But he was good. I did a paper which was received rather coolly when I left from the man who was going to inherit my post. It was called “Propaganda and Impropaganda.” Part of what I’m telling you today was in it. It was how, just as in business, you should know your victim, so to speak, so in propaganda you should either know the language of the person you’re dealing with or something about his beliefs and views so that you can influence him. Later in the war we got very skillful and we caused numberless suicides among the Japanese by printing a poem, an extraordinary, simple haiku poem with a moon and the Yellow River or something like that. Whole regiments surrendered in tears with this thing. It was done, of course, by a Japanese. No Englishman would’ve found it possible to do. At the very outbreak of the war in Cairo when I arrived there, the British community, to show their patriotism, had done something so foolish that I can hardly bear to speak about it. They printed a poster of a bulldog with a British flag ‘round its neck and the slogan, “Who is for liberty, Who is for victory?.” Now, at first sight it seems a very harmless thing, but the worst insult in Arabic is “dog”. And this was done by people who had been residents in Egypt for half a lifetime. They should have known that “ya kelb” is the worst insult an Arab can give or take. It would be like, you know, the French being particularly sensitive to being compared to pigs—“cochon” is the worst insult in French. Can you imagine at the beginning of an important war like that putting out a poster of a pig with the French flag around its neck and saying “Let’s all be patriotic pigs together for victory.”? You wouldn’t get a Frenchman to rally to that. Well, naturally, the English couldn’t understand why the Arabs were rolling about with laughter in the street when they saw this thing. And this was just the beginning of our war effort.
Diplomats speak good French in general, but owing to the rapid shift around they are limited: two years is just not enough to deal with a complicated language like, for instance, Japanese. In the old days you were more or less projected forward toward a country, often of your own choice. You were told, “Will you do five years in Japan?”, and you were given a handsome allowance and a Japanese instructor to teach you the language. So those in the old colonial service were all the experts; they knew the country with all its personalities, and got to love it very much. They were quite a different breed from modern diplomats who have spent two years here, two years there; and the service is more picturesque than really serious. Also it’s taken less seriously because of this element. I’m thinking, for example, of Sir Charles Bell’s mission to Tibet. No one had ever been to Tibet after Young-husband had conquered it in 1904. We established diplomatic ties with it and then Bell took a small group in, a chancery of five members. The first thing they noticed was that drink and cigarets were offensive to Buddhists. So the rule went out that there was one room in the Embassy where you could smoke a cigaret or have a drink; but to all intents and purposes they would never drink or smoke outside the premises, and certainly never in public. And owing to that one small consideration Bell became very friendly with the Dalai Lama and secured all the trade negotiations going at that time. He also secured all our supply lines up to the north—just one of one simple, tactful act. And that works even today.
The other day I was in Geneva and ran across a man whom I think I call “Hoyle” in one of my books. He’s a very venerable chap now in UNESCO who speaks beautiful Turkish and beautiful Greek, and has been in East Bahan for a hundred years—knows everybody, all the personalities, and is very gentle and sweet. And he said, “You know, I’ve got so bored with Geneva, not only the climate but also work in the U.N. is absolutely asinine—anybody would be qualified to do it. You have no idea how useless one feels as a diplomat. So I think that I’m going to the Congo, I see there’s a job going there.” And I said, “But listen, have you seen the evening’s paper?” He said, “Oh you mean about them eating the last mission?” I said, “Yes, you know the Balubas—they’re turning everybody into soup. You don’t want to go in there.” And he said, “Well, to be eaten by a Baluba—at least one would feel that one had served some purpose.”
But in justice to us, as usual, stag-legged and rather behind the times and really adrift, we hadn’t realised what propaganda was, you see, far less what impropaganda was. We knew the word agitprop and vaguely we had in our minds a sort of historical perspective on propaganda in general, But the Germans had set us a particular case. They set up a ministry of lies, and they were pumping out, like a Barnum Circus of absolutely flat, bare-faced lies, and they suddenly realised that, like a television commercial, if you repeat it long enough people don’t bother to question, they take it as true. We hadn’t realised this. We lived in a democracy where most of us lied negatively, not really by open intention, but by simple evasion, really, and where a free press rapidly ventilates problems and queries, particularly in England where you feel that if you write to the Times the whole thing will be settled. Not in the new Times, the old Times. The one that’s dead now, that you used to call “Auntie”. This propaganda question was a sort of characteristic fixation on our part and we suddenly had a brilliant idea about five years before the war when Goebbels was in full flood with the German propaganda machine. We thought we ought to make a distinction between propaganda and culture, and surely cultural penetration is what we really needed, what we really wanted because it would bring together all the most erudite and most instructed people in any given foreign community with our own instructed. We’d mutually agree to lend books to the universities and so on. This is all very well. This society, which is rather like a missionary society, was founded after a lot of argument, and the Queen agreed to be a patron. But the thing got so delayed that it was only after the outbreak of the war that it was actually launched. And this happened to be one of the master strokes of our policy because all of a sudden in Athens, in a very difficult position, a whole lot of young men in white knitted wool ties with copies of Keats in their pockets, and civilians to boot, at a time when everybody else was in uniform, suddenly arrived in Athens, opened institutes and started instantly teaching English and teaching Keats. Well, the Germans realised at once that the entire British Secret Service was at work, doubled all their effectives and kept a watch night and day on these innocent schoolmasters. Being German, of course, everything normal was suspicious. Sometimes I myself wondered whether we hadn’t been too clever and whether these teachers were not, after all, spies. Then when I joined them to give some lectures I realised it was the most innocent and absurd thing that could have happened. But they would choose the outbreak of the war to launch this organisation. It was called The British Council.
Naturally, the salaries were so low that the members were rather inferior. One had hopes that our general culture was going to be on a pretty high standard, but my boss for these lectures was sitting at his desk one day and asked me what I wanted to lecture about and I gave him some subjects which might please the Greeks when all of a sudden the accountant came in absolutely white and said “There is 10,000 pounds missing from the safe, sir.” This man, who was a clergyman said, after a moment of blankness, “Oh yes, my goodness, I think I have it here.” And he had. He had it all in his pocket. He had forgotten. He transferred all the petty cash to his pocket and he was only interested in ancient history. He was working on a book about Herodotus. And so the entire funds were in his pocket—I was horrified too because my salary was coming out of it. And then in Egypt I went ’round to see the British Council representative to find out if they’d like any lectures that could be done for the Middle East, political ones especially, and I met an extraordinary man, very gloomy, who said, “Where would you like to live if you really wanted to live somewhere, old man?” So I said, “Well, really, there’s only place I really want to live. That’s in France.” He said, “Why France?” I said, “Well, I can give you a number of reasons, but just take the simplest… food.” He said, “I thought you’d say that.” Then he said, bitterly, “Do you know I’ve crossed France fr
equently and I always carried my food in a paper bag because I was so badly swindled one day at lunch I decided I was never going to pay for another French meal?” And this man was our cultural representative! Needless to say I didn’t go any further with this thing at all. I went back to the embassy and I stayed there.
I should perhaps say a few words about the functions of embassies and the role they play; in our crazy spy-mad age the whole question of information has been much bedevilled by the fact that all information of whatever kind has been lumped together by the spy-nuts behind the Curtain and made to sound as if it were military in scope. This is plain madness. When an embassy is appointed to a country it is perfectly normal for them to find out what is going on there, what personalities rule there, in the simple interests of business or cultural association. Of course when some countries are acting in bad faith and with bad intent their consciences prick them for they know that they are building a secret army or secret airforce and they don’t want the fact known. But the whole domain of commercial and cultural relations is helped or hindered by the knowledge of a good embassy. They study the produce of the country and put people in their own country in touch so that business deals can be arranged. They send poets and journalists and painters on short visits. They arrange for painting or films to be shown reciprocally. All this is for the best, and only in this lunatic age would it be thought of as spying. But when countries have something to hide, particularly the communist countries, and you get a spy phobia, it’s very amusing to see what is regarded as spying: all these legitimate activities which in peace time or under normal diplomatic arrangements wouldn’t be considered at all reprehensible, but in fact helpful information. For example, here I wouldn’t have to bug you for information about silkworms or about San Francisco wines; I would just ring up the board of trade and go out and get all the information I needed and send it home clear, not in cipher. Whereas, half the trouble with this problem is that what is not really spying is considered spying. For example, I spent 4½ years in Yugoslavia for my sins; that was tough. There everything was considered spying, even breathing. When you arrived at the gate you practically have a man to breathe for you, to breathe down you and on you. And when you went to the embassy he breathed on your car, and when you came out he followed in another car. And then there was a man in your house who breathed on you too. That’s how I’m so good at yoga now because I learned breathing from the secret police there. But it was perfectly foolish also, because the amount of information you can get if you really want to out of censored papers is absolutely marvellous if you know a little bit of Freud, a little bit of crossword puzzle, a little bit of this and that. The military attaché used to have great fun because he could read Yugoslav, and reading the official communiques he could follow the movements of their units of the army all over the town. For example, the artillery was largely horse-drawn, so every time they arrived in a village they put an ad in the local paper asking for farriers to shoe their horses. Thus we always knew the 37th division was at this particular place because we used to buy all the papers, even the provincial ones. I mean, if they force you to work you can really find almost anything with a bit of logic and intuition. Meanwhile, they used to do silly things. They used to put microphones in the bowl of roses on your table. Whereupon we would tape the noise of lavatory chains and fill their mikes with long long strips of water music. We played this lavatory chains noise for hours to their mikes until they got tired and moved them.
All that’s the rather futile and foolish end of diplomacy, but the serious end is fascinating, and it is interesting and it can be fruitful. As I say, acted on in good faith, it can be enormously useful between nations. It’s a pity that communications have rendered it rather suspect and rather moribund because a great personality is still a great negotiator; and I have seen even very silly personalities—I would describe Sir Anthony Eden as rather a fop, but he’s an extraordinarily good negotiator—and I saw him locking horns with a trade delegation in Yugoslavia and he was extremely bright. I wouldn’t have suspected it from his political role. And then of course we had other problems because half the world is ruled by nuts as you probably know. Or do you know?
And then the evaluation of a very trick position between church and state, for example, in Egypt. In the middle of the war—the Egyptians had declared war but they didn’t want to fight—they declared war because we asked them to. So we allowed them to man the anti-aircraft defenses of Cairo and Alexandria, which they did with considerable skill, but technically they were out of the war, so that their towns were not bombed, they were open cities. Now Farouk was a strangely divided character, very strange. On one hand rather civilised, on the other hand seething with Arab resentments, and like anyone who’s been to British public school, pretty scratched up. It was even dues what he might elect to do. While we were fighting the Germans in the desert we couldn’t really risk a political situation on an Arab basis in Egypt where, for example, the anti-aircraft defenses of Cairo might be withdrawn suddenly. It was not that the defenses themselves were so terribly important, but the towns would’ve been bombed and then the Egyptians would have panicked and we would have had an interior situation which would have benefited Rommel very much indeed. As it was, by a stroke of luck and a fluke, and some diplomacy, and the use of one tank it was stabilized. They went late one night and broke down the palace wall and told Farouk that he really must appoint Nahas Pasha who was pro-British and able to stabilize the situation. And he did do that, but he didn’t like doing it at all and it was, I suppose, a bit of a fascist act. But he had no choice. We had to do that because at one point the Germans were 40 kilometers away and it was quite clear Rommel was going to reach Cairo that evening.
At this time I was attached to the British Embassy and was as usual pining for an independent command. I was always complaining about being under other peoples’ orders. I was extremely independent and had a number of bad ideas which now, looking back, I am rather glad they didn’t let me put into action. But one of the great tragedies in my life has been that whenever I did get an independent command it was in a situation which had gone too far, had deteriorated into a crisis post. I arrived in Yugoslavia on the night Tito broke with Stalin. The frontiers were humming with tanks. Then again when I got a post in Cyprus the whole island went up under me, so to speak. Well, in Egypt, when I finally did get my independent command, it was I think because they thought I would arrive in Alexandria and find a German sitting in my office chair. They realized that the only man crazy enough to accept such an appointment was Durrell. Why not give Durrell to the Germans? He was not much use to us and could do us little harm if they took him away. But I was so fed up with Cairo that I thought I would take a chance. So I drew a revolver which I only knew how to fire very vaguely, and climbed into the night train for the coast. It was all blacked out, very sinister; and from time to time there were halts, mysterious unexplained halts, in the desert; everything went dead silent. Only giant mosquitoes filled the carriages, biting us to death. When I arrived in my post Rommel was still 40 kilometres away; his troops had got bogged down in a bottleneck of sand dunes and lakes called the Qattara Depression. I couldn’t believe my luck.
In Alexandria everything was shut up. When there’s an element of panic in the air the first sign you notice is all the cafés close and all the delicatessens and everything like that, and they roll down those iron shutters; and the more intelligent had actually put up signs saying “Welcome to Rommel” in German. Well, I went around and made a complete list of these people. It took me about three hours and then I went to the British H.Q. and said, “If Rommel doesn’t arrive tonight, these people are going to be out of bounds to British troops, I assure you.” And the Army agreed and they stayed out of bounds for four months. Finally, I had delegations of these people coming to my office and pleading to be put back on the visitor’s list because after Rommel was repulsed and the British got back into Alexandria these people found the British soldiers couldn?
??t drink in these places. It was out of bounds for them. So this was the only practical thing I could do in the way of propaganda. I made a lot of friends this way.
But the first night was a frightfully exciting night because in Cairo I went down to Operations in a great big gloomy hall with a giant board which marked all the positions.
The scale was so great that you could almost see individual units, and I went down with a friend of mine who ran one of the Four Hurricanes out of Crete, Dudley Honor. He said, “Come out and have a look and let’s see because I think tonight’s the night.” And the trains were taking everybody away, sending off all the women and children. A delicious thing to experience actually. Pure vertigo of panic in the streets. And on this operations board in this absolutely silent room, the tapes were marking this thing, the Qattara Depression; the chips were down, Rommel was closing in, and we knew there was just one tarmac road and no further to go. Nothing to stop him except sand dunes. And all of a sudden about 2:00 in the morning the chap takes his earphones off and says, “We’ve advanced a bit,” then marked up three positions in the neck of the depression which were considered really unassailable by us. Of course Rommel had a lack of equipment and he also had the long lines of communications. We took an enormous deep breath and went out and had a drink and I wrote up the names of all these dogs who had said “Welcome Rommel,” and for about two months British soldiers really didn’t drink there and they sobbed their little hearts out until I asked the Army to relent.