This article is a follow up to Brian Matthew’s previous column.
The military police were waiting for us in Gallipoli and they were not happy. Approaching in darkness, when we rolled to a stop we were immediately surrounded by uniformed figures. A group of men playing cards outside a café watched this drama unfold and one shouted something which made them all laugh. The military police, however, did not laugh.
We were taken to a sparsely furnished office lit by a large, naked globe hanging on a fly-papered flex. Years later I would remember that scene when watching Edward Woodward in the TV series, Callan. A man in uniform sat behind a desk at the end furthest from the door. Several rows of coloured decorations and medals queued up across his left breast — we would later refer to him in anecdote as ‘the Colonel’. He motioned us to sit. Three other officers lounged somewhere in the background. Smoke from their cigarettes curled round the light and flattened out under the ceiling like overcast. If all this sounds like a scene from a thriller, that’s what we thought too, and — briefly — we were amused. The police, however, were not amused and our satiric impulses lasted about thirty seconds.
French, it turned out, was the only bridge between us. With some difficulty, we jointly recounted the events of the afternoon — the van running out of petrol, our jaunt to the village on the tractor, and so on. The Colonel, still clearly skeptical, asked to see our jerry can. He shook it, smelt it, and handed it to the other three like Exhibit A in court.
With the inspection of the jerry can, something in the atmosphere changed. Our interrogator visibly relaxed, lit another cigarette. It was as if he was concluding that we were either brilliantly duplicitous and therefore very dangerous spies, or we were as incompetent as we looked. Suddenly he smiled. We must be hungry after our trip? We were.
‘Suivez-moi,’ and we all trooped across the square and down an alleyway to a restaurant. It was closed but the Colonel knocked several times at the door. ‘Mon ami,’ he explained — and sure enough, the proprietor emerged, greeted the Colonel with great enthusiasm and welcomed us all. Straight away he began cooking meat and rice and provided each of us with a large glass of raki. Protocol dictated that