Page 43 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

36 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

and officials in the protectorates to obscure what one might reasonably expect
to be the foremost duty of the governor of a British colony, viz. the protection
of the lives and property of the local population. So far as the inhabitants of
Crater were concerned, this meant their prompt liberation from the rule of the
terrorists who now held the town in their grip. While Trevelyan acknowledged
the necessity to recover control of Crater, his reason for doing so, as we have
seen, was to protect the eventual evacuation of the British forces from Aden.
Throughout his account of his governorship, in fact, he appears to subscribe to
a most unusual interpretation of the respective roles of diplomatist (or
governor) and soldier in conditions of limited warfare or civil insurrection. One
would have thought that the prime function of military forces in such con­
ditions would have been to uphold the civil power and support it in its
endeavours to restore and maintain peace and security. Trevelyan, in contrast,
seems to consider that the diplomatist’s (or governor’s) first task is to rescue the
military forces from the very disorders they are sent to quell. It was not an
interpretation which commended itself to the British Army in Aden in 1967,
however much it may have accorded with the outlook of its political masters in
Britain.
On the night of 3 July the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders re-entered
Crater, and by the early hours of the next morning they were in full command
of the town. There was only one casualty in the entire operation, a suspected
Arab terrorist. None of the inhabitants of Crater was injured, there was no
massacre of Britons up country, and the South Arabian Army and Police
neither mutinied nor disintegrated. All the dire predictions had proved false.
For the next four-and-a-half months the Argylls kept the peace in Crater so
effectively that the NLF and FLOSY terrorists went to ground or moved out
altogether. The Argylls received few thanks for their efforts. They had embar­
rassed their own government by recalling it to its duty and showing how it
should be performed, and for this Mitchell and his men were in due course to
suffer retribution. The Wilson administration, while shirking its respon­
sibilities to its colonial subjects and flinching from its enemies in Arabia, could
be magnificently petty in its treatment of its own servants. When the list of
honours and awards for the Aden campaign was published Mitchell’s name was
conspicuously absent; and in July 1968 the Ministry of Defence announced
that the Argylls, the original ‘thin red line’ of the British Army, were to be
disbanded as a regiment. Wilson himself, Shackleton and Trevelyan (who
received a barony as well), were all later to become Knights of the Garter, the
premier order of chivalry. The wheel, it would seem, had turned full circle
since the day when Lord Melbourne, the young Victoria’s prime minister, had
quipped, ‘I like the Garter; there is no damned merit in it.’
After the reoccupation of Crater Trevelyan urged the federal ministers to
grasp the reins of government more firmly, to initiate reforms, and to try to
broaden the basis of their government, perhaps by coming to terms with the