The Northern Garrisons Read online

  These people, who have so many of the antique virtues—and it would be unfair to deny them one or two of the antique frailties—are friendly with our troops, and have shown them much hospitality. To compensate them for service in so far and stormy a region, our soldiers have sometimes shared the uncommon sport of whale-hunting: in the summer months a shoal of bottle-nosed whales, some ten or twelve feet long, will occasionally come into a fjord, and whenever this happens the whole of the adjacent male population will put to sea in small boats, and drive and harry the whales ashore, where they are slaughtered in a fine confusion of blood and blubber and joyous excitement, after which, it is likely, there will be a dancing of the Faeroese reel to the accompaniment of interminable Faeroese ballads. The kidneys of a whale are said to be a great delicacy.

  Reykjavik—Town of Contrasts

  Iceland is bigger by a fifth than Ireland, and its northern extremities almost touch the Arctic Circle. Reykjavik, the capital, is a town of some forty thousand inhabitants, and anyone who has the time and the inclination may dance there every night of the week to an orchestra that is no worse than many other dance orchestras. It is an interesting town, and illustrates on all sides the recent material progress of the country, and the ambitious temper of its people. A generation ago the houses were nearly all of wood—farm buildings of turf—but concrete has taken the place of timber, and now there are rows of new houses all built according to modern notions of simplicity and functionalism, a rank of windowed cubes with a shelf on each to catch the sun. And in the growing untidy streets, a mixture still of concrete, wood, and corrugated iron, there are little hat-shops, very daintily dressed, with an elegant sample or two of the latest fasions from New York; there are book-shops, half-a-dozen of them, that put to shame the illiteracy of many an English town of greater size; and there are flower shops where, through the driving snow of a spring blizzard, you may discern a sheaf of roses, a pot of hydrangeas, that have been grown in greenhouses warmed by the hot springs of this icy and volcanic island.

  An interesting town, with a brand-new university of its own, a National Theatre—not wholly finished yet—and a statue to Leif Ericsson, the Icelander who discovered America. You will be told, of course, that Reykjavik is not Iceland; and indeed it differs greatly from the hinterland, where life has a patriarchal simplicity, a stark and noble loneliness, and in whose far-off valleys there has lived, as a vital thing, the greatest literature of the north; the common language is hardly altered from the years when the story of Burnt Njal was written, the sagas of Grettir the Outlaw, of Egil Skallagrimsson, poet and Viking. Their regard for this native literature, and their heroic past, has made the Icelanders a proud people ; and, being proud, they did not welcome our intrusion.

  But Iceland, because of its position, had to be occupied. It commands the North Atlantic, and if Germany had seized it first, the Battle of the Atlantic by now would have been a German victory.

  III. Airway to the Isles

  To travel speedily and well, one should attach oneself, if possible, to a General. There was a General whose duty was taking him to Iceland when mine also pointed there, and being ordered to join him I crossed the Atlantic in the rapid luxury of a Sunderland flying-boat.

  We started from the North of Scotland, but because the weather was bad we flew first to Shetland. We crossed the knuckle-end of Scotland, a dismal landscape, through the mist, of dark moorland as full of holes, of tarns and lochans as a scarecrow’s coat. Then the sea, white-edged, and dimly through the starboard cloud the memorial, on Marwick Head in Orkney, to Kitchener and the lost crew of the Hampshire. Then Fitful Head, and presently, in a confusion of Shetland voes, a leg of water that was our anchorage. Banking steeply, we came quickly down, and the sea rose to meet us. We, the passengers, stiffened ourselves to meet the shock. But there was no shock. We kissed the water with a soft and social impact, and gently glided on.

  The weather was still bad, and we waited a day for its improvement. It grew better, it became as good as a duck-shooting morning—a dark and shifty sky, forty miles an hour of head-wind—so we took off on the voyage, of nearly seven hundred miles, to Reykjavik.

  The captain of the Sunderland and his second pilot were both very young. They were slightly built, good-looking in a cheerful, boyish way, and neither had been to Iceland before. Nor had their navigator. One had rather expected that the captain of so large a boat, with a crew of twelve and the North Atlantic to cross, would be a stern and thoughtful man, of ripe age, and showing on his face the grave lines of long experience. He would be able to speak of his many previous voyages, to assure one of his familiarity with all the difficulties of sub-Arctic navigation. … It was, therefore, not without surprise that one discovered the youthful confidence, the precocious maturity, the insouciant ability of the Royal Air Force.

  The sea below had a rough unfriendly aspect, but there was no need to look at it. The Sunderland was so big that one could ignore the outer World. One could walk about, from deck to deck, and look at the fine furniture of bombs, the array of guns, the navigating instruments, and the galley which was to produce, in honour of the General, a three-course lunch. To eat a steak-and-kidney pie, fifteen hundred feet above the Atlantic in latitude 62 or so, was the sort of luxury, one felt, that might have been invented by the author of the Arabian Nights. But what a piece of work is Western man, who can turn the flying carpet into reality!

  Through a window could be seen the prodigious crest of an island that rose sheerly from the sea. Dark in the driving clouds, it leaned forward with the humping back and the shrunk belly of a wave about to break. This was the end of Syderö, the southernmost of the Faeroes. After it there was nothing to be seen, for a long time, but white-hooded waves and the iron-black sea—and suddenly, in the midst of them, a thin protruding object that disappeared again, but brought us steeply and swiftly down, in tip-tilted circles, to stare and search for it. A submarine? It might have been a periscope. But there was another, and there a third. “Porpoises,” said the captain with a deep disgust.

  A little more than five hours after leaving Shetland we perceived, high in the cloudy sky before us, a streak of snow. That was Iceland. Then slowly there came into sight a most extraordinary beach. It was enormous, it appeared to be quite level, and it was black. It was broken by the branching mouths of a river, and for mile after mile it was edged with the white lace of breaking seas. Inland of the great lava-flats were mountains of which nothing could be seen but their snowy tops. Our landfall was not very far from that made by Ingolf, the Norwegian chieftain, who, in the ninth century, planted the first colony in Iceland.

  We turned west along the land, and the first sign of human enterprise that we saw was a wrecked ship, leaning wretchedly against the beach, with the waves breaking over her stern. Then, on the broadening coastal plain, a lonely house or two. The sky cleared, and the ribs of the mountains shone. They were all capped and caped with snow, and glaciers without movement came pouring down, and waterfalls stood frozen and amazed. The houses grew more numerous on the plain, which had become a dun or yellowish colour, seamed and patterned by innumerable water-courses. There was a house every twenty miles or so. And Hekla rose in the distance, the snow upon its shoulders like a stolen fleece in the sun.

  In the roof of a Sunderland there is a glass dome, called the astral-hatch, from which observation is made of horizons, the declination of the sun, and suchlike matters. Stand with your head in the astral-hatch, and you have a roundabout view broken only by the great shark’s fin of a rudder that rises so tall astern of you. The long smooth wings, the sleek hull of the boat, are below the level of your eyes, and you can see them slightly rocking—very slightly—like the wings of a sailing albatross. In the crystal dome you have the freedom of the air, and shreds of cloud come racing at your eyes, the land below drifts slowly back. You realise, with a feeling of amazement, that the huge boat is actually flying. The sensation of flight invades your blood, and to circle, like an albatross, the
great white tableland of Iceland is a very noble sensation indeed.

  Then we rose to five thousand feet or so, to cross a range of cindery mountains, with a crusty ragged edge, that stood between us and Reykjavik. The view enlarged itself. It became an immense bewildering panorama of blanched volcanoes, of fjords and creeks and league-long pools in the plain. One had never seen so much of the earth at one time, nor so fantastic and strange a wilderness. But the captain and the second pilot and the navigator, who had never been to Iceland before and whose combined years were a good many fewer than three score and ten, looked out upon it with perfect composure, and at once perceived the watery bight on which we must descend. So down from mountain-height to sea-level we swiftly came, and gently met the sea, and presently were at rest upon Icelandic water. To a mind unused to so fast transition, there was something nearly half-incredible in our arrival.

  But the navigator was rolling up his charts, and the captain preparing to go ashore for orders. To-morrow he might be on patrol or convoy duty, flying far to the south on a much longer voyage than ours. A twelve-hour patrol was the common thing, he said. Our trip from Shetland had been quite short, and would have been shorter by an hour had it not been for the strong head-wind.

  How long had we been flying? Seven hours all but five minutes.

  IV. Iceland

  When our soldiers landed in Iceland, in May of 1940, they were not received—as ingenuously they had expected—with open arms. The Icelanders were displeased by the occupation of their country and, being unable to prevent it, they decided to ignore it. To ignore it as far as possible, that is. They assumed towards our troops an attitude of frosty indifference, and our troops, being friendly people, and so sure of the virtue of their cause that they could not see how anyone should doubt it, were sorely puzzled by this reception.

  A neutral country, however, can hardly be expected to welcome the appearance of a foreign army at its quays, and because the recent history of Iceland is dominated by the ambition of total independence, the blow to its pride, when strategic necessity compelled us to occupy the land, was particularly severe. Its jealous regard for a political solitude has been fostered, in a very interesting way, by its literature. The spoken word of to-day is almost the same as the tongue of the first settlers and the classical language of Snorri Sturluson; and as this unusual continuity has been preserved by the Atlantic loneliness of the country, and as their historical pride is essentially a literary pride, so the people have set a high value on isolation. Isolation, by safeguarding their language, has kept their spirit whole.

  But they are not insusceptible to flattery, and Germany, for some years, flattered them by taking a very intelligent interest in all manner of things from Icelandic scholarship to Icelandic roads, from volcanic geology to the younger men’s readiness to form—under German guidance—ski-clubs and gliding-clubs. Many of the older people were educated in German universities, and retain for them the affection which German universities always inspired before the Nazis had their way with them; and Nazi Germany, by offering university education at a far lower cost than England, maintained the academic connection.

  In addition to this cultural amity there existed, among some of the younger Icelanders, a superstitious regard for German efficiency. This sort of regard, of course, was not confined to Iceland. It flourished wherever people permitted themselves to be impressed by the German talent for getting things done, without enquiring of their minds in what way such things were being done; for what purpose; and what was likely to be their consequence. In Iceland the legend of Nazi efficiency had circulated fairly widely.

  There was, on the other hand, a feeling that England’s virtue was somewhat passée, and that England had not paid much attention to Iceland. That except for a brace or two of professors we had neglected its culture and permitted ourselves to live in distressing ignorance of its classical literature. Englishmen came in small numbers to fish the Icelandic rivers, but they cared nothing for the Laxdale Saga or the poems of Egil Skallagrimsson. No small country likes to be under-esteemed; and it was unfortunate that Iceland, being insular itself, was unable to realise the insularity of England, the huge extent and utter innocence of our indifference.

  And then we, who had done nothing, or almost nothing, to breach the mental isolation of the country, had to occupy and hold it against the very people who had most cleverly and persistently wooed it. It was a difficult situation which would have been more difficult had not the majority of Icelanders recognised that Nazi Germany had become a common enemy. That Nazi doctrines were inimical to their free spirit, their native individualism, and all their way of life whose origin, a millennium ago, had been rebellion against the despotism of an ambitious king.

  The Soldiers Break the Ice

  From the earliest weeks of our occupation to the present time, however, there has been—and the process continues—a gradual improvement in our relations, and this improvement is due to three things: to the good sense of the Icelanders, to the good behaviour of our troops, and to the good market we offer for Icelandic produce.

  “The conduct of your troops,” an Icelander told me, “has been beyond all praise.” Another, a scholar and a traveller, said emphatically, “Their behaviour has been unbelievably correct.”

  The military authorities have interfered as little as possible with civilian life and economy. In such matters as the requisitioning of land and buildings, most conscientious efforts have been made to avoid infliction of hardship, and camp after camp has been sited far less conveniently than it could have been had we shown less care and regard for the small and scanty fields of the Icelandic farmer. And we have, of course, brought a great deal of money into the country. All the local produce is bought—mutton and milk and fish—and local labour is paid high wages. In March of this year about £30,000 was paid out in wages; and like his British confrere, the Icelandic labourer is properly compensated for his wounded conscience when he agrees to work on the Sabbath day: 4.50 kronur an hour, to be precise; three shillings and fourpence in English money.

  In the remoter parts of the country, where small detachments of our troops were living near small communities, friendly relations were very soon established. Like all northern people, the Icelander, when no political ideas inhibit him, is a hospitable person, and the normal English soldier has an essential decency that is, in the long run, more effective than diplomacy and better than any propaganda. The Icelandic children were the first to recognise it. Iceland is rich in children—handsome youngsters with fair hair and pretty features—and they soon discovered that our troops were not imperial marauders, but companionable people with easy manners and a domestic liking for children’s company.

  There is a story told of a Senior Officer who arrived in a northern village where a mere handful of soldiers kept watch upon the little harbour. He walked down the street, accompanied by a Corporal, and on both sides the regarding villagers behaved in the politest way imaginable. Men touched their caps, and women bowed, and children all saluted. The Senior Officer was duly pleased, and recalled his experience with pride.

  Then he was told: “But it wasn’t you they were saluting. They don’t know you, but they all know Corporal Watsisname. He is the British Army here, and the British Army, in consequence, is very highly respected.”

  Corporal Watsisname came from Huddersfield, I think. There was a very strong flavour of Yorkshire in the Garrison, and a good palatable flavour it was. In the early months of the occupation there had been a large proportion of Canadian troops—Canadians with Scots names and French names, Highlanders from the prairie and descendants of the voyageurs—but they were withdrawn for service elsewhere ; and Yorkshire was left as the dominant influence.

  Army of the Arctic

  What are the special conditions of service in Iceland? Loneliness and hard weather. The long darkness of the winter nights, and prodigious gales that blow with icy violence. Lack of communications, lack of mail, lack of news, lack of amusement a
nd lack of beer.

  Against the climate the troops are as well equipped as a good polar expedition. They have fur caps, great double-skinned wool-and-waterproof overcoats, double sleeping-bags, proper boots and underclothes. Their Nissen huts are built with concrete ends and have stood well against the weather. But outdoor work and training, when an Arctic gale is blowing, are still a test of endurance. Such winds appear to freeze, not fingers only, but the mind.

  Against loneliness and boredom there are many weapons—and they are needed. There is work, and the Iceland Force has had plenty of work to do, has still plenty, and does it with curiously little grumbling. There is discipline, and the Iceland Force, if peace were declared to-morrow, could march through London next week with as smart a bearing, as steady a drill, as if it had spent its last year at Aldershot. There are the new principles of Army welfare, and the officers of the Iceland Force deserve much credit for the energy and imagination with which they have put them into practice.

  In every unit, so far as I could discover, some sort of scheme had been devised to occupy and exercise the minds of the men during the long winter darkness when outdoor training was reduced to a minimum. The schemes varied in accordance with the available resources—in small detachments the supply of possible instructors was naturally not large, and as all the roads were snow-drowned, instructors could not easily be borrowed from neighbouring units—but a most resolute ingenuity, it appeared, had generally been used, and many of the winter programmes of entertainment and education were extremely attractive. They ranged from debating societies to classes in metal-work. They included concert parties and lectures on architecture. In Reykjavik there was an admirably produced, amusingly written, and well-acted pantomime ; in many places there was elementary teaching of reading, writing, and arithmetic ; and determined young officers, in the snow-bound solitude of most desolate valleys, delivered earnest homilies on civics.