Letter from Harry Massey to Barbara Massey

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arrangement - & it then cost him three months to sell some property to raise the money to pay to his girl's father. As soon as this was done, he married the girl, & gave himself up three days later. As he was able to produce a marriage certificate, correctly dated & had surrendered himself, his story was believed - & he was found not guilty of desertion, but guilty of absence with leave & not punished too severely.

All Arab fathers sell their daughters, you know & apparently the market is now very bullish, owing to imports of girls having been put an end to by the war. This does not apply to the Christian Arabs of course - I mean the selling business. I must now tell you about the suicide of the Jewish Sergeant - this happened on Dec 31st, & it is now Jan 9th & I have only written you one short letter in between & that is the reason. This is liable to be a long story, because many things are involved - & as I told you in my last letter, I have longed to have you by me these last few days to help & advise me.

His name was Gergel, & he was a Russian Jew. He was a very brilliant person & like most such, a bit mad & very restless & up & down. He was not really a good N.C.O. as he was completely unsystematic & therefore unreliable & quite unbelievably dirty & unclean in his person & clothes. The first real trouble & queerness about him came in Sept - after he had been sent on an ammunition escort into Syria

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Iran. He disappeared mysteriously for a day or two, & lost the convoy & came back weeks later. There was only the day or two of unaccounted time, & his story could not be disproved & so the matter was allowed to drop. It had been thought for a time that he might have made an attempt to get to the Russians. He was pretty strange after he came back, & more forgetful than usual - & I was eventually told that he had done a faint on training. I therefore had him in, & he told me he felt run down - & I sent him on leave for 10 days. On about the 20th Dec, I found him behaving very strangely with his platoon - just mucking them about on a drill parade. I had to talk pretty sharply to him. And for a day or two after this, various people kept telling me how peculiar he was being, in general. On Dec 21, therefore, I had him into my own room & told him to sit down & tell me what was the matter, & we would see if I could help him. He seemed to welcome the opportunity to talk. Firstly, he was very worried about relations of his in Kiev, including a sister of 18, & of whom he had had no news for months. Secondly, he had been having frightful headaches & eye flashes - & he said they were chronic & he knew what the word chronic meant. And thirdly, he had lost the manuscript

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of a book which he had written before he joined up. This last was what seemed to worry him most. It was about the phcycology of languages & that it was a considerable affair & had cost him months of research & very hard work far into the night, & all his heart & mind & blood had gone into it. On joining the Army, he had left it with a friend for safe keeping, & this friend had lost or mislaid it. And together with this, a large number of poems, in German, which he had been told were really good & which he was hoping to publish.

I could give him no direct help, of course - & merely tried to cheer him up & make him feel that things may easily not be so bad as he thought or imagined. On Dec 24 I had my next real contact with him. We had to get Volunteers from the private soldiers of the Coy. for a certain job, which meant the possibility of more action & excitement. Headley came to me to say that Gergel was going mad to get on this, even if it meant him reverting to the rank of private, & wanted an interview with me. I had him in, & was pretty rude to him & told him one could not do just what one wanted in the Army & that it was about time he began to think about the 35 men in his platoon & less about himself - & in any case I would not dream of recommending

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him for anything until he showed himself to be more reliable.

He was always talking about seeing action & so on - & I found out afterwards that he had often spoken to people about him being too good for his job & being wasted in it. I also found out that he had had a conversation with another Sgt about this, about the same thing - & had discussed suicide, apparently in the abstract - & had said that he thought it to be the action of a very brave man when there was nothing else worth living for.

I did not really see him again, until I saw him dead. It happened at about 6-15 in the morning. Headley was woken up as Orderly Officer, & then came & woke me, & we went along. It was in the guard-room, & he had been the guard commander. He had taken off his right anklet & boot, put a round in the breach, removed the magazine of the rifle, poked it inside his mouth & pulled the trigger with his toe. There is no doubt that he was mad, & he must have been completely mad that night or morning. Even his friends in Jerusalem say so -- & it now turns out that he went to see one of his best friends in Tel Aviv, who is a doctor, about his headaches - & this man told somebody that "Gergel is definitely mad, but he must never be told that, or he will commit suicide".

I do not blame myself for his death at all - except in so far as being wise after the event is concerned.

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And I now wish that I had had more intuition or understanding - & had taken more interest in him & had not had rows with him - & even that I had taken steps to get him into some more active or fighting Unit, & perhaps this might have given him a chance to satisfy himself, even if only to get killed in action.

It should be just a very sad thing, which one would forget about, & just remember, with sadness, from time to time.

But he left a letter beside him on the table, addressed to the M.O. & which said that for one year, a man who should be under medical supervision had been in charge of 200 men - & that Major Massey was definitely a case for a phsycopathologist. (You need not worry for one second, my darling - my nerves are very much better than most peoples). He then went on to say that I was neurotic, unable to control myself & suffered from frequent bouts of hysteria; that once, on my CO's parade, in a sudden outburst of rage I had drawn my loaded pistol on my little dog - (I have told you how frightened Peter is of my pistol - on this particular parade he would follow me round, & so I took it out of my holster & showed it to him & off he went) & that I had sent a perfectly innocent man to Field Punishment (that is a matter of