David Fisher - The War Magician

TITLE: The War Magician

AUTHOR: David Fisher

PUBLISHER: Weidenfeld & Nicolson

ISBN: 0 297 84635 3

ABEB Version: 3.0

Created: 2006/5/3 @ 22:16

An mdf Scan & Proofread.

The War Magician

The man who conjured victory in the desert

David Fisher

This book is dedicated to

Richard Curtis

Bob and Catherine Carlen Forgione

Joyce Heiberger

Paul Heller

Rosemary Rogers

for their support while I wandered in my own desert.

The outbreak of the 1939 war, foretelling inevitable misery to everyone,

meant different things to different people. To me, it involved something

very strange and rather alarming – the focusing of my whole imagination

and knowledge on the problem of how best to mobilize the world of magic

against Hitler.

Jasper Maskelyne

Introduction

During the sixteenth century, it is said, a stocky English farmer named John

Maskelyne served the Cheltenham district as justice of the peace. He was

called one day to preside at the trial of a stranger, a small, twisted black

man who had appeared mysteriously in the district, clad in an unusual black

silk suit. Called by the name Drummer of Tedworth, he stood accused of the

practice of black magic. The evidence given against him was such that John

Maskelyne declared him guilty of witchcraft and banished him to the

American plantations.

Soon thereafter great misfortune befell the Maskelyne farm. Crops

inexplicably failed. Cattle became bloated and died. A barn fire destroyed

the sparse corn harvest. And at night, on the darkest eves, a little black

man was seen limping about the fields.

Suddenly, however, the farm once more blossomed. Crops grew high and

straight in the fields. The cattle were fat with milk. During a local famine

the Maskelyne barn alone burst with corn, and soon the farmer’s pockets

clinked with gold coins.

So the tale was told throughout the land that farmer John Maskelyne

had purchased, at the price of his mortal soul, the powers of black magic

for himself and ten generations of his descendants.

Through the years that followed, the Maskelyne family did indeed seem

to possess extraordinary powers. The line is ripe with scientists, magicians

and men of standing. Nevil Maskelyne, of the third generation, served as

royal astronomer in the court of King George III. He was the first to

measure time to tenths of a second, to figure the weight of the earth, and

he made great discoveries about the movement of stars in the heavens.

About Peter Maskelyne, the fifth generation, it was said he practised

alchemy. Upon his death his notebooks were burned in a public bonfire, and

the flames were supposedly many and unusual colours.

In the eighth generation came John Nevil Maskelyne, a remarkable

inventor and the man considered to be the father of modern magic. He

created the famed Box Trick, in which two people seemingly change places

in an instant, learned to fly from the stage to a perch on a crystal

chandelier, and was able to cause full-bodied spirits to materialize from his

own body and converse. He founded the elite magicians’ organization, the

Magic Circle, and presented the first edition of Maskelyne’s Magical

Mysteries at London’s famed Egyptian Theatre. He also perfected the

standard typewriter keyboard and invented Psycho, the marvel of the

1870s, a mechanical man that played flawless whist.

The tenth generation was Jasper Maskelyne, the war magician. To him

would fall the greatest challenge of all: to pit the powers of magic against

the most evil foe in history. And at the end of the titanic battle he would

have added the strangest and most significant page to the family legend.

One

Spring 1940

Jasper Maskelyne was drinking a glass of razor blades when the war began.

It was an old trick, first made popular by his grandfather, the legendary

John Nevil Maskelyne, and often performed by his father, Nevil Maskelyne,

but it always delighted the audience. As he began withdrawing from his

mouth the six sharp blades, conveniently knotted to a cotton string like tiny

steel sheets on a clothesline, he first noticed the young army captain

moving anxiously down the centre aisle. He was careful not to stare at the

officer, lest he divert attention to him, but still managed to watch him

scanning the rows. The captain finally stopped near the front and leaned

over a handsome woman to whisper something to a colonel. By the time

Jasper had discovered the live rose sprouting from the stageboards, and

picked it, the colonel was walking briskly out of the theatre. He did not look

back.

Jasper sniffed the scarlet flower, briefly luxuriating in its fragrance, then

tossed it into the air. Suddenly, it burst into smoke and vanished. The

audience cheered this trick, and he bowed and accepted their applause, but

even as he did he thought of the two soldiers, and realized it was peace

that had disappeared.

Earlier that day, April 9, 1940, German shock troops had stormed into

Norway and Denmark, signalling the end of the nine-month “Bore War,” or

“Phoney War.” The long winter spent waiting for the fighting to begin was

over. Finally the Army would meet the enemy.

War had officially been declared against Germany on September 3, 1939,

when the Nazi blitzkrieg overran Poland, but had thus far been limited to

naval battles. After an immediate flurry of excitement, restaurants,

theatres and cinemas had reopened, and life in England had continued

much as it had been. But Hitler’s invasion of Scandinavia on April 9 marked

the beginning of the land war, and a patriotic fervour gripped the nation.

Long lines formed in front of enlistment centres throughout the country.

Maskelyne dressed in his finest Harry Hall suit, put a fresh flower into his

lapel, and joined the queue at the Reserve Officers’ Enlistment Centre at

Hobart House. But while the other men were volunteering to take up

conventional weapons against the Germans, he harboured a much more

unusual and daring plan. It was his intention to mobilize the world of magic

against Hitler.

Jasper Maskelyne had been born into the world of magic. For sixty-six

years, since watchmaker John Nevil Maskelyne had turned the murky

Egyptian Theatre in Piccadilly into “England’s Home of Mystery,” the

Maskelynes had been Europe’s first family of conjuring. The fabled John

Nevil, the “Father of Modern Magic,” had introduced the Box Trick, in which

an assistant vanished from a sealed and inspected cabinet and Eye of the

Needle, in which one person seemingly passed through a tiny hole in a

steel plate to exchange places with another who had been sealed inside a

case, as well as numerous other illusions that have become magic-show

standards. In addition, he had perfected Psycho, the whist-playing,

cigarette-smoking mechanical man that dazzled Europe, had originated the

matinée performance, had designed the accepted typewriter keyboard and

had founded the exclusive magician’s society, the Magic Circle.

His son, Nevil Maskelyne, had carried on the family trade at the opulent

St. George’s Hall, in Regent Street in the West End. During his reign at the

top of the bill, Maskelyne’s Magical Mysteries remained one of London’s

most popular attractions, and the Continent’s most famous illusionists had

astounded audiences from the St. George’s stage. In the Great War, Nevil

Maskelyne had served England by developing a paste that protected naval

gunners’ hands from searing gun flashes, and trained magician-spies for T.

E. Lawrence in Arabia. Upon Nevil’s death in 1926, twenty-four-year-old

Jasper Maskelyne stepped into the spotlight.

It was a role for which he had been carefully groomed. His was a

childhood spent watching reality turned topsy-turvy. He had grown up in the

workshop beneath the stage learning how to make objects materialize or

vanish, float in midair and appear to be precisely what they were not. From

his grandfather he learned that, with imagination and knowledge, fantasies

could be made to come alive. Given the proper equipment, anything was

possible.

He was only nine when he made his stage debut, assisting the famed

magician David Devant in a royal command performance at the Palace

Theatre, and thereafter often worked backstage at St. George’s Hall. So he

was well prepared to take his place centre stage when it became his turn.

Jasper rapidly became one of London’s most celebrated performers. He

was almost six feet four inches tall and was handsome in the most dashing

manner of the times. His hair was black and gleaming and was worn pulled

back passionately, and his brush moustache was always neatly trimmed.

His deep green eyes and furrowed dimples, set off by the manly cleft in his

chin, made him a proper rival to the swashbuckling matinée idols.

His good looks, and the sophisticated presence that enabled him to

charm sceptical patrons into believing that a simple sleight was a feat of

great difficulty, made him a natural for the talking pictures, and he made a

series of them, starring as a detective who used magic to solve crimes.

But when the world mobilized for war in 1939 he put show business

aside and began conceiving of means to adapt the techniques of stage

magic to the battlefield. He firmly believed, as he had been taught by his

grandfather, that with imagination and knowledge anything was possible.

The prospect of military service thrilled him. Although his fame had

spread throughout Europe, he had spent much of his life feeling as if he

were a character cast into someone else’s play. As a Maskelyne his life had

been carefully planned for him, and he had diligently followed that plan.

The war represented a chance to finally step out of the historic shadows

cast by his grandfather and father. The Maskelyne name would have no

meaning on the battlefield. Family contacts could not deflect Nazi bullets.

The carpenters in the workshop could not create illusions for him. He would

be on his own, dependent entirely upon his own skills.

Ironically, his fame worked against him. He had no difficulty arranging

appointments with enlistment officers, but they refused to take him

seriously. Time and again they politely explained that the Army needed

fighting boys, not thirty-eight-year-old magicians. Then, nearly always, they

casually asked how a favourite bit of magic they had seen performed at St.

George’s Hall had been accomplished.

Jasper admitted he was too old to leap from the trenches into no man’s

land and acknowledged that he occasionally suffered from motion sickness,

but he insisted he could offer something far more valuable than cannon

fodder. “If I can stand in the focus of powerful footlights and deceive an

audience only the width of an orchestra pit away, I can certainly deceive

German observers fifteen thousand feet in the air, or miles away on land.”

But as desperately as he fought to get a commission, so did the Army

seem determined to keep him out, as if there were some shame in allowing

a music-hall performer to partake in the serious killing business. It was

proving easier for him to levitate an entire chorus in midverse than convince

a single ranking officer that his concepts had merit. Although Maskelyne’s

qualifications included an expertise in optics and applied mechanics, and

practical skills in fields ranging from electronics to counterfeiting and

forgery, to Army recruitment officers the thought of a magician at war

conjured up images of Merlin turning young King Arthur into a bird and

Moses parting the Red Sea. A battle for the survival of England was being

fought in the skies, and brave boys lacking adequate weapons to defend

themselves were dying on the battlefields, and it did not seem a time for

magic wands or threatening spells.

While the Nazi blitzkrieg raced through the spring of 1940, Maskelyne

laid siege to enlistment offices. He waited impatiently at the Hobart House

recruitment centre as the Low Countries fell, paced long grey corridors while

the Chamberlain government resigned in disgrace and was replaced by the

bulldog Churchill, and sat in outer offices in Whitehall through the fall of

Belgium and the disaster at Dunkirk. On June 22, the dark night of the

French surrender, he shared a last bottle of claret with Mary, his wife of

fourteen years, and said bitterly, “It’s beginning to look as though I won’t

have to go to the war after all. It seems to be coming to me.”

In September, as more than a thousand Luftwaffe aircraft roared across

the Channel every day and Mussolini’s Italian Army in Libya marched across

the western desert toward lightly defended Egypt, Maskelyne decided to

join the Home Guard. But before he could sign up, H. Hendley Lenton, a

well-placed family friend, contacted Prime Minister Churchill. “I have had

conversations with Mr Jasper Maskelyne (‘The Maskelyne’),” he wrote, “and

he has persuaded me that there are great possibilities (he says certainties)

that some of his so-called ‘tricks’ if harnessed to greater ‘power’ or utilised

in other form would be valuable assets in the present war conditions and in

particular against aircraft.”

The Prime Minister referred this suggestion to his personal assistant on

scientific matters, Professor Frederick Alexander Lindemann, and an

appointment was arranged.

Maskelyne sat opposite the staid professor in a comfortable Whitehall

office and outlined his plan. Lindemann listened with fascination, but

remained sceptical. It was one thing to fool a receptive audience under

prepared conditions, he pointed out, and quite another to trick the most

sophisticated military machine in history. Eventually, their conversation

came round to specifics. “What sort of things do you propose to do?” he

asked.

Jasper replied in an even voice. “Given a free hand, there are no limits

to the effects I can produce on the battlefield. I can create cannon where

they don’t exist and make ghost ships sail the seas. I can put an entire

army in the field if you’d like, or make aircraft invisible, even project an

image of Hitler sitting on the loo a thousand feet into the sky …”

Lindemann’s initial reaction had been to dismiss Maskelyne’s claims as a

performer’s malarkey, but for some reason he had hesitated, and now found

himself actually imagining the impossible. Hitler on the loo? The corners of

his mouth hinted at a smile. “It does sound a bit far-fetched, you know.

How do you propose to go about doing these things?”

“Look over there,” Jasper responded, pointing to a spot on the

whitewashed ceiling behind the professor.

Lindemann spun around in his chair and stared at the general area

indicated by Maskelyne. There seemed to be nothing there. He leaned

forward a bit and adjusted his eyeglasses, but still did not see anything on

the ceiling. “I don’t see anything,” he said.

“Exactly, because there’s nothing there to see. But you reacted precisely

as would anyone else. Actually, I didn’t even have to say a word. If I had

just stared at that spot, eventually you would have turned around. That’s

human nature. And stage magic, the work I do, is nothing more than a bit

of suggestion, a touch of knowledge about human nature and the rather

elementary use of scientific principles. The fulfilment of carefully planted

expectation. It’s not all that different than military camouflage, actually. I

can make the Nazis see guns where they expect to see guns and soldiers

where they believe soldiers might be. It’s quite simple, really.”

Lindemann crossed his arms across his chest, leaned back in his chair

and stared at the magician. Well, why not? he wondered. Hitler’s outlaws

had pretty much shattered all the traditional concepts of warfare – there

was nothing to be lost by trying something new. “All right,” he finally

agreed. “Right now a hearty dose of magic might be just the tonic. I’ll make

some inquiries on your behalf.”

After sending Maskelyne off to fill out the necessary forms, Lindemann

closed his eyes and tried to imagine the Führer on the loo. The thought

made him chuckle mischievously.

It was growing dark by the time Jasper left Whitehall, and London was

beginning to settle in for the night. Thousands of people were retreating to

the subterranean tube stations, armed with mattresses, blankets, and

games and powdered milk for those children too young to be sent to safety

in the country. Maskelyne waited at a tram stop for a decent interval, but

the Luftwaffe raids had forced most above-ground transport to stop running

after dusk. Finally he settled for the less convenient underground, from

which he would still have a long trek home.

He walked the last few blocks in a protective fog, finding his way by

following the white stripes that had been painted on tree trunks and curbs.

When he reached the house on Albany Street, he paused outside,

wondering how he would tell his Mary he was finally going to the war. For

the fourteen years of their marriage they had been inseparable: they had

taken Maskelyne magic to the mining towns of Australia and the African

bush, they had played the grand opera houses of Europe, and they had

performed throughout England always together. Mary had designed the sets

and settled the bills and solved the problems, and on occasion she had

vanished from boxes and been shot out of a cannon to land in the rafters,

but mostly she had been his friend and confidante, and the thought of

leaving her was a frightening one.

The Maskelyne house was a sturdy two-storied red-brick-and-mortar

construction, topped with a sloping gabled roof. Ivy vines that for some

reason never climbed above the first level gave the house the appearance

of having a dark beard. Viewed against the night in its blacked-out dress it

appeared dark and empty, but inside it was ablaze. A wood fire warmed the

parlour, and lights were on in the dining room and kitchen. The black velvet

curtains taken from the theatre effectively covered each window, absorbing

light rather than reflecting it or allowing it to pierce through. Jasper’s

thirteen-year-old son, Alistair, and twelve-year-old daughter, Jasmine, had

been evacuated to the safety of a reception zone, so Mary waited alone.

When he entered she was loudly preparing dinner, banging pots and

pans, clanking the wedding silver normally reserved for special occasions,

and humming a popular melody. Evelyn Enid Mary Home-Douglas

Maskelyne, Mary, was a small woman with short black hair and a round

face, and eyes that seemed perpetually amused by some bit of private

whimsy. She turned around to greet him with a kiss, and he immediately

realized she knew. She knew in the mystical way women learn of distant

realities.

“I’m so proud of you,” she responded when he told her the details of his

meeting.

They tried to laugh. Sometimes a single tear would betray her fine act,

but she nonchalantly brushed away each one. “You’ll be such a dashing

officer,” she boasted. “Wait till that Hitler hears you’re in the war. That

might even be enough to send him tramping.”

She was careful not to tell him how much she would worry about him.

She knew he would not have an easy time in the services. It was not his

age, nor his physical condition, that would cause him the most problems,

but rather his basic optimism. He was a man who chased his dreams and

worked to turn them into reality. To him a question mark was a challenge,

and his greatest joy came with the solution of a troublesome problem. The

Army would not nurture him as she had done, there would be no time to

indulge his fantasies, and no one nearby to support him when failure

seemed inevitable. Mary was terrified he would be wounded in battle, but

she worried just as much that he would lose his ability to dream.

He was just as careful not to tell her he would worry about her every

minute of every day, and would never feel whole until they were together

once again.

The night was given to the past, and it was warm and tender. After

dinner they sat close together on the flowered couch in the parlour,

remembering a lifetime. Mary had joined Maskelyne’s as an assistant in

1925; less than a year later they had married. “Remember the night you

were trying to make a motorbike disappear and the curtain caught fire,” she

chided, “and you were so brave, you grabbed the hose from the stagehand

and proceeded to soak everyone in the audience.”

He countered, “And what about the night I made you vanish from that

old Chinese cabinet? You were supposed to reappear at the rear of the

theatre, but someone had locked the door in the hallway beneath the

auditorium. I can still hear you screaming for someone to open it while I

was up there trying to figure out some way to explain exactly what you

were doing.”

Later, they disdained the bulky steel-and-wood Morrison indoor shelter

and slept on their marriage bed. The German bombers did not dare interrupt

them.

Three days later a buff envelope was hand-delivered, ordering Jasper to

report to the Royal Engineers Camouflage Training and Development Centre

at Farnham.

“Camouflage?” Mary asked.

“Hiding things,” he explained.

She nodded. “Perfect.”

It had long been a family maxim that a Maskelyne never left, he simply

disappeared. But this was not a time for humour. Mary scoured the

neighourhood for rationed goods and cooked a Woolton pie, a mixture of

carrots, parsnips, turnips and potatoes, moistened with white sauce and

covered in pastry. “It’s delicious,” Jasper said as he forced it down.

“It’s awful,” she corrected.

“It is awful.”

“Damn that Hitler,” she said, reducing the war to a domestic problem.

“They should make him eat it.”

After dinner Jasper went upstairs to pack his kit. The old leather case

was plastered with cheery travel stickers from around the world. He packed

one suit from Hall’s, five small hard balls with which to exercise his fingers,

some shirts, socks, his toilet items and undergarments. After debating it

briefly, he decided to take his battered ukulele, then closed the bag.

Mary had been standing in the doorway watching him. He turned and

saw her there and started to speak, but stopped midsentence. She was

wearing the white silk robe she’d worn on their wedding night. “You look

beautiful,” he said.

“I love you, Jay.”

He took her in his arms and first kissed her sweetly as a friend, then

warmly as his wife and companion, and finally passionately as his lover.

They made love tenderly and fiercely and both of them laughed and cried

and whispered enduring promises, and he caressed her and tried to

memorize the feel of her soft skin and the sound of her breathing and the

scent of her hair and the touch of her lips, and finally they slept, sweetly

cupped together, a most lovely way to say goodbye. Sometime in the

middle of the night he arose and neatly hung up the wrinkled white silk

robe and then, in keeping with family tradition, silently disappeared.

The village of Farnham was located in the Home County of Surrey, some

forty minutes by rail from Waterloo Station. It was a place thick with

history, and moved in the present at its own pace. During peacetime it had

served as a dormitory town for well-heeled London commuters, and

day-trippers often visited for a respite from the hectic pace of city life, but

the war had changed all that.

Boards now covered the windows of the small shops on High Street, and

the familiar humps of Anderson shelters popped out of backyard gardens.

The stately iron picket fences had been torn down and shipped to factories

to be smelted into munitions. Each morning long lines formed in front of

the greengrocer’s. Visitors quickly passed through on their way to the safer

outlying districts. And at dusk each night, from the crumbling mullioned

windows of Farnham Castle the residents of the town could be seen

scurrying home carrying their gas masks in little brown boxes and glancing

nervously at the sky. The war had reached Farnham.

It was to Farnham Castle that Jasper Maskelyne came to learn how to

march correctly, stand at rigid attention, salute properly, and create

illusions that might fool the greatest conquering army in history.

The first class of the Royal Engineers Camouflage Training and

Development Centre assembled there on October 14. Thirty men exchanged

their civilian clothes for natty Austin Reed uniforms and Sam Browne chest

belts, raised their hands and swore to defend Crown and country, then

stood around sipping tea, adjusting their starched uniforms and trying to

sound as militarily astute as possible. Basically, this consisted of

punctuating every few sentences with a crisp “Damn Jerries.”

The centre had been organized and was commanded by Lieutenant

Colonel Frederick Beddington, but the chief instructor was Major Richard

Buckley. During the Great War Buckley had served as a camouflage officer

under Solomon J. Solomon, the painter who literally wrote the book on

wartime camouflage. It was a thin book, however. Camouflage in that war

consisted primarily of stringing garnished nets over artillery pieces to hide

telltale shadows and flash burns from observers in gas bags, of stretching

large pieces of canvas between treetops so that command posts could

safely operate beneath them, and of concealing snipers inside blasted trees

and setting them out in no man’s land. But this experience was far more

than anyone else could offer, so the Army had plucked Buckley out of Eton’s

Tuck Shop and made him chief instructor.

“You are here to learn the art of camouflage,” he boomed as he

inspected the scraggly line the first day. “Camouflage means disguising

things so the enemy doesn’t know what you’re doing, or hiding them so he

can’t see you doing it. Now, am I going too fast for anyone?”

No one responded.

“Splendid,” he said. “I can see we’re going to get along just fine.”

It was ironic that Buckley was a camouflage officer, because he would

have stood out in any crowd. He was as tall as Maskelyne, and broader, and

shocks of bright ginger hair sprouted wildly from his head. His green eyes

were deepset and dominated by a single brow that rolled casually across

his forehead. This combination of flaming hair and lively green eyes against

perpetually pale skin gave him an uncanny resemblance to the Irish flag, a

fact of which he was extremely proud. But the most Irish thing about him

was his legendary temper. “I lost it once when I was a lad,” he warned the

class, “and haven’t found it yet.” And, while it was true he would on

occasion express his displeasure by hurling a telephone or a desk across

the room, he was also capable of quoting the better poets at length, or

musing late into the night about the banality of a war passed in Farnham.

Buckley understood that camouflage was a visual art, and so he helped

Beddington recruit men from applicable fields. Some future camoufleurs he

found himself and talked into accepting commissions. Others, like

Maskelyne, were routed to him by officers who couldn’t figure out where

else they rightly belonged. The end result was a curious collection. Besides

the magician Maskelyne, the group included Victor Stiebel, a well-known

couturier, painters Blair Hughes-Stanton, Edward Seago, Frederick Gore and

Julian Trevelyan, designers Steven Sykes, James Gardner and Ashley

Havindon, sculptor John Codner, Oxford don Francis Knox, at forty-two the

oldest recruit and an animal-camouflage expert, circus manager Donald

Kingsley, zoologist Hugh Cott, art expert Fred Mayor, who decorated his

room at the castle with Rouaults and Matisses from his London gallery, and

Jack Keefer, a West End set designer. Among their other classmates were a

restorer of religious art, an electrician, two stained-glass artisans, a

magazine editor, a Punch cartoonist and a Surrealist poet.

Teaching the King’s Regulations to this group of creative officers proved

to be a considerable challenge for Buckley. During the first weeks of the

course he unflinchingly returned some of the most unusual salutes in

military history. To his relief, no one suffered any serious injuries in

close-order marching drills, although there were a great many banged-up

limbs. He finally compromised on the Manual of Arms, telling his men, “If

you can pretend those sticks of wood on your shoulders are rifles, I can

pretend you know what you’re doing with them.”

The course was divided into general military instruction, theory and

application of camouflage and deception, and physical training. It quickly

became obvious to Buckley that some of his students knew more about

certain aspects of camouflage than he did, so he let them teach their own

subjects. Maskelyne, for example, had spent much of his life using light and

shadow to deceive, and thus made a fine instructor.

As naturally occurs when men are forced together for a prolonged period,

firm friendships were born at the school. Professor Frank Knox preceded

Maskelyne in the alphabet, and thus in most lines, and they spent the

waiting time getting to know each other. Their friendship was further

strengthened by Knox’s ability to play a dandy mouth organ in

accompaniment to Jasper’s efforts on the ukulele.

In appearance, he was quite the opposite of the dapper Maskelyne, and

most resembled an unmade bed. Although he was a quite ordinary five feet

seven inches tall and pleasantly chubby, he was a man fated to live his life

between sizes. Everything he wore was too long or too short, too loose or

too tight. Bits of shirttail were always popping from his trousers, which

were always baggy; and his belt was either too long, which caused the

tongue to drift away from his body and slap his stomach as he walked, or

too tight, so that a wave of belly flowed over it. His face was round, his

cheeks were almost perfect circles, and he had carefully cultivated a

walruslike moustache, so that people often commented that he looked like

Theodore Roosevelt. When he was issued his equipment at Farnham he

made an attempt to substitute his taped-together black horn-rims for the

regulation wire-rimmed glasses, but the army glasses sat ridiculously low

on his nose, forcing him to raise his entire face skyward to see straight

ahead, so he returned to his horn-rims. Buckley did not object.

Perhaps the only thing that ever fitted Frank Knox perfectly was his

contagious smile. Maskelyne grew very fond of the man very quickly.

Some men are cast into lifelong supporting roles, and Frank Knox was

the pick of this type. He was a man of constant good cheer, gentle and

amiable, content with his own situation and thus able to live free of envy.

“There are few things that really make any difference in life,” he once

explained to Jasper. “Love and friendship are the most important, then

honesty and loyalty, a few pounds to get along, and time. Time is

precious.”

“Is that all?”

“That’s plenty.”

“There’s got to be more than that,” Maskelyne insisted.

“If you say so,” Knox readily agreed. Although essentially a private man,

he began to confide in Jasper as he got to know him better. He dated his

life of accommodation from the death of his wife. She had given him two

daughters before dying in the minor pneumonia outbreak of 1932. Eight

years later he still grieved. The impact of her loss had set everything else

forever in its proper place.

The camouflage course progressed without incident into the winter,

much of it being improvised by Buckley and this first class as they moved

along. Although Jasper’s stage experience had made him an expert in the

basic camouflage techniques of colouring, shading, blending, perspective

and the use of decoys, the application of these principles to military

situations was new to him. Among the many things he had to learn was

how to “read” air reconnaissance photographs, how to fool enemy air recce

cameras and how to determine if the enemy was attempting to mislead

British surveillance. Eventually, he was able to determine the calibre of a

heavy weapon by its muzzle flash or the type and size of a vehicle by the

depth of its tyre track; he could estimate the strength of an enemy force by

the garbage left in an abandoned bivouac area or pick out a concealed unit

by distorted shadows.

“I’m now perfectly able to hide an entire battalion in an open field,” he

said to Knox one afternoon as they huffed around the castle to fulfill

Buckley’s daily exercise requirement. “Unfortunately, with all the Nazi

bombing, we haven’t got any open fields.”

“For that matter,” Knox pointed out, “we’ve no full battalions either.”

Even more impressive than the fact that Buckley had turned this group

David Fisher - The War Magician

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