For Whom the Bell Tolls Read online

  Our late Prime Minister, so messianic

  His ship of state became the new Titanic,

  Was always journeying. The route he took,

  Inspiring everything from awe to panic,

  Was from one war zone to the next, and look,

  It then became the title of his book.

  Through Kosovo, Baghdad and Kandahar,

  His journeys weren’t at all run of the mill,

  But lured him into battlefields too far;

  And we were with him for a while, until

  We saw the merit of just standing still

  And journeying no further than the bar.

  Chain of Command

  The view from the ranks of the 1st Battalion the Suffolk Regiment: lines written in Cyprus in 1958 for the regimental magazine Castle and Key. I also did the accounts for the Corporals’ Mess.

  The Major General cut himself while shaving,

  And cursed the Brigadier who, madly raving,

  Then cast the most chastising and infernal

  Aspersions on the morals of the Colonel;

  Who passed them to the Major, and he, rapt in

  The darkest thoughts, relayed them to the Captain,

  Who rocketed the Subaltern who rose

  To loose all hell among the NCOs,

  Who in their wrath and mad acerbity

  Picked on one last poor buckshee Private – me!

  Bash on Regardless

  In 1957 when I was a young soldier before the War Office Selection Board, the presiding Brigadier concluded that I was not officer material and returned me to regimental duty. Bash on Regardless was the motto of the old Army Commandos.

  The first of life’s inspections that I failed

  Was the Army’s officer selection test.

  The smarter, brighter, smoother ones prevailed;

  I was of course the awkwardest

  In any awkward squad. The Brigadier

  Told Private Bell to take himself elsewhere.

  Bless him, for those two years in the ranks

  Taught more than any university.

  The officer’s entitlements? No thanks,

  Besides, they were as thick as two short planks,

  Not to be entrusted with a troop of tanks.

  Better the uses of adversity:

  That was the lesson of the Corporals’ Mess;

  We learn much more from failure than success.

  The golden hopefuls of my generation,

  The future bishops, ministers of state

  And such, were victims of high expectation,

  But crashed and burned on take-off, every one,

  Defrocked or brought before the magistrate

  In circumstances that intrigued The Sun.

  But we, who were the RSM’s despair,

  We slowly and discreetly raised our game,

  We learned sufficient arms drill on the square,

  Did not disgrace the regimental name,

  And by not being spectacularly good,

  We went much further than he thought we would.

  So here’s the moral of this soldier’s story:

  Don’t ever dream of trailing clouds of glory;

  Play the long game, don’t try to fly too high

  And never catch the Sergeant Major’s eye.

  Life’s not a sprint but more a marathon;

  The winner is the one who bashes on.

  Call Signs

  From 1957 to 1959 I was a soldier in the Intelligence Section of the Suffolk Regiment in Cyprus.

  When I served in the ranks the then CO

  Was known as Sunray on the radio,

  Which we who knew him thought inapposite,

  Since he was not conspicuously bright.

  The Signals Officer was code-named Seagull,

  To which he was in literacy the equal.

  Lest our identities should be mistaken,

  We in Intelligence were known as Acorn;

  My military career was never finer

  Than when I used the call sign Acorn Minor.

  Yet from this acorn grew no mighty oak

  But just a wandering and insurgent bloke.

  Look East

  I began my broadcasting career with the BBC in Norwich in 1962. The news programme we launched two years later was rather less slick and professional than the Look East of today.

  One day in autumn 1964,

  Quite unremarked in television’s folklore,

  The BBC began the worst and least

  Distinguished programme in its history,

  Less of a broadcast than a travesty

  And parody of regular TV

  (A sort of Alan Partridge show,

  But from so very long ago).

  The hapless debutant was called Look East:

  And Old East Anglians remember well

  Their daily diet of television from hell

  Inflicted by a youthful Martin Bell.

  Nigeria

  The United Kingdom supported the Nigerian government in its war against the secessionists of Biafra, formerly Eastern Nigeria, from 1967 to 1969. The government forces won.

  We sold them armaments and armoured cars,

  Equipped their rag-tag army with the best,

  Staff College trained their generals (two stars),

  And well-placed mercenaries did the rest;

  Then when their war machine was deadliest,

  We piously denied that it was ours.

  We leased them aircraft about which we lied,

  Jet trainers, pilots, bombardiers and more.

  (They dropped their bombs from DC3s, port side).

  We fuelled a fire we never answered for,

  And here I learned a principle of war:

  There is no truth until it is denied.

  Armagh

  In the late 1960s in Northern Ireland I was not one of The Reverend Ian Paisley’s favourite reporters, although inadvertently I helped to bring him to national attention. Thirty years later, when we served in the House of Commons together, he could not have been more affable.

  The Big Man called his people to the square,

  Not for a rally but a day of prayer.

  They sought deliverance from all their foes:

  I was identified as one of those.

  He said I didn’t serve the BBC,

  But the dark forces of the Papacy.

  He urged his people not to harm a hair

  And added, ‘But he’s standing over there!’

  The Big Man’s motto of ‘No popery’

  Seemed in my case to be more like ‘No hopery’.

  Surrounded and with no way of retreating,

  His loyal people gave me quite a beating.

  Idi Amin

  President Idi Amin of Uganda married his fifth wife, Sarah, at the OAU Summit in Kampala in 1975.

  In fifty years I never played the hero

  And never was one either, more’s the pity;

  In derring-do my rating was a zero –

  I did not lead an infantry attack,

  I never claimed to liberate a city,

  Or counted them all out and then all back.

  But one thing that I did and they did not,

  Despite their valiant actions and embeddings

  (Except of course that some of us were shot),

  The sole, unique distinction I have got:

  I witnessed one of Idi Amin’s weddings,

  To Lady Sarah of the Suicide Squad

  Of the Ugandan Army; and that, by God,

 
Was well worth doing, if distinctly odd.

  St Lucia

  The island of St Lucia, once a British possession, became an independent state on 22 February 1979.

  The flags were lowered, one by one,

  In the direction of the setting sun,

  On islands soon to be ex-colonies;

  A free St Lucia would be one of these.

  It seemed ill-starred: a frigate rammed the quays

  Of the island’s port and capital, Castries;

  A petrol strike made public transport fail;

  The prisoners rioted and burned the jail.

  Perhaps imprudently, I felt I ought

  Include these mishaps in the day’s report.

  The island’s very displeased government

  Imposed a Caribbean punishment.

  (The option of imprisonment was void,

  Because the prison cells had been destroyed.)

  A favoured band, the True Tones, wrote a song

  Accusing me of every kind of wrong.

  They sang: ‘Martin Bell of the BBC,

  He’s the man we really want to see.

  The BBC should be ashamed

  To associate itself with Martin Bell’s name.’

  A calypso’s editorial in those parts,

  And this one even topped the island’s charts.

  Hoping that all’s forgotten over time,

  Except of course the rhythm and the rhyme,

  I seek no glittering prizes, because ipso

  Facto, I have got my own calypso.

  The Cavalry

  In Gulf War One in 1991 I was embedded with a British tank regiment, The Queen’s Royal Irish Hussars, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Denaro.

  To say they didn’t like to leave their horses

  Is understatement. Given half a chance,

  Even now they’d willingly set sail for France,

  To fight old battles with equestrian forces.

  The cornets (subalterns) have to pretend

  Their polo pony is their closest friend

  Or else be Duty Officer for weeks on end.

  Traditions stick: a new recruit called Trevor

  Was told it wasn’t on their list of names.

  The Colonel ordered: ‘Henceforth and for ever

  The Regiment is going to call you James!’

  Dismounted, they won’t march the extra mile,

  Or any miles at all, it’s not their style,

  But they make up for it with charm and guile.

  With some reluctance they retrained on tanks

  And learned reconnaissance in armoured cars;

  How they survived at all remains a mystery;

  But still, some fine old titles left their ranks:

  My favourite among these last hurrahs

  For sure, The Queen’s Royal Irish Hussars,

  A rather splendid fighting force

  Well known to some as Arthur’s Horse;

  Also: the Queerest Regiment in History.

  A Political Romance

  I was the BBC’s Chief North America Correspondent during the eight years of the special relationship between Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. No other visiting head of government was received at the White House with such attention and affection.

  It had the aspect of a high romance,

  Such as no novelist could represent,

  A minuet, or diplomatic dance

  Between Prime Minister and President.

  This was no routine meeting on his list,

  He the great illusionist

  And she the handbag specialist,

  Being not so much a summit as a tryst.

  They seemed so much at one in their rapport

  (Glances exchanged and confidences heeded)

  That it was said she told him what she thought

  And told him then what he did.

  Vukovar

  This fine old Austro-Hungarian town on the banks of the Danube was totally destroyed by artillery and tank fire during the Croatian war in November 1991. The Chetniks, roaming bands of Serbian irregulars, were the ground troops who forced the Croats’ surrender at the end of a long siege.

  A Balkan Stalingrad – as Serbian tanks

  Blasted the cemetery, and Chetniks fought

  From house to house along the river banks;

  The centre shook and fell, the suburbs bled;

  I stood among the ruins and I thought,

  It isn’t even safe here to be dead.

  From the destructions of the war machine

  In all the zones of conflict where I’ve been

  (At the last reckoning there were eighteen),

  Plus other random bloodshed in between,

  I’d say to those who glamorise

  The warrior’s toil and trouble,

  That ‘To the victor goes the prize,

  Which is a pile of rubble’.*

  * A quotation from one of my reports from Vukovar in November 1991.

  Lucky Escape

  In June 1992 the runway of Sarajevo airport was a free fire zone, with government forces on both its sides and the Serbs at its ends; but it was the only way into the city. The BBC car was a battered Vauxhall Carlton.

  I drove at speed across the airport runway,

  And, half way over, hit a spot of bother,

  Or it hit me. As I was going one way

  A burst of hostile fire came from another.

  Yet I got through unscathed. The bullets sank

  Into the door frame without passing through it.

  My friends at Vauxhall Cars had made a tank,

  And in the fog of war they never knew it.

  Holiday Inn Sarajevo

  It was the ultimate war zone hotel,

  Its south side blown away by shot and shell,

  Apparently the lodging place from hell

  And yet, away from where the mortars fell,

  It did not just survive, but cast its spell;

  It was our refuge and it served us well.

  The Serbian snipers had it in their sights,

  The comforts of a hostelry were few,

  No running water, little food, no lights

  And rather short on health and safety too.

  Of course it never quite ran out of booze,

  In those days the chief lubricant of news,

  And made up for a scarcity of wines

  With its supply of bootleg Ballantines.

  To those who ran away it seemed accursed,

  More like ground zero than a place of rest.

  By normal standards it was quite the worst,

  But to us war zone folk it seemed the best,

  We the believers, they the infidels,

  In this most dangerous of all hotels,

  And those who stayed there were uniquely blessed.

  Vitez

  This central Bosnian town was the base for British peacekeeping troops throughout the Bosnian war from 1992 to 1995.

  We came upon it in the midst of war,

  Muslims and Croats, not a Serb in sight;

  We should have seen it as a metaphor:

  Its only factory made dynamite.

  Here in the school the British troops were based,

  Without a mandate, peacekeeping ad hoc,

  As all around them murderers laid waste,

  And every one would own his own road block.

  And so amid the Balkan cauldron’s pressures

  The best of British learned to improvise.

  First up, the 22nd of Foot, the Chesh
ires,

  (The Guards of course did their own thing, Guards-wise),

  ‘Flowers of the Forest’ – the Scots too knew the cost.

  It was a long haul and hard earned success,

  Lives saved which otherwise would have been lost,

  And every man owned his own peace process.

  Twenty years on and what a transformation!

  No footfall of the bloodshed and hardship;

  The place became a racketeers’ way station,

  A Balkan Vegas or suburban strip,

  With nightclubs and casinos wall to wall;

  Some lost their lives and others prospered well,

  There was no decent outcome there at all,

  And every man would own his private hell.

  Karadzic on Trial

  Dr Karadzic was arrested in Belgrade in June 2009 after more than ten years on the run. (He called it his ‘period of avoidance’.) He conducted his own defence at his trial at The Hague which began in March 2010. I appeared as a prosecution witness in December 2010. He asked me to visit him before the court appearance.

  He sat before me in a guarded cell,

  And though I once believed I knew him well,

  It seemed our altered lives ran parallel,

  As if in separate ante-rooms of hell.

  He vowed he’d left his heart and his possessions

  Inside a city of beloved sadness;

  And yet I knew, because of his obsessions,

  His soldiers bombed it to the edge of madness.

  The siege of Sarajevo was refought,

  No longer street by street and trench by trench,

  But mercilessly and in open court,

  On screens inset into the judges’ bench.

  He called me precious: ‘precious witness’. What!

  No one in all my troubled life and times

  Had ever spoken of me thus – and that

  Was from a man indicted for war crimes.

  For all the sacrifices of the dead,

  The legend of the cause of those he led

  Will ricochet for ever in the head

  Of one who talked of maps while others bled.