De Vèze hits a ball, just goes through the motions, to be free of it, but Max detains him: tell Morel here how it works, contemporary history, events we have lived through, that’ll get him out of his precious seventeenth century, but not now, good, now listen to me everybody, all you’ve had up to this point are the basic rules, they define a game suitable for morons, but there’s more to croquet than that!
Croquet is a noun but also a verb, and ‘croqueting’ is precisely what makes the game human, aggressive, vicious, with its alliances, reprisals, betrayals, double-dealing, reconciliations, yes, patching things up, what does ‘to croquet’ mean, ladies and gentlemen? It means you are entitled to hit your opponent’s ball into the sky-blue yonder, using his, as in pétanque, your opponent thinks he’s nearly home then thwack, it’s into the long grass with him, you’re already past the turning post and making for home, you meet a player who’s been held up, a dawdler, an innocent and thwack! the innocent knocks your ball all the way to Pétaouchnok, and you wonder if his innocence was really innocence, so, on with the game, it’s all about strategy, shush! no talking, play’s started, I’ll be keeping an eye open.
Max smiles as he watches the first efforts of his pupils, in the end it’s all about innocence, mustn’t let anyone anticipate your next move, a clear look in the eye, a smooth lawn, Pétain’s air of innocence, at Rabat.
Lyautey never saw it coming, the hero of Verdun disembarks, inspection visit to Morocco, because Abd el-Krim’s Riffians have started to harass our lines of defence on the Ouergha, and the great leader of Verdun knocks his ball gently so that it rolls to a stop touching Lyautey’s, which gives him the right to croquet, first touch then you can croquet, innocent smiles, may I, Marshal? Be my guest, Marshal! Pétain tight-croquets and Lyautey ends up in Pétaouchnok, semi-retirement, return to France, no one there to meet him off the boat, makes for Paris, the only thing waiting for me in the rue des Saints-Pères was a letter from the inland revenue, a demand for unpaid taxes.
Later a consolation prize, chair of the Colonial Exhibition committee, at the time I didn’t see it coming, no one saw it, Lyautey didn’t want a war in the Riff, you negotiate, you play for time, you divide and isolate and win back hearts and minds, I do note that the building of the Arabo-Berber School has fallen further behind schedule, so I’m asking you to take a personal interest in the work, you will report to me direcdy every two weeks.
A school for the sons of chiefs, the rebels want the Riff to be a republic, we won’t give it to them, but we can negotiate a form of autonomy with allegiance to the Sultan of Rabat, ceremony, white cloak, parasols, black slaves, Abd el-Krim will kiss his hand, it’s negotiable, he’d go to kiss the hand, and the Sultan would take back his hand, no he must actually kiss his hand, and then the Sultan will confer the accolade on him.
In receiving the accolade, Abd el-Krim must kiss his shoulder, no, no kiss, which would you prefer? a man who pretends to kiss the hand and will keep his word? Or another man who will lick the back of the hand, the palm of the hand, the other hand and afterwards hatches some underhand plot? Lyautey was seriously tempted to allow Abd el-Krim to become firmly established, so as to boot the Spaniards out of Morocco, teach them a lesson for staying neutral in 1914, the sky was bluer, more intense than in Asia today, fewer clouds, a scent of orange trees and just as much of a shambles, colonial troops getting a trouncing from peasants who pour down from their mountains, not proper mountains really, one morning the call goes out to the harka, twenty men from the tents of each douar, a couple of douars per lejf, no precise figures, a few leffi per part of a tribe, plus a tribe, it soon adds up to hundreds and thousands of men.
A mass mobilisation, an army of men who have no leaders but know each other, here they come down from the hills, I hang on for dear life, I am overrun, swept along by the rush down a slippery slope, the meat at the Residence was succulent, Lyautey watching his guests feeding off lambs served whole.
His own officers tore off pieces with a light, almost mechanical flick of the wrist, three fingers of the right hand, without looking, choicest morsels must go to the guests, to the chiefs who have come to be honoured or to the Parisians who do not know what to do with the titbits which are set politely down on the rim of the large dish in front of them, red wine is served, to it ice is added, the ladies from Paris laugh very loudly, gorgeous ceremonial tents, the largest for the greatest personages and then lesser groups under progressively more rustic tents, it’s protocol, first the dishes go round to high-ranking officials, next to low-ranking officials, then to their subordinates, and when they have been poked at for the fifth or sixth time they reach the attendants and, finally, the women in the compound at the back.
‘Look at that, a show of breathtaking menace,’ says Max, pointing to a galloping herd of leaden clouds over Singapore, ‘there’s going to be a deluge, dear people.’
‘Not so,’ says Morel, ‘the wind off the sea prevents the clouds from massing, it won’t come to anything much.’
‘And the tree hasn’t stirred,’ adds the Consul.
From a tin of Capstan he has taken two small flakes of tobacco, which he proceeds to rub in his palm before filling the bowl of his pipe with it.
‘Tree?’ asks Morel.
‘That one,’ says the Consul, gesturing to a tree as supple as a large papyrus, ‘when a real storm is brewing it closes up, but it hasn’t stirred, so we’re in the clear.’
‘So come along ladies, play!’ Max orders, ‘since such is the will of the tree!’
Singapore, those were great times, some right, and the rest were wrong, those who had bombers were wrong to drop bombs, and those who kept to the forest, the paddy-fields, the night, were wrong not to negotiate. And those who’d spent forty years trying to understand, that is the English and the French, could play croquet in Singapore as in days of yore and tell each other that at last they’d been proved right.
*
This time it was you who reached the Waldhaus ahead of schedule, you arrived from Paris the day before, you stayed the night in the valley in the village hotel, the Prätschli, and next morning you took the cable car up to the Waldhaus. You are uneasy, you have a premonition, you are sitting by a window and you see Lilstein coming towards you through the lounge, stiff as a poker, moving as awkwardly as a student, he smiles, greets you, rubs his hands together and comes straight out with:
‘They’ve screwed up, young gentleman of France, I know that they’ve taken the decision, they’re going to bomb Vietnam, carpet bombing, Johnson will make the announcement two weeks from now, you can tip the wink to your friend the Minister, it will give him a chance to make a prediction, it will do his reputation no harm!
‘The Americans have fouled up, they can drop as many bombs as they like, it’s a quagmire, they can fight a war from the air, but the more bombs they drop the less they’ll be capable of establishing themselves on the ground, and they’ll go home with their tails between their legs, as your side says, your de Gaulle is right about this, plus the two of us and a few of our friends, we’re working to make reason prevail, reason will cut through this whole mess, but we’ve got to give it a helping hand, like at the time of Cuba, this isn’t espionage, it’s diplomacy, discreet, why so glum? This information is worth a pot of money, they’re going to start bombing in two weeks, all’s well! Let’s just carry on.