Also I had another ship experience that didn’t endear the navy to me at all. I had one of those old rolltop desks, you know that kind you get in cheap offices everywhere downtown, and my secretary had got Jane’s Fighting Ships and we got the entire Mediterranean fleet. We were trying to influence the French to give us a battleship and they wouldn’t. We locked up all the machinery on their warships so they actually couldn’t shoot at us, but they wouldn’t go ashore and they wouldn’t do anything. We didn’t want to offend the Free French, you know, and so we were trying to get the French Admiral to come out on our side — trying to coerce a little bit. Then they said to me, “Can’t you do some articles about the glories of the French fleet, and so on.” So I had some articles like that and I put them in the rolltop desk. The next morning when I opened the desk to launch these articles they had disappeared. I said, “Oh, God, I’ve been burgled.” They were all marked highly confidential. There was nothing that wasn’t out of Jane’s Fighting Ships, but still they were confidential. I had to report a confidential loss. Immediately the secret service visited me, the whole Scotland Yard came and took fingerprints and so on. I found other copies of the things and duly sent them out to the press, but this mystery was never cleared up until a month later when I opened the press and discovered that the roller had sucked the entire French fleet into the surround. But meanwhile everybody panicked. The French navy locked up their files and said that the Bulgarians were at it again. Moments of intense panic.
And in the middle of it another absurdity. I get a telegram from London saying, “George Bernard Shaw’s film is being made by Mr. Pascal in Alexandria”—Anthony and Cleopatra, actually, a very bad film—”will you please look after the unit.” It was the middle of the war, but I said yes, I would and got in touch with Mr. Pascal and arranged for barrels to put his film in to send it off. But he had perhaps 5,000 extras for battle scenes who were all Egyptians he picked up anywhere. He also had a false foam rubber Sphinx. Every day at the end of the shooting, they, the extras, didn’t quite understand what was going on. They drew their salary and walked off with their costumes. The company was losing costumes at a rate of about 1,000 a day. At that time we had a bit of a fifth column phobia about parachutists. We had had such a bad mauling in Crete with the 1st division of the German parachutists being dropped. It was the first really extensive drop. Later the Army turned the tables on them at Arnhem. It was quite clear to us with our communications layout in the middle east and the internal sensibility of the Egyptians that perhaps a frightfully determined parachute drop might cut us off from the canal. It would be much worse havoc strategically than having to face Rommel nose to nose. So we were a bit sensitive to this element. At that time, in my office, I had an enormously spy-conscious man with popping eyes called Mr. Axelos who had a deep hoarse voice and smoked cigars, and he used to go about on a bicycle dressed in shorts with his beady eyes, all through the Arab quarter, looking for strange anomalies like, say, Italian parachutists disguised as nuns. And when he’d arrive at the office I’d say, “Mr. Axelos, how are things down at the airport?” And he’d say, “C’est drole! C’est etrange! C’est trés etrange!” Well, no sooner had Pascal begun to shoot there than Axelos began to go down more and more to the airport and he came back looking really purple. He said, “There’s something really astonishing. I can’t believe my eyes. It must be the Italian Air Force!” I said, “What’s happened?” He said, “I’ve seen ancient Roman centurions walking about in the marketplace!” Of course it was these damned extras of Pascal’s. They got so excited with their plumage they carried it off and used to do their evening shopping down there, which for a propagandist, was confusing to say the least. And then that foam rubber Sphinx caused terrible trouble, because the R.A.F. used the real one at Gizeh as a marker, to navigate by and they thought the Germans had dropped a dummy Sphinx to fool them.
These are some of the silly as well as interesting sides of diplomacy as it was yesterday. Perhaps things have changed, but I doubt it very much. Basically, I should say, Tallyrand’s advice is really sound and can’t be bettered. But the British contribution hasn’t been negligible either. They have cultivated two secret weapons of great efficacy — the poe-face and the stiff upper lip. There’s nothing like them when you are in a spot. Long may they flourish!