There are certain individualists in every unit in the British Army who are necessarily men of character. There is the orderly-room sergeant, a knowing person with the hottest stove, who works hard in a peaceful way and puts the officers right on law and procedure. There is the sanitary orderly, who leads a life of privilege and undisturbed seclusion. There is the O.C’s driver, a sleek person who knows so much about the private life of the O.C. that subalterns respect him. There are such key men as the medical orderly and the canteen corporal, both suspicious by experience and courted by their fellows. .But the most valuable of all, the most privileged, the best fed, the hardest worked, the principal guardian of morale and good temper, is the cook.
Certainly Corporal Yazbek was an individualist. Although memories of the Army quickly fade, memory of Yazbek lingers. It was his duty to provide three meals a day for the two hundred and fifty Syrian and Lebanese sappers in our unit. He was a treasure, but we had difficult times with him. There were two sources of trouble: one was the staff who worked under him; the other was a periodic fading of the light of his enthusiasm.
His troubles with his staff were difficult to explain. He had three assistants, picked by him. He always asked for particular men, pointing out through the interpreter because he had no English at all, how impossible his work would be without them. No others would do, and as his department was rightly given priority over all other duties he had the ones he wanted. Then after a month he would ask for an interview and complain about them. His work would be impossible unless they were replaced by three others, all named. We could never find out what was behind this constant change of staff. Perhaps Yazbek drove them too hard and they became difficult; perhaps he extorted payment from them and then wanted to extract three more tributes.
His own attacks of despair were also regular; they occurred at three-monthly intervals. He would ask for an interview with the O.C. and then ask to be returned to general duty. He was tired of being the cook. He did not mind if he lost his two stripes. He was quite well but he wanted to return to duty. The treatment was a five-minute eulogy on his skill, on the admiration the officers had for him, on his value to the unit, to the British Army, to the King in England. Gradually he thawed, shuffled with pleasure, reddened, and, finally, when he was patted on the shoulder, he was won over. He would take his O.C.’s hand, kiss it, place it on his heart and on his forehead, and return happily to his little cookhouse, content for three more months. Once we gave him a photograph of the officers, inscribed in Arabic to him. Once we gave him an armchair. For he was too precious to lose; not only was he a good cook, he was completely honest. In Italy, where Army rations could be sold to civilians for a great many lire, this was of great importance.
We often wondered why he never went out. Not only did he never go down to town as the rest of the unit loved to do; he never seemed to leave his cook-house, in one wing of which he had his bed. It was only when the unit moved to return to Syria that we found the reason. Under the floor of his hut he had constructed an ingenious cavern, and here he had a great store of rations, saved from the ration issue day by day, and hoarded against a possible shortage. Knowing the ease with which his fellows fell into temptation and how lively was the black market, he had resolutely stayed with his hoard, sacrificing all leisure to the feeding of his flock. The disposal of this surplus presented the administration with a difficult problem, but it was solved by holding a feast, the Arab calendar providing an excuse as it so often does. At the feast, on long tables set down the company lines, the O.C. made a little speech about Yazbek, who was by his side, and three cheers were called. The result was not the clear ringing British cheers, but a prolonged medley of shouting and yelling, nasal and continuous, while Yazbek glowed with mixed pleasure and embarrassment.
During the unit’s travels to Egypt, where it was to be disbanded, Yazbek produced his brew of tea and his ever-lasting stews beside trains, in dock-yards, and in the desert. We arrived at our final camp at Qassassin and swiftly the unit was disbanded; the happy soldiers leaving in batches of twenty a day to return to their towns or villages, heroes back from the wars. Yazbek’s turn came early and he served his last meal and paraded, for the first time since his first day in the Army, to be given his documents and sent off. We said goodbye to Yazbek with a pang. He was moved, too. Never again would he cook for 250 soldiers and, as he put it, have an officer so much a father and a mother. His village was obscure and remote and the restaurant he was to open with his savings from his pay would not be very busy. So honest Yazbek climbed into the lorry and went away, along the desert road to the railway station.
But in a few days we had to adjust our opinion of Yazbek’s honesty. The quartermaster went to the cookhouse with his ledger to check the pots and pans, knives and spoons, and general stores issued to a unit for its cooking. These were to be handed in with everything else to complete the disbandment of the unit. Like all good “Q’s,” ours was clever at “arranging” deficiencies, but he was deeply perplexed at the state of Yazbek’s stock. There was at least three times as much as there should have been.
We recalled then that other units billeted in the same camp as ours in Italy had experienced strange losses of cookhouse equipment, and we realised that Yazbek had not been so uncannily honest after all. There was no evidence that his wonderful reserve ration store was not legitimately saved from the rations issued to him, but he had certainly indulged in a great deal of illicit requisitioning from other units to enlarge his stock of implements. His reputation did not suffer, for soldiers admire a clever scrounger.
Yazbek is now in his little village deep in Syria. He was a silent person, but perhaps sometimes he produces his signed photograph and the photographs of the great feast, and tells tales of his great days in Italy when he was a British soldier. Perhaps he may even produce, to prove that he speaks true, a “knife, butcher’s, long” with the Initials “W.D.” on the handle.
David Scott Daniell
Manchester Guardian; Jan 29 1947