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Letter No. 3 Tuesday March 17
Major J.H. Massey 6 Palestinian Coy., The Buffs M.E.F.
My sweet darling
I have been fiddlig & doodling & o'filling for half an hour, wondering what to write to you about. I have replied to your letters as best I can. I have sent you an Airgraph this morning. And so I am reminding myself now that I am writing mainly for your pleasure & comfort & I hope, entertainment, that I must pull myself together instead of to pieces.
Thursday March 19 - Perhaps you can understand beause I find it difficult to explain the waves of depress & hopelessness which come over me & make it quite impossible for me to write to you. Sot it was on Tuesday & you see what I achieved. Would it be better if I were to tear up that short beginning & start again & pretend that I am feeling fine & dandy. I can't see it really - because the whole basis of my feelings for you & our relationship & its affect on my life out here, is bound up with the most complete misery because I am separated from you & when the separation has been going on for 18 months & shows no sign of coming to an end. I just cannot pretend that I ever feel happy for a moment, & I don't really want you to think that I do. I want you to know darling, that life for me is hell without you & it will always be the same. And when I am having a worse attack than usual, I just cannot write. But I never allow this to
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continue for too long. This is my fourth letter this month & it will be posted tomorrow. It is midday - I intend to go on writing to you until bedtime, with various breaks to attend to necessary work etc . When I work hard all day, I am a bit tired by the end of it when the evening comes & so in an ideal & receptive frame of mind for an attack of misery & melancholy.
I have been trying recently to work a little less hard & to decentralise more onto other people. But new things are always popping up & bits of extra work adding themselves & I have not been too successful yet.
I told you I had written a pretty rude letter to a R.A.F. Squadron leader & also reported him to the Area Commander. Well, the result was solitary & immediate & very satisfactory for me (I cannot tell you what it was all about) - but this has meant much extra work.
You were saying in a letter that I am doing an awful amount of changing officers & I am still at it. That carsenty person who came to me on special report had to be reported on by me this week. I sent an adverse report, & said he was ignorant, lazy & very unreliable: this is all endorsed by Col. L. - & so the bloody man is practically certain to lose his commission & be flung out of the army. As an officer he has the right of appeal under a section of the Army Act & he is taking advantage of this. The basis of his appeal is firstly that he was wronged by a misunderstanding in his other Coy - & that when he came to me, I took a prejudiced view of him. And secondly that in this Coy there is a very much higher standard of discipline & training & so he was always being checked in this Coy for
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doing things which were normal & every day in the other one. He is right, up to point, because the other Coy is criminally slack & slipshod. But Carsenty was not spoiled there - he's been a liar & a bluffer for years & is quite incurably lazy & he will be a good riddance. And now I am setting about this chap Dikman. It's dreadful, isn't it? But they should not make the mistake of commissioning these people. Any one of my Sgts would make a better officer than either of these two people.
I told you before that Dikman is mad - I'm sure of it now - I'll give you some good laughs about him when I come home. This is bad enough but he has an overwhelming desire to be popular with the men & so shuts his eye when they do things wrong & generally allows them to do whatever they want: I have warned him in extremely plain language about this twice & explained at length the importance of discipline & order, & the exact relations which should exist between officer & man. The final straw came yesterday when my C.S.M. visited the Detachment of which Dikman is in charge. One of my corporals reported to the CSM that Dikman had had him into his tent & explained how it hurt him to have to punish men & that he had wanted to go on well with the men & make life easy & pleasant for them. But that he was forced to do this by the C.O. & he wanted the men to understand this. He then told the corporal never to tell anything to the CSM because the CSM passed everything on to the C.O. with the result that he got [sockets?]
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& it all came back on the men.
What do you think of that? The more I think of it the more furious I feel. The bloody little twirp - I'll give him blasted rockets. I have put in 12 months slogging with this Coy to make it into quite a good one & that half baked lunatic apparently thinks he can come along & undo all that in a few weeks. Bloody impudence!
Anyway, I have put it all onto Col L now, with a strong recommendation that I be advised to Court Martial the man.
And I have a Court Martial coming up on three of my soldiers - they were duty guarding a crashed Wellington bomber & instead of guarding it, they pinched some valuable parts of it & tried to get them out of camp for a sale. It was lucky we caught them. The case is complicated because each one of them is evidence against the other two, & a man cannot be forced to give evidence about another man if it tends to incriminate himself. But I had to take down about 25 pages of written summary of evidence & now it has all gone uop to the H.Q. Legal Dept for sorting out.
So you see, my dearie, there are always extra things coming along to complicate life & make it more difficult & tedious.
I had quite a pleasant evening last Monday. On Sunday there had been a tea party, given by the Jewish Welfare Committee, & the first of the series, for the Jewish
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offices & their British officers too. Ben & Levantin went & I stayed behind. Mrs Samuel was there & was talking to Ben about me & apparently told him that she likes me by far the best of the Majors - this is not so much of a compliment really, if you were to know the other majors! Anyway she told Ben to ask me to phone her in the morning, which I did - when she said she was staying in Tel-Aviv for a few days & asked me to come in. I found another man there, a Russian Jew called Shapira & who is head of the Palestine Electric Corporation. We then went along to have dinner with a man & his wife called Kirchner, a South African Jew & a solicitor. We had an excellent dinner & a most interesting evening. There is really no doubt, you know, that Jews of this class & education & intelligence are very much more intelligent and interesting to talk to than their English counterparts - on the average. Mrs S. told a most amusing & pretty aggravating story about the A.T.S. which has just started in Palestine. The idea was wroted about a year ago, & a woman called Commander Chitty came out from England, specially, to go into the matter. She spent a few weeks here, then went home & reported that there were no suitable or available people in the country! Apparently all she had done was to talk to Lady MacMichael, the High Commissioner's wife, who had told her that there were no suitable 'gairls' at all, all of which were working for her in
