtyard; telephones rang querulously and continuously; red and black leather dispatch boxes filled with sheaves of Foreign Office telegrams flew backwards and forwards to the Chancery; Sir George Clerk, the most hospitable of Ambassadors, dispensed informal but lavish entertainment in the most magnificent of Embassies. It was an exhausting but also an entertaining and instructive existence. Small wonder that in Paris we felt ourselves closer to the centre of things than our less fortunate colleagues stranded in remote Embassies and Legations in South America and eastern Europe.

Everything that happened in the world seemed to affect us directly and violently in Paris. One crisis followed another: the Abyssinian War, the remilitarization of the Rhineland, the Spanish Civil War. Each time angry crowds demonstrated in the streets. At one moment they wanted to drown M. Herriot. ‘A l’eau, Herriot,’ they cried menacingly. The Abyssinian War and the threat of sanctions against Italy brought a violent reaction against Great Britain on the part of the pro-Fascist right wing. ‘Conspuez Sir Clerk!’ they shouted when the Ambassdor appeared, and we were given a platoon of Gardes Mobiles with steel helmets and fixed bayonets to guard the Embassy.
Over Spain rival factions raised rival cries, the Left predominating. ‘Des avions pour l’Espagne!’ they yelled rhythmically, as they marched along the boulevards. Strangely enough, the remilitarization of the Rhineland, which to those who knew what was going on behind the scenes was the biggest crisis of all, left the general public relatively unmoved, though, had they been aware of our refusal to support their Government against Hitler at this vital juncture, they would have been justified in going to almost any lengths to show their disapproval of British policy.

Nor, in those troubled years before the war, did French domestic affairs present a less animated picture than the European scene itself. From the February Riots of 1934 to the advent of the Front Populaire and the sit-down strikes of 1936, parliamentary democracy in France was at its wildest and most unstable. Governments were formed and reformed, shuffled and re-shuffled, by politicians of the Right, Left and Centre, all of whom the people of France took less and less seriously as they became more and more discredited. Some remained in power for a few weeks, some for a few days. Every week increasingly inflammatory speeches were made and increasingly unsavoury scandals brought to light. On the extreme Left and on the extreme Right private armies were forming, always ready for a scuffle with each other or with the police. Up and down the Champs Elysées crowds of demonstrators surged threateningly, overturning the little tables outside the cafés. Even in the Chamber of Deputies the proceedings were daily interrupted by shouts of ‘Traître!’ and ‘Assassin!’ and, on occasion, by free fights.

In French politics the dominating factor had long been a strong leftward trend and, in the summer of 1936, to the accompaniment of strikes and rioting, the Front Populaire had come to power under weak Socialist leadership. Behind this convenient façade the strength of the Communists, ably led by Maurice Thorez, was steadily increasing. At the elections they had polled more votes than ever before. For the first time their leaders were associated, though indirectly, with the Government of the country. In the trade union movement their influence was in the ascendant. They enjoyed the advantages of power without its responsibilities. There were many ways by which they could exert
pressure on the Government. Some people held them responsible for the strikes which were paralysing the industrial and economic life of the country.

Two pictures from that period of uncertainty and disorder stick in my mind.

One is a scene in the gigantic Renault Motor Works at Boulognesur-Seine, newly seized by the strikers. With two friends I had managed to slip past the pickets on the gate. Wandering through workshop after workshop where girls and men were bedding down for the night on the luxurious cushions of half-finished limousines, we eventually came to the Managing Director’s office. There the Strike Committee had established their Headquarters. The luxuriously furnished room was draped from floor to ceiling with red flags, plentifully adorned with hammers and sickles. Against this improvised background sat the strikers’ leaders, unshaven, with berets or cloth caps on their heads and cigarettes drooping from the corners of their mouths, presided over by a massively formidable woman whose deftly flicking knitting-needles struck me as symbolic. From this nerve centre, as we watched, orders went out by messenger or telephone to different parts of the works. For M. Léon Blum, that amiable drawing-room Socialist and his newly formed Government, they told us, they cared less than nothing. It was all rather like a scene out of a play. Was this, we wondered, a passing phase? Or did it represent the shape of things to come?

Another memory from those days is of a vast crowd, many thousands strong, sweeping along towards the Place de la Bastille on July 14th. Above it waves a forest of red flags with here and there an isolated tricolour, and, borne aloft on the shoulders of the crowd, immense portraits of Stalin, brooding over the proceedings with benign malignity, and the French Communist leaders: Maurice Thorez, square and bloated-looking, who, when war came was to run away to Moscow; Gabriel Péri, the frail intellectual who was to become a resistance leader and be tortured to death in a Gestapo prison; Jacques Duclos, spectacled and cunning; André Marty, the mutineer of the Black Sea Fleet; Marcel Cachin, who had become the Grand Old Man of French Communism. Out in front a tall, pale girl in a red shirt
strides along, her black hair streaming out behind her. From time to time sections of the crowd start to sing and the lugubrious strains of the ‘Internationale’ rise and fall above the tumult. Then, as the singing dies away, there is a shrill cry of ‘Les Soviets!’ and thousands of hoarse voices take up the rhythmic refrain, ‘
LES SOV-I-ETS PAR-TOUT. LES SOV-I-ETS PAR-TOUT
.’

In the disturbed state of their country, with the Germans back in the Rhineland and a weak Government in power at home, it was only natural that many Frenchmen should begin to look about them with increasing anxiety. Their looks turned eastwards: across the reassuring fortifications of the Maginot Line to France’s hereditary enemy, Germany; further east still to Russia — Russia, France’s new found and untried ally; Russia, whose rulers, so many people thought, bore no small share of responsibility for France’s present disturbed state.

Russia seemed to hold the answer to so many of their problems. Could they count on Russian help in the event of a war with Germany? What would this help amount to? What was the truth about the Red Army, about the Soviet economic and industrial position? Were the Russians, working through the Communist International, responsible for the political and industrial disturbances in France? If so, why were they seeking by these methods to undermine the strength of their only ally? Would the Russians leave the Spanish Republicans in the lurch? Would they, in case of need, help Czechoslovakia or Poland? Did the Soviet system offer a solution to any of France’s own social and economic problems? Or was it a menace to which Fascism or Nazism were the only answers? Such were the questions which every thinking Frenchman was asking himself.

Nor did the problems concern France alone. To every European it was of vital importance to know what the Soviet Union stood for, what her aims were and what part she would play in the international conflagration which already seemed inevitable. The years which I spent in Paris, with its essentially continental political atmosphere, had convinced me that, without a first-hand knowledge of the Soviet Union and of its political system, any picture that one might form of the international situation would inevitably be incomplete.

Russia also had other attractions. After a year at the Foreign Office and three more in Paris, I had decided that a change to a more active and less luxurious existence would do me no harm.

I was twenty-five. But, already, I was beginning to get a little set in my ways; perhaps, I reflected in my rare moments of introspection, even a little smug. There were those pin-striped suits from Scholte; those blue and white shirts from Beale and Inman with their starched collars; those neat, well-cleaned shoes from Lobb; the dark red carnation that came every morning from the florist in the Faubourg Saint Honoré. After breakfast, a brief walk under the trees in the Champs Elysées. Or sometimes a ride among the leafy avenues of the Bois. Then the daily, not disagreeable task of drafting telegrams and dispatches, on thick, blue laid paper, in a style and a handwriting which, I flattered myself, both discreetly reflected a classical education. Occasional telephone calls. Occasional visits to the Quai d’Orsay: the smell of bees-wax in the passages; the rather fusty smell of the cluttered, steam-heated offices;
comment allez-vous, cher collègue?
Luncheon at a restaurant or at somebody’s house: politics and people. Afterwards, a pleasant feeling of repletion. Then, more telegrams, more dispatches, more telephone calls till dinner time. A bath. A drink. And then all the different lights and colours and smells and noises of Paris at night. Big official dinner parties, with white ties and decorations. Small private dinner parties with black ties and that particular type of general conversation at which the French excel. The best-dressed women, the best food, the best wine, the best brandy in the world. Parties in restaurants. Parties in night clubs. The Théâtre de Dix Heures, the chansonniers: jokes about politics and sex. The Bal Tabarin: the rattle and bang of the can-can; the plump thighs of the dancers in their long black silk stockings. Week after week; month after month. An agreeable existence, but one that, if prolonged unduly, seemed bound to lead to chronic liver trouble, if to nothing worse.

I have always relished contrasts, and what more complete contrast could there be after Paris than Moscow? I had seen something of the West. Now I wanted to see the East.

My knowledge of Russia and the Russians was derived largely from the charmingly inconsequent White Russian émigrés of both sexes to
be found in the night clubs of every capital in the world and at that time particularly well represented in Paris. From these and from an occasional Soviet film shown at a little Communist cinema behind the Odeon, I had, rightly or wrongly, gained the impression that Russia must be a mysterious and highly coloured part of the world, different from other countries, and offering a better chance of adventure than most places. In the back of my mind lurked the idea that through Moscow might lie the road to Turkestan, to Samarkand, Tashkent and Bokhara, names which for me had then, and still have, an unrivalled power of attraction. I decided to apply for a transfer to Moscow.

Everyone whom I consulted about my projects told me that I was deeply mistaken. They assured me that the Moscow Embassy was a dead end. Life there would be even more sedentary and a great deal duller than life in London or Paris. I should spend long hours in a steam-heated Chancery, to which I should be confined by inclement weather, relentless superiors and the machinations of the O.G.P.U. My only relaxation would be an exhausting round of official parties at which I should meet the same tedious diplomatic colleagues again and again. I should see no Russians and gain no insight into the intricacies of Soviet policy. As for Turkestan, I should never get there. No one, they said, had been there for twenty years. Even before the revolution the Imperial Government had done their best to keep out foreigners, and now travel there was quite out of the question — especially for a British Government official. Why not stay where I was until in the normal course of things I was transferred to Rome, Washington or Brussels?