Prologue
Summer 1942
We’d known for weeks that something was coming. We were all old hands by that time and after two years in the desert you developed a sharper ear than most for desert sounds and a keener feeling for military moods; and somehow, in spite of the briefings we’d had to be ready to move on into Libya, we’d all long since guessed that things weren’t as they ought to be and that before long the route was going to change to east again towards Egypt and not further west as we’d been told.
We were waiting in a neat little hollow scooped out by the wind, with high sides where you could post a sentry and where you could remain unseen and even light a fire to boil tea. We’d stopped there several nights before, with the heat like an oven and the wind whipping up the surface of the desert in clouds so that we’d bad to do everything with our eyes half closed and our backs to the sand as it had piled in drifts against the wheels of the vehicles.
The land stretched away from us under the full blue of the sky. The coarse gravelly surface beyond the few ridges of dunes where we waited was hard and looked like brown sugar, with clumps of camel-thorn and rock here and there. It was tawny-yellow and dead, though the dunes were sculptured into fabulously beautiful shapes by the wind, and the camel-thorn made a tremulous shadow pattern of sorts where the land was flat.
We’d sat there for what seemed weeks now, tending our weapons and measuring our water in precise drops so that there was always some to spare for the radiators, never once letting up in our vigil, straining our gaze against the glittering light of the desert, watching not only towards our front but also towards our rear as we waited for the tanks to come up and relieve us. We’d laid down beside our vehicles at night in the cooling sand, our ears full of the mutter and rumble of guns to the north, our eyes, prickling for want of sleep, seeing the flicker and flash of distant artillery along the coast and alert all the time for the unexpected geometric shapes against the sky that meant enemy vehicles.
We knew nothing, of course. We’d been told to wait there and it was nobody’s job to tell us why. The only news we picked up was from the BBC on the receiver.
Near the coast road, hundreds and hundreds of vehicles had been bumping across the sand for days as the Eighth Army had got itself into motion towards Libya. Nobody had come near us, however, except for a few stray British fighters from the north. Rommel had been taken by surprise. We all knew that. He hadn’t even been near his headquarters when the first blows had fallen on his startled troops.
Up there, young men from the Rhine and the Black Forest and the Harz Mountains and the great cities of Hamburg and Berlin and the marshy plains of Prussia waited with jaws clenched and the tense look of agonised concentration, their eyes ringed with exhaustion and lack of sleep, knowing their lives depended on the attention they’d paid to detail. As we’d done more than once, they were watching the approaching line of shell-flashes and ducking at the whirring stones and shell-splinters, biting their lips and clenching their fingers until their nails dug into their palms, praying all the time that the next lump of shattered flesh wouldn’t be their own.
‘Think Tobruk’s been relieved, sir?’ the wireless operator asked, looking up at me.
I shrugged and he went on, wishfully, voicing the thoughts of us all. ‘It’s about time,’ he said. ‘If they’ve done it right, it ought to be a piece of cake.’
I nodded, saying nothing, but missing nothing either. I was still hardly more than a boy at the time, desperately young to be leading a group of men like these with their deadly weapons and the dust-covered vehicles in which they had learned to live. But, like so many more of my age, I’d acquired a precise consideration for every precaution, a care that belonged to someone older in years than I was, that must have made them somehow trust me, so although they called me ‘Pat’ or even ‘Son’ to my face, they showed a surprising respect for the two pips on the shoulder of my oil-stained bush-jacket.
I had all the bad hats of the Group with me, I knew, and I sometimes stopped to wonder why I was stuck with them. The Colonel had once encouraged me by saying, ‘It’s the bad hats who fight best when things are sticky,’ and to a certain extent he was right, but it didn’t make life any easier between the fighting.
I’d always assumed it was because I was the youngest officer in the outfit and that nobody else would have them, but, curiously, in spite of barely having got rid of the down on my cheeks, I’d never had much trouble with them.
In my sentimental moods I liked to think it was because I was a good officer, because I considered their comfort and took care of their safety, but in my heart of hearts I knew it was less of my doing than that of Morena, my sergeant mechanic, a hard, square-faced regular with a tough, lean body, who never smiled much and had been in the habit of mothering me ever since I’d first arrived as a dewy-eyed second lieutenant just out from England.
I’d learned a lot since then, but Morena still managed to drop his hints on what I should do, just as he always had in the first days, saving me from embarrassment or disaster, his tips always arriving just when I was most doubtful. It was Morena who’d chosen our present position in the hollow, discovering it with the instinct of an old desert fighter and dropping his suggestion that we halt in such a way that for a time I’d almost believed I’d found it myself. Morena would have been a good officer if he hadn’t been such a good sergeant. Though I’d learned how to run my little party, I still knew where its strength lay and who it was that held it together, because they were a tough enough crew to require someone just that little bit harder than they were.
Nimmo, for instance, my corporal: none of us knew much about Nimmo apart from the fact that he’d been at one of the great public schools and that he could have been a captain or even a major if he hadn’t been such a trouble-maker, because he’d got twice the flair for it most of the time than I had. He had the background and the instincts, and with that flaming red hair and those handsome features of his, all it required to make a leader. As it was, however, he couldn’t even keep the stripes on his arm for more than six months at a time. He was a lot older than I was and had a faintly contemptuous attitude towards me, because in spite of the pips on my shoulder, I was still the youngster of the party.
He was always on his own, the only one among us, even including me, who didn’t have a nickname. Even Morena, with his black hair and dark Spanish eyes, was ‘Wop’, a term that covered all Latin races in the same way that ‘Wog’ covered all coloured races, but in spite of being an artist of sorts, a fact that would have got anyone else called ‘Raphael’ or ‘Rembrandt’ or something like that, Nimmo had always been just ‘Jimmy’ – Jimmy Nimmo, an odd clownish name that went so incongruously with his background and accent. Perhaps it was because somehow he never showed much affection towards any of the others and never asked it for himself. His was a sardonic manner and it was one of his jokes to carry a cheque-book around with him wherever he went and get people to cash dud cheques for him. He regarded it as rather a game, and there were always plenty of strangers around in the desert who could be impressed with a cheque-book handled with confidence.
Then there was Leach, six-foot-four and sixteen stone, an arch-scrounger who was inevitably known as ‘Tiny’, an uncertain figure of sudden moods, sullen tempers and rocky steadiness in battle, a man whose greatest delight was to slave all day with a shovel or lift heavy equipment that normally took two men to handle, showing off his strength and willing to dig anyone’s slit trench just for the pleasure of using his muscles. And Houston, with the clipped accents of Carlisle, whose chief interests at all times were women and seeing that the tea was brewing; and pipe-smoking Gester, who’d been a Pole when there’d been a Poland and whose one joy in life was to kill Germans; and Bummer Ward, who got his name from the fact that he was always short of money and was constantly trying to wheedle it out of others; and Morris, who liked to read poetry in his spare time – and was tough enough to get away with it; and Smollett and Pike and a few more.
It was still a matter of wonder to me that such men would accept directions without question from me, Patrick Alan Doyle, until recently only a prefect at school. Usually, I put it down to the fact that I was simply part of the Group, and they’d been in the desert long enough to cherish their own kind.
They were all tough old-timers, a special breed of men with sun-dried, desert-wise faces who could remain shirtless and capless even under the burnished sun. They were burnt an Arab brown and marked with months of desert sores. Their rations and cigarettes and their hot sweet tea were all that mattered to them, and they were contemptuous of anyone whose base was nearer to Cairo than theirs.
There were a few beards among them and one or two Arab head-dresses – the most gorgeous of all inevitably that of Houston, who was a great man for the girls – worn mostly out of open and undiluted affection, because they looked good when they got among more conventional troops. They had learned to live easily in the desert and were untouched by the changing fortunes of war. England had long since been forgotten, because none of them from the first day they’d left it had ever expected to see it again, and even Cairo and Alex were only somewhere to go for a break. One of the deserted beaches to the north served them just as well for a weekend off.
They always had one eye squinting cynically at the brassy bowl of the sky for the sudden gleam of wings and one ear always cocked for the thud-thud of guns or the clatter of tank tracks in the silence. They had learned to ignore all shooting unless it was immediately dangerous, but when it was they leapt unhesitatingly and instinctively for the right kind of cover. They cursed constantly, using the same monotonous word for everything – at the enemy, the vehicles and me, but curiously always with a strange sort of warmth, because they were all – the enemy, the vehicles and me – sharing their lot. That was the point. We were all in it together, and it bred a strange sort of oneness that completely overrode rank. Nobody appeared to show anybody else any respect at all, but underlying all the chaffing there was an immense regard for each other, bred of interdependence and the knowledge that their companions were all experts in their own way.
In spite of the harsh comments in the ‘Conduct’ column of their files, I thought the world of them and I’d fought tooth and nail more than once against the Provost people when one of them had been in trouble.
The muttering that had been going on for days swelled up again that night and there were those bright flickerings in the north once more, and the sullen rumble of guns, with the occasional thud-thud-thud of nearer firing. Then the next day it seemed to die away to nothing again and for a while there was a lull, and with our sharp sense of desert fighting we knew that this was the crucial moment, after which the battle would begin to move swiftly – east or west. Always it had followed the same pattern – first, the thin rods of wireless antennae coming over the horizon and then the tanks, jinking and swaying as they cut between the patches of camel-thorn, and men running as the bullets and cannon shells traced pathways across the stony floor of the desert, whining and whistling and tumbling end-over-end as they came to the limit of their flight. It was always the heavy blow, followed by confused fighting, then a frantic haring across the desert, with one side or the other in hot pursuit.
It was anybody’s guess which way we’d go this time, but we all had our private views as we found ourselves waiting with our nerves on edge for what was going to happen next. From what we could pick up from the radio receiver, it seemed that both sides had had a pretty severe mauling, but the British attack had not been as successful as had been expected, and it stuck out a mile that something else was going to happen before long, so that we hung on tensely, not speaking much, going about our work silently. Then we noticed that the German R/T traffic, picked up by the worried wireless operator with his head down over his set, had begun to grow, and we could hear the fire of the 88s beginning to build up in the west, and the following night we heard the far-distant growling of heavy engines in low gear that spoke of large numbers of tanks on the move.
‘Hope to Christ it’s our lot,’ Leach said.
Houston looked up from the book of strip-pictures that he’d acquired in Alex and grinned. ‘It’s ours all right,’ he reassured him. ‘It’s a move the General thought up in his bath.’
There’d been a lot of confident talk, of course, in the days before we’d left base, especially from the briskly moustachioed and laundered gentry who came up from headquarters to brief us. ‘It’ll be a walk-over this time,’ they’d told us. ‘There’s nothing to it.’
But the people who lived at headquarters were always more optimistic than the men who lived in the desert – especially people like us who were the antennae of the army, the listening posts, the long-range groups way ahead of the main body – the men who lived all the time in slit trenches and bivouac tents and in the backs of lorries and jeeps out in the baking sand, covered with dust, the lines on their faces deepening more with every day they stared at the setting sun. And it was too quiet suddenly, and we were all nervous.
Houston was talking to Nimmo and Leach now, his voice a little louder than it should have been, and I could hear it plainly from where I sat with my maps.
‘…that belly dancer in that bar where we had the kus-kus,’ he was saying. ‘The one who used to pick up pennies between her tits. Remember when Gester heated up half a dollar for her on the top of his pipe. Jesus, that made her jump!’
The laughter came a little too readily and a little too loudly and died a little too quickly, and very soon they were all silent again, waiting, watching, listening. They had begun to guess what was happening up in the north and they didn’t like it very much. We were too isolated, too much out on a limb.
While the army probed beyond the ‘boxes’ and the dumps, seeking a gap through the suddenly stiffening ranks of the enemy, we were on our own, unsupported, our position unknown to the RAF who might have kept an eye on us, watching the end of the wire the Italians had erected from Siwa to Sollum to keep the Senussi out of Libya, with the dunes of the Great Sand Sea on our left, the dust blowing off the crests like smoke from a set of factory chimneys. There’d been a little muttering over the mugs of tea at the thought of it, and they’d kept their eyes on my face, looking for signs one way or the other, but, young as I was I’d learned long since to keep my feelings hidden.
To the men around the lorries, our stay there seemed pointless, an isolated post out in the desert, but I knew we’d been sent there because Intelligence had it that any counterattack by the Germans would come along the coast while the Italians would make a breakthrough in the south. ‘Winforce’ was to the north of us, with Grant tanks, then the armoured cars on our right watching towards the west; and finally us – three jeeps and a couple of three-tonners – spot-ball, right on the end of the line, on the lookout for hit-and-run Mark IVs.
When I’d lagered the vehicles in the hollow and watched them being immobilised I’d known that, to all intents and purposes, I was safe from all but air attack. So long as we remained alert we were well able to withdraw in good time before the enemy could come down on us. Morena had chosen his spot well and it was just a matter of remaining wide-awake.
But on my right flank was Qalam, a flea-bitten Arab village we’d passed through some days before – full of flies and grunting camels and surly obsequious men and women outside the tumbledown houses – and on my left was the Qalam Depression. It was a great empty hollow in the desert, running roughly from north-west to south-east, a bare sandy bowl below the floor of the desert, surrounded by high limestone cliffs and littered with rocks, and broken up here and there by rock falls or small wadis. One of the wadis led off to the ruined village of Qatu and at the other end of the track that ran through the Depression was Qahait, where several hundred Arab fighting men were waiting with machine guns and mortars and a few lorries handed over by the High Command. Any big movement round the end of the wire would have to pass by the Depression, and someone in Intelligence, trying to do a Lawrence of Arabia, had persuaded Sheikh Ghad of the Qalami to come in against the Axis with the promise of further support from a couple of cousins and all their followers, too. They’d been trained up by the Australians and, on paper, looked useful, but it was an unexpected arrangement, because, for the most part, the war in North Africa was a private affair between the Allies and the Axis, with the Arabs lifting anything that was not locked up or pegged down. But Ghad had been educated in England and he didn’t like the Italians, and he was still young enough to enjoy a bit of fun. To all intents and purposes, the set-up was sound, but to me it was an uneasy situation because I wasn’t sure how much I could trust Sheikh Ghad. I’d been far less impressed with him than the man who’d come up from headquarters in the Delta to swear to his trustworthiness.
But there wasn’t much I could do about it. I’d been told to wait there and that I’d receive my instructions when it was time for them to be sent. There were others behind me, it seemed, doing the same thing.
Trying hard to look unconcerned, I walked across to where the wireless operator was listening to the muted bleep-bleep of the set.
‘Traffic’s still growing,’ he said in answer to my raised eyebrows. ‘It’s getting bloody crowded, in fact.’
‘I hope it won’t get so crowded they can’t contact us,’ I commented.
Almost as I spoke, the set began to bleep louder and the operator dropped the paper-backed novel he’d been browsing through, dog-eared from weeks of being kicked around inside a jeep, and reached for his pencil.
‘Us,’ he said shortly.
From time to time he tapped his key in response, then his hand flickered as he sent off the letters that indicated the signal had been received and understood.
We decoded the message together in the shade of the little shelter we’d rigged up, and the wireless operator looked round at me, puzzled. I said nothing, though, and, picking up the sheet of buff paper, I stepped into the glare of the sun.
Morena was standing alongside a sand-coloured jeep with ‘Daisy’ painted on the radiator. ‘Daisy’ was Morena’s wife and it was something of a joke that he should carry her name about with him wherever he went. He had his head in the bonnet, tinkering with the petrol pump, and as he heard the shuffle of my feet in the sand, he looked up, lifted his head and slammed the bonnet down.
‘Trouble?’ I asked.
Morena shook his head, his face expressionless. ‘No,’ he said shortly. ‘Just making sure we don’t get any. That’s all.’
I flicked the message in my hand. ‘Visitors,’ I said. ‘We’re expecting visitors.’
A flicker of concern crossed Morena’s face. ‘Jerry?’ he asked.
I shook my head. ‘No. Our lot.’
He raised his eyes. ‘When?’ he asked.
‘He’s nearly here.’
‘Is that why we’ve been waiting here?’ he asked, and I nodded.
‘End of the line,’ I said. ‘He’s been passed on from one group to the next. We’re the last.’
‘Must be someone important. Who is it? Churchill?’
The bleeping from the wireless had died away now and it had become quiet again, so quiet we both seemed to hold our breath at the silence. The shadows were lengthening beyond the dunes as the sun sank lower, and the brilliant whites and silvers of midday were taking on a golden glow now; and over the whole wide desert beyond the hollow there was no hint of movement.
Morena made an awkward, half-embarrassed gesture towards it. ‘Gets you, doesn’t it?’ he said.
‘I’ll miss it when it’s all over,’ I agreed.
‘Often thought I’d like to come back. Have a look round. Appreciate it without worrying whether a Stuka’ll be up in the sun.’
I nodded. ‘It’ll be nice to sleep at nights,’ I said, ‘without having one ear open all the time for tank tracks.’
After two years we were all beginning to grow weary of the desert, with the sucked-in cheeks and dark rings under the eyes that you got from too many nights of half-sleep or sitting up watching the north for lights or the hum of engines.
Morena offered me a cigarette and we leaned against the jeep, idly studying a map I’d produced – something we’d got into the habit of doing in our spare moments, so that it was firmly imprinted on the mind for the times when we might not have the chance to get it out and look at it. Behind us were the trucks, surrounded by mines that could take care of any intruders. In the hollow, Leach, absurd in Ward’s shorts which he’d ‘borrowed’ and forgotten to give back, was lifting the mortar about as though it were a featherweight, bulky as a brewery horse as he bent over it. Once, for a joke, in the ‘Build’ column of his identity form I’d written ‘Colossal’ – a touch of humour authority had never appreciated, and which had been promptly changed to ‘Large’. He was slow and awkward, with stiff, humourless jokes that nobody laughed at, which could change in a moment to surly ill temper.
Houston, his bootlaces trailing, handed him a cup of tea – a ragbag sparrow of a soldier whose socks always needed darning or whose shirt was always torn, a dry little man with a sharp humour who was completely unaware of his sloppiness.
It was always Houston who was first out of the lorry and filling the two halves of the old petrol-tin stove we carried – one half containing the sand on to which he poured petrol, the other half the water for the tea. Always it seemed to be Houston’s job to provide the tea, and, though he regularly lost his equipment and even other people’s, the one thing he never lost track of was the tea. He was a thin, slightly built little man with a big nose that stuck out from under the Arab head-dress he wore.
‘Have a glass of aphrodisiac,’ he said as he passed over the mug. ‘Vintage,’ forty-two. Chilled, but not iced.’
Leach stared at him, uncomprehending, his mind heaving over slowly.
‘You being funny?’ he asked.
‘For Christ’s sake, yes!’ Houston said waspishly, edgy with waiting. ‘But don’t strain your brain, mate, I’ll write it down and you can get out your Child’s Guide To Funny Bits and look it up.’
‘One of these days I’ll flatten you,’ Leach growled, but Houston merely grinned and skipped away, conscious of his own superiority in spite of Leach’s strength.
I watched them moving around among the other men going about their business, and I was still staring at them when I saw the sentry we’d posted suddenly retreat from the lip of the dune above and come down towards us, his feet kicking up puffs of sand as he scrambled down to the hollow. Immediately everyone stopped what he was doing and hands began to reach out towards weapons.
The sentry stopped in front of me, cocking a thumb towards the east. ‘Jeep, it looks like,’ he said shortly, and I turned and followed him up the slope.
As I went, I saw Ward climb into the truck behind the Bren and move the cocking handle, and Houston bending quickly to lace up his boots. Morena moved among the others, not speaking, simply indicating things with little flicks of his fingers. Everyone knew what he meant. They’d all done everything before. Houston stood ready to kick sand over the fire, and Leach bent over the mortar, his heavy face set, ready to grab it up and run with it if it were needed. The wireless operator looked up as Nimmo tapped his shoulder, and kept his eyes on me, waiting for any signal that might spell danger and the need to send out an urgent message to the north.
But the dust-cloud that the sentry had seen was a jeep and I could see the Pay Corps sign on it through my binoculars. The man driving it was a captain with the sort of guardee moustache all officers in the desert liked to cultivate in those days. There was an Arab wearing khaki trousers and an Arab head-dress and cloak in the front of the vehicle with him, and in the rear two Military Policemen.
I gave the washout sign to Morena and he turned and gestured with the flat of his hand. Leach’s straining muscles relaxed and Houston bent and poured the dregs of the tea into his mug. Nimmo lit a cigarette and the wireless operator’s tense expression vanished as he picked up his paper-backed book again and started thumbing through it.
The Pay Corps captain was a Welshman with a high voice, and I sent out Nimmo to guide him through the mines. There were a few jeers at the Redcaps because all soldiers jeer at Military Police on principle, and the men with me had been in the desert too long to have much love for anybody but their own friends.
‘Oh, Mother, look!’ Houston indicated the smart uniforms. ‘Soldiers! Real ones! Is it right, mate,’ he asked one of the Redcaps, ‘that you lot take a bath once a month whether you need it or not?’
There was a guffaw, and one of the Redcaps, a young sergeant who looked as though he’d just left school, blushed and made an embarrassed hostile gesture.
‘You want to watch out, chum,’ he said. ‘I know you. I’ve seen you before, back at base.’
‘Not me,’ Houston said innocently. ‘I don’t know you from a bar of soap.’
The moustached captain was staring round him with narrowed eyes, obviously disapproving of the banter, frowning at the dusty men in the hollow, all of them bleached to the colour of the fine sand.
‘Christ, it’s like a bloody fortress in here,’ he said.
‘We need a lot of guns,’ Nimmo said coolly, his eyes glowing with the instinctive dislike of the front-line soldier for the base operator. ‘We do a lot of fighting.’
The captain stared at him for a second as though he weren’t in the habit of talking casually to corporals, then he turned to me.
‘They told me I’d find you here,’ he said. ‘They said you’d see me before I saw you.’ He glanced at Nimmo. ‘You did,’ he added. ‘It’s a good job we weren’t Jerries.’
‘It’s a knack,’ Nimmo said insolently. ‘You learn it when you live out here all the time.’
The captain checked his map references with me and gestured towards the south.
‘How long to Qahait?’ he asked.
‘Best part of a day,’ I said.
‘Christ, as much as that?’
‘Straight on and through the Depression. It’s a village at the other end to the south. Bit of a dump, but you’ll find it all right. The road leads straight through to it.’
The captain grinned. ‘Sheikh Ghad’s going to be glad to see me,’ he said. ‘I’ve got their pay. In coin.’
‘In coin?’
‘Pound notes wouldn’t be much good to Sheikh Ghad, would they? It’s in sovereigns. Ten thousand of ’em, each worth three quid a time – silver dollars, napoleons and maria theresas, to say nothing of a bloody great bagful of diamonds.’
I saw Nimmo’s eyes flicker, glowing quickly and full of evil, then he caught the captain’s stare on him and turned away and lit a cigarette.
‘Nice and portable,’ the captain went on. ‘And legal tender anywhere. Ghad’s promised a lot more men later, so there had to be plenty of it. Fraser fixed it. You’ve met Fraser?’
I nodded. Yes, I’d met Fraser, a spare-looking New Zealander who’d been an archaeologist like Lawrence and had spent all the war so far doing intelligence work.
‘There’s enough to buy all the Arabs in Libya and Cyrenaica,’ the Pay Corps captain went on. ‘They drove a hard bargain. I just hope it does some good. Rumour has it that Ghad’ll just bolt for the south as soon as he’s got it. They’re saying in Cairo that Fraser’s pulled a boner this time and picked a wrong ’un. Still’ – he shrugged – ‘that’s not my affair. My job’s just to see that we deliver it intact to him.’
He patted the iron box in the back of the jeep between the MPs.
‘Glad to get rid of it,’ he said. ‘Bit of a responsibility. That’s why we’re travelling light. So nobody’ll notice us. Hope to meet Ghad tomorrow.’
‘Hope you’re lucky,’ I said.
‘Why shouldn’t I be?’
I jerked my head towards the north. ‘That lot,’ I said. ‘The chances are it’ll move down here before long.’
The Welsh captain grinned. ‘Don’t let that worry you,’ he said. ‘They’re moving west. They say in Cairo that this time it’s for keeps.’
‘I hope they’re right.’
‘Don’t you think they are?’
‘Doesn’t feel right. We shouldn’t be here.’
He slapped me on the shoulder. ‘You’ve got the heebie-jeebies, son,’ he said. ‘Been out in the desert too long.’
I didn’t reply. I had my own way of feeling things, just as the men around me had, and it came as no surprise to hear that the frailer flowers in Cairo felt differently.
The Welshman didn’t stay long, just long enough to share some of the greasy bully beef and tepid peaches we lived on, just long enough for the Military Policemen to have their legs pulled unmercifully by the hardened set of villains round the fire, then they climbed back into the jeep, watched by the half-circle of dusty, sun-bleached men.
‘Qalam, here we come,’ the Welshman said, with a forced attempt at good humour.
His smile wasn’t reflected in the bearded faces around him.
‘Hope you enjoy it,’ Houston muttered. ‘Send a signal, operator. Here come the soldiers, weary and footsore from doing nothing by numbers.’
The captain heard him and his face went taut, but he had realised by now that he wasn’t talking to base soldiers and, embarrassed by the silence after Houston’s remark, he made a valiant effort to be one of them, going on with dogged cheerfulness that was so artificial it was painful.
‘They reckon the Lost City’s down in the Depression somewhere,’ he said.
‘Which lost city?’ I asked.
‘You know – the one they always talk about. People have seen it. But only people who were lost themselves. They were always coming back to look for it but they never found it.’
‘How’d they know it was lost, then?’ Nimmo asked disconcertingly.
The captain frowned, but went on gamely. ‘They say it’s got white walls and a door shaped like a bird. They say it’s full of sleeping people.’
Nobody showed any enthusiasm for the story and, his voice trailing away lamely, he let in the clutch hurriedly and set off through the mines, guided by Nimmo.
‘He’s got it wrong,’ Houston said in a solemn voice, staring after them. ‘He’s thinking of Sleeping Beauty.’
We stood on top of the dune watching the jeep move away, then, as the Welshman waved and began to accelerate, Nimmo turned and came back.
‘Hope they enjoy the trip,’ he said.
Nobody moved for a long time, all eyes watching the disappearing jeep as though it were the last frail link with civilisation. Nimmo lit a cigarette with that slow deliberate manner of his, his eyes squinting towards the west and the disappearing cloud of dust. Houston, his face shaded by the linen folds of the head-dress he wore, sipped a mug of cold tea. Leach stood like a great rock between them, his craggy face expressionless, two great hands like shovels hanging down by his sides.
The jeep had been gone some time when we heard the Messerschmitts go over. We saw them first high in the brassy blue of the sky like tiny silver fishes, then the glint of the sun on them as they banked and came down.
‘They’ve seen something,’ Nimmo said in a flat unhurried voice, staring upwards, the sun glinting on the red-gold of his hair.
Nobody said anything. We’d taken all the precautions of camouflage, even to tying clumps of scrub to the vehicles and smearing the windscreens with oil and scattering dust across them to stop them reflecting the sun, and nobody moved. Nobody ever moved until we were certain.
Then we saw the Messerschmitts were going overhead, slightly towards the south, towards some point beyond us, and we all drew breath again as they disappeared beyond the curve of the ground.
Morena’s face was hard, a set of square, flat planes in the sunshine.
‘What are they after?’ he asked, in that unemotional stolid way he had.
‘Looking for the ice-cream man,’ Houston said. ‘They heard his bell.’
Leach stared at him, his eyes puzzled, and he started to say something. But then he changed his mind and stared up with the others at the disappearing aircraft.
‘Haven’t seen Messerschmitts prowling about like that down here for some time,’ Nimmo commented. ‘Something’s in the wind.’
‘Probably after some soft-skinned stuff down there,’ I said. ‘We’ve probably been using Qahait as a dump. Perhaps they’ve seen ’em. Perhaps they’ve seen Sheikh Ghad.’
The Messerschmitts were out of sight when we heard the faint rattle of guns and the thump-thump-thump of bombs and felt the echo of the blast in the air, as though someone kept slamming a door.
‘Somebody’s bought it,’ Morena grunted.
That evening we got the expected messages from the north. At first they were only rumours, springing from the wireless operator, with his secret knowledge of the private means of wireless operators all the world over, of sending messages that headquarters never learned of. Somebody had made the mistake of splitting up the armour, it seemed, so that the superior numbers of the British had been cancelled out, and it had been found that the fifty- and seventy-five-millimetre guns of the Germans had a greater range, and suddenly, instead of being on the defensive, Rommel was attacking and the retreat was on.
‘Oh, well,’ Houston said, with the philosophical disgust of the private for the staff. ‘That’ll be another general they’ll have to pull the plug on. Bang goes my leave and all that beer and skittles and all those white silken bodies on black silken sheets I was dreaming of dallying with.’
Sollum was choked with vehicles, we heard, as the frightened men headed hot-foot for Egypt. The German attack on the British line had cut off 150 Brigade ‘box’ and the German transports were streaming through the gaps to replenish their tanks, and what Houston called ‘The Gazala Gallop’ was in full swing. Tobruk was cut off again and there was black smoke billowing from the blazing oil tanks and spreading like a pall across the sky. The Eighth Army was pulling back again.
He’d
‘There wasn’t any,’ he said. ‘It had gone.’
‘What about the till? Didn’t you bring the till?’
‘There wasn’t any till.’
‘Christ, it filled the back of the jeep!’
‘Well, it had gone. Ask anybody.’
I saw Houston nodding, and Leach and Ward just behind solemnly agreeing, their faces blank. Morena stood to one side, listening, his face expressionless.
‘Must have been those black bastards from Qahait,’ Nimmo went on. ‘They must have moved up the Depression and they must have got there before we did.’
‘Did you see ’em?’
‘Not a sign.’
I glanced towards the north. Up there the desert was a scrap-heap of burned-out wreckage and there was a steady stream of traffic flowing back under a hanging dust-haze towards Egypt. The Naafis were going up in orange flowers of flame and the field cashiers and the padres and the correspondents and all those other assorted hangers-on who could please themselves when to leave had long since vanished. The tents were coming down and the desert was littered with drifting scraps of torn and charred paper; and the thin-skinned vehicles were moving back beyond the check-point, hiss-hissing as they passed, lurching and rolling, gleaming ghostly in the moonlight as the endless procession went on day and night, dim faces staring ahead; while the Grants drew off the road, ready to cover the retreat with those big guns of theirs that would only traverse fifteen degrees so that they had to travel in reverse at five miles an hour to get them to bear at all – all there was between Rommel’s Mark IVs and Cairo.
‘You were a bloody long time,’ I said. I was worried sick now and growing more and more nervous, but Nimmo only shrugged.
‘We buried them,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t easy. It was rock. Here!’ He held out a fistful of identification discs. ‘I searched around a bit in case we found the box lying about. Even up the Depression, in case some of those black bastards were still around. We didn’t find the box, but we found some pictures. In a cave.’
I looked up angrily. ‘You weren’t looking for bloody pictures,’ I said sharply, still with one eye over my shoulder looking for the Mark IVs. I’d been there too long and I was anxious to get back to the safety of our own lines.
Nimmo grinned at me, untroubled by my anger. ‘Take it easy,’ he advised. ‘We found a place where the bombs had disturbed the rocks. There were a lot of old drawings in there. We might have made an archaeological discovery of some sort. I took some bearings just for safety, then we piled the rocks back and shovelled a lot of sand over ’em. I thought somebody might like to know.’
I stared at him for a long time. Not far away the desert was being pulverised to dust under the thousands of moving wheels and the tramp of thousands of boots, until it was deep and floury and coated the hair and the clothes and caked in crusts on the lips of exhausted men. All the way back to Alex there were bodies lying under blankets and the smell of death and wounds, and the bewildered look of driven animals was on the faces of all the living as they struggled back through the wreckage of an army to where they could form some sort of defence and make a stand. The very thought of it made me jumpy.
My own little party had packed up everything long since and there was nothing left in the hollow now except the empty tins and the ashes of the fire and the churned-up sand. But there was a long way to go and half of Rommel’s army was between us and safety.
I half turned, gesturing wearily. Somehow, I felt I hadn’t the stomach for it.
‘Let’s make tracks,’ I said. ‘We’re not playing kiss-in-the-ring. We should have gone three days ago.’
Soon afterwards the group began to split up. Bummer Ward was killed in the push from Alamein and Gester’s jeep went up on a mine near the Mareth Line. Smollett lost a leg and Morris died of wounds, then Morena was caught by shrapnel in Italy and we lost him, too, for a while, and when he returned both he and Nimmo were posted off to different companies to nurse new officers just out from England, just as they’d nursed me, while I was promoted and landed with a whole batch of newcomers who were still wet behind the ears and had to be taught everything I’d ever learned from Morena.
By that time, of course, everyone knew the invasion was near and, in addition to all the working-up we had to do as a group, we all had other things on our minds. Those of us who were left were ordered back to England for the second front and, with the Germans in retreat everywhere, from then on the only thing that filled my brain was the thought of peace. There were a whole lot of new things to learn about fighting in Europe and the only thing that seriously concerned me just then was learning them quickly so that I might have a chance of being alive to see the lights go on again. I wasn’t sure by this time that I was glad to leave the desert. I don’t think anyone was. In spite of all the cursing and the complaints, we’d grown used to it and understood it – but there was still a long hard road to travel before we’d finished and by this time I was determined that I was going to be there when we reached the end of it.
It was really only when I’d lost touch with them all that I remembered the pictures Nimmo claimed to have found. We were pushing up to Germany by then, through acres of ruined fields and charred houses and splintered forests, with the muddy ground carved up by tank tracks and trampled by the boots of thousands of marching men. It was bitterly cold, with the frost-rime on every hedgerow, and all the grassland seemed to be flooded and every puddle was starred by new ice, and I was trying to keep warm over a fire that some Americans had started in a broken-down barn.
It was as I thought longingly of the warmth of Africa that I remembered the Qalam Depression and the long wait there, and the boob I’d made over the Paymaster, and then, suddenly I began to think of the pictures Nimmo had found and wondered if anything had ever been done about them.
I was still thinking about them, wondering if they’d been lost again, when someone came to tell me the Colonel was looking for me and that there was a new job to do, and I promptly pushed Nimmo and his pictures to the back of my mind. After all, I decided as I thrust between the steaming, half-frozen men, it was all over and done with now. Whatever had or had not been done, there was no reason to worry my head about them. I’d never hear of them again.
At least, that was what I thought.
But I was wrong. Dead wrong.
