Lost Classic – Eastern Approaches, by Fitzroy Maclean

One of the keys to Britain’s success has been its ability to harness the energy of a particular type: the institutional rebel. From Francis Drake onwards, characters who would be rejected outright – and most probably executed – by stiffer hierarchies instead lent British overseas efforts much of their vitality. There was an unspoken symbiosis to these relationships: these individuals gave the government what it wanted, provided the government gave them what they wanted. For many, this was simply an insatiable desire for adventure: and none more so than for Fitzroy Maclean, the author of Eastern Approaches

In the late 1930s, the British Embassy in Moscow was a diplomatic backwater. The Cold War had yet to begin, Stalin’s terror was at its height, and there was little scope for real diplomacy. It was not a place for those seeking career advancement. But for Fitzroy Maclean – then a rising star at the infinitely more important Paris Embassy – Moscow was a stepping stone towards an entirely private goal: visiting the closed republics of Central Asia. He was soon casting out on deep, unauthorised visits into the Soviet Union’s “Forbidden Zone” – a region with good claim to being one of the wildest on earth. Culturally, the ‘Stans had changed little since the advent of the Mongol invasions. The previous generation of British pioneers – the players of the “Great Game” of the nineteenth century – had passed themselves off as holy men or traders, often inventing grisly deaths when exposed.

Fitzroy alternately evades his bemused NKVD escorts, befriends them, and turns them to his advantage. Finding the entire garrison of one town to be illiterate, he flourishes a Moscow theatre ticket in place of a travel permit; and they are soon opening the very doors they are supposed to be keeping barred to him. He later arrives on the shores of Oxus so well-versed in official casuistry that the local authorities are soon rebuilding their ferry in order to take him across into Afghanistan. Only when attempting to cross into Communist China does his gift of bureaucratic creativity meet its match (“I’d been scored off badly,” he records bitterly). Nonetheless, he successfully demands that the NKVD provide him with a first-class compartment to return to Moscow.

The thousands of miles of rail journeys are the touchstone of this section of the book. When not a guest of the authorities, he is often confined to the “hard” carriages into which the old Tsarist rolling stock has been converted: rows of plain wooden bunks, where he is plied with vodka, conversation, music, inedible food; and at one stage even falls in love. These journeys often intersect with the capricious population movements carried out by the Soviet Union. Whole trains of different ethnicities pass by towards unknown destinations. These add extra poignancy to his account of the great cities of the Silk Roads: “It is only a question of time,” he writes, “before all that remains of a bygone civilisation is swept away”. In Bokhara, he finds a giant Soviet flag hoisted on the previous Emir’s “Tower of Death” – a double echo of the show trials then in full swing in Moscow.

The outbreak of the Second World War risks a rupture in his symbiotic relationship with authority. Being of more value as a diplomat than soldier, he is under no circumstances allowed to join up. Burying himself in the Foreign Office regulations, Fitzroy uncovers a spectacular way to game the system: by standing for Parliament. This he achieves with no experience or interest in British politics, informing his constituents they are unlikely to see much of him until after the war. Now a serving Member of Parliament, he enlists as a private and learns the army from the bottom up (one of only two “officer class” men to do so in the course of the war).

Soon rumbled, he is dispatched to Cairo, where a combination of guile and chance secures him a place in the newly-formed Special Air Service; becoming surely the only soldier in history to be seconded to Special Forces having never before seen active combat (“The next thing is to get trained,” he writes laconically). Soon he is striking out with David Stirling across 400 miles of desert towards Benghazi, then in Italian hands. Here Fitzroy makes up for his lack of operational nous by delving into his Central-Asian bluffing skills, barking his way past sentry-posts in an Italian so authoritative that it blinds the occupants to his British uniform. When the mission is on the point of discovery, he responds by giving the guard commander a thorough dressing-down – “We could be British saboteurs, carrying loads of high explosive!” – allowing the entire party to dissolve back into the desert.

This farce is succeeded by tragedy. Dispatched back to the same target via an even longer route – and in defiance of their own intelligence – they walk into an ambush. The party limps back through the desert, harried by aircraft; subsisting on a mouthful and a teaspoon of water a day. An absolute tenet of the SAS had been that they were not sent on suicide missions. And yet it turned out the operation has been as close to one as you can get: a mere diversion, hundreds of miles behind enemy lines. In perhaps the greatest insight of the book – or perhaps into his own underlying stoicism and loyalty – he writes that this “delighted us no less than surprised us” as the operation “had achieved its main object.” A similar sclerosis handicaps his later mission to kidnap a rogue Persian general in Isfahan. Staff Headquarters approve the most dangerous aspects of the mission, while vetoing his request to impersonate a Brigadier for the purposes; promising instead to send a real Brigadier in order to maintain the dignity of the rank.

The final third of the book recounts Fitzroy Maclean’s most famous war experience: being parachuted into Bosnia to liaise with Tito’s resistance movement. So little was known of Tito that he was sometimes assumed to be an acronym for an organisation, or a rotating position. Instead Fitzroy finds the real man, presiding over an intensely proud and energised Partisan movement. The Old Etonian and the professional revolutionary – although “initially shy” – soon form a close bond which is to endure for the rest of the War. Converting his Russian into Serbo-Croat, Fitzroy joins them in their “agreeably compact mode of life” – a lean, hunted existence in which the only material pleasure is plentiful rakija, including at breakfast. Even someone of his worldliness is impressed by the garrulous Yugoslavs, with their huge moustache and bottomless appetite for fighting Germans.

Soon he is criss-crossing Yugoslavia, being passed from one unit to the next; each more hospitable and curious about the outside world than the last. When he is taken away from them into the hyper-mobile world of military planning – flying via Italy to Cairo – he gleefully juxtaposes the black-tie dinners with the world he has just left. As the stakes are raised in Yugoslavia, Fitzroy’s new itinerary includes seeking out Churchill in villas from Puglia to Morocco; at one point having to chase him through the French invasion flotilla by speedboat to find him. Infiltrating back into Yugoslavia – with increasingly difficulty each time – he sees first hand in the results of strategic decisions take at the top table. As the war nears its endgame, the book builds into a heady vortex of diplomacy, politics, and national liberation.

It is impossible to do the memoir justice, not least as the likes of its contents and author will never be seen again. Fitzroy thought he was writing a valedictory note for the cultures he visited: only now, twenty three years after his death, does it appear he was also writing one for his own.