Lawrence Durrell - Esprit de Corps - Sketches from Diplomatic Life

“Meanwhile things aboard the raft were not going too well. Signs of incipient disintegration had begun to set in. Some of De Mandeville’s artful trellis work had gone while the whole buffet had rather surprisingly broken off from the main body and started on a journey of its own down a narrow tributary of the river. I still remember the frozen faces of the waiters as they gazed around them despairingly like penguins on an ice-floe. Bozo’s Band still kept up a pitiful simulacrum of sound but they had to keep moving position as the water was leaking along the tarpaulin and enveloping their ankles. Many of the candles had gone out. The chill of despair had begun to settle on the faces of the diplomats as the full urgency of the situation became plain to them. In their mind’s eye they could hear — not to mix a metaphor — the fateful roar of the Danube water in its collision with the slow and peaceful Sava. Involuntary exclamations burst from the more voluble ladies. Was there nothing we could do? Could we not signal? Perhaps if we lit a fire …? But these were counsels of despair as well they knew. I think we all felt in our bones that we should have to swim for it. The Italian Ambassador who had not swum for a quarter of a century tried a few tentative strokes in the air in a vain attempt to remember the routine. The only lucky person was Tope who had fallen asleep under the bar and was being borne off steadily down the tributary towards the sawmills where presumably he would be cut up by absent-minded Serbs and turned into newsprint — a fitting end.

“By this time we had reached the fatal bend in the river overlooked by the bastions of the castle where Pithecanthropos Popovic waited, eyes on the river, safety match at the ready. The Gun was loaded to the brim. He knew he could not afford to miss us as it would be at least a week before the raw material for another lethal charge could be gathered from the dustbins of Belgrade. It was now or never. He drew a deep ecstatic breath as he saw us come round the bend, slowly, fatefully, straight into his line of fire. He applied the safety match to the touch-hole.

“There was a husky roar and the night above us was torn by a lurid yellow flash while the still water round the raft was suddenly ripped and pock-marked by a hail of what seemed to us pretty sizeable chain-shot. Pandemonium broke out. ‘My God,’ cried the Argentine Minister, who always showed a larger White Feather than anyone else, ‘they’re shooting at us!’ He took refuge behind the massive Hanoverian frame of Madame Hess, wife of the German First Secretary. ‘Throw yourselves on your faces!’ cried the Swiss Minister, suiting the action to the word. The Italian Ambassador refused this injunction with some hauteur. ‘Porca Madonna, I shall die standing up,’ he cried, striking an attitude with one hand on his breast.

“Though nobody was actually hurt the bombardment had carried away most of the band’s instruments, half the marquee and the rest of the De Mandeville’s dainty trellis-work. It had also holed an ice-box filled with tomato juice and scattered the stuff, with its fearful resemblance to blood, all over us, so that many of us looked cut to pieces. Nor did we know then that it would take Comrade Popovic a week to repeat his exploit. We expected a dozen more guns to open on us as we neared the city. Some of the ladies began to cry, and others to staunch the apparent wounds made by the flying tomato juice on their menfolk. The Argentine Minister, suddenly noticing a red stain spreading on his white dinner-jacket front cried out: ‘Caramba! They’ve got me!’ and fell in a dead faint at Madame Hess’s feet.

“The raft looked like a Victorian battle-piece by a master of anecdote. Some lay on their faces, some crouched behind chairs, some stood gesticulating, but all were racked with moans. It was now, too, that Polk-Mowbray turned savagely on poor De Mandeville and hissed: ‘Why don’t you do something? Why don’t you shout for help?’ Obediently above the racket De Mandeville raised his pitiful female-impersonator’s screams: ‘Help! Help!’ into the enigmatic night.

“No further guns barked at us from the fort but by now the river had narrowed and its flow had increased. The raft began to spin round and round in a series of sickening rotations as it neared the fateful junction. Ahead of us we could see the blaze of searchlights and the stir of river traffic. My God, what fresh trials were awaiting us down there at the whirlpool’s edge? Perhaps squads of whiskered Serbs were waiting to greet us with a hail of small-arms fire. A green-and-red rocket shot up in the farther darkness, increasing our alarm.

“Now the only people who had been of any real assistance to us in our predicament (though we did not know it then) were the chauffeurs of the Diplomatic Corps. They were mostly Serbian and virtually constituted a Corps on their own; jutting foreheads, lowering forelocks, buck teeth, webbed hands and feet, vast outcrops of untamed hair stretching away to every skyline.… They alone had watched our departure with alarm — with shrill ululations and inarticulate cries as they shifted their feet about in the ooze and watched the raft borne to its destruction. Moreover, they remembered what happened at the confluence of the two rivers. No sooner, therefore,

were we out of sight than the chauffeurs started out for town — a long gleaming line of official limousines.

“They had the sense, moreover, to go down to the dock and alert the river police and to enlist the aid of all the inhabitants of the coal quay whose bum-boats might be of use in grounding the raft before it reached the Niagara Falls. Two police boats with searchlights and a variety of sweat-stained small-boat owners accordingly set off up the Sava to head us off. This was the meaning of the lights and rockets on the river which caused us so much alarm.

“But they had reckoned without the mean size of the raft; even with all the missing bits which had flaked off it was still the size of a ballroom floor and correspondingly heavy. The bum-boats and the river launches met us in sickening collision about four hundred yards above the river junction. We were by this time so confused and shaken as to be almost out of our minds. Most of us thought that we had been attacked by pirates, and this impression was heightened when a huge Serb picked up Madame Hess in one hand and deposited her in his bum-boat. Cries of ‘Rape!’ went up from the Latin-American secretaries who had seen this sort of thing before. Meanwhile, half-blinded by searchlights and repeatedly knocked off their feet by the concussion of launches hitting the raft, the Swedish Embassy, in one of those sudden attacks of hysteria which afflict Nordics, decided to die to the last man rather than allow our rescuers aboard. The friendly, willing Serbs suddenly found themselves grappled by lithe young men clad in dinner jackets who sank their teeth into their necks and rolled overboard with them. A disgraceful fracas ensued. Despite the powerful engines of the river launches, too, the raft was irresistibly moving towards the rapids carrying not only the Flower of European Diplomacy but also a large assortment of bum-boats whose owners were letting out shrill cries and rowing in every direction but the right one.

“It was all over with us, old man. Not exactly in a flash but in a series of movements like a bucking bronco. Those of us who had read Conrad’s Typhoon felt we had been here before.

“The Danube ripped the tarpaulin off, unstapled the logs and threw everything into the air. It was lucky that there were enough logs to go round. I can’t say the Diplomatic Corps looked its best sitting astride logs with the water foaming round it, but it was certainly something you don’t see every day. The Argentine Minister was borne screaming off into the night and only picked up next morning ten miles down river. Indeed, the banks of the Danube as far as the town of Smog were littered with the whitening bones of Swedes and Finns and Japs and Greeks. De Mandeville was struck on the head and knocked insensible; Polk-Mowbray broke his collar bone. Draper lost a toupee which cost about a hundred pounds and was forced to go about in a beret for nearly two months.