by Max Hennessy
They were sitting at the side of the road listening to the engineer as they ate their rations when the Life Guardsman from Lindley’s staff appeared, asking for Boumphrey. As Boumphrey rose, he produced a map. ‘They tell me you know this area round here,’ he said.
‘I know all the areas round here,’ Boumphrey admitted.
‘Well, look,’ the map was flattened out on the bonnet of Boumphrey’s car, ‘there are floods to the north of where we are now, running alongside the Mandadad-Musol road and railway line. Is there any high ground along there which won’t be flooded?’
‘It might be possible close to the road.’
‘You willing to take your chaps and try to get through to the northern column? They reached the railway line and turned south but when they reached Taji the stupid clots just sat down. The Brig wants them to pull their finger out and get moving. Can you do it?’
The Life Guardsman looked at Jenno. ‘He says you’re to go, too, with the armoured cars, in case anybody tries to stop you. Somebody’s got to make it. If the clots had got away earlier and travelled all day without a halt they could have driven into Mandadad without meeting any opposition. The embassy got through to us and told us there was nothing on that side df the capital. Unfortunately, they’ve now found out and rushed troops up there. Your job’s to stir Craddock into action. Got it?’
‘Got it,’ Jenno said with some satisfaction.
12
To their surprise, they found the water wasn’t as deep as they’d expected because the flooding had been halted by local chiefs and headmen anxious to preserve their crops, and they were able to skirt it and push northwards parallel to the road, but just far enough away from it to avoid the attention of the Irazhi gunners deployed along its verges.
The situation was no longer as reassuring as it had been. The surprise had been lost and at any moment the Irazhi leaders would discover they were being attacked by about one-tenth of the numbers they could muster themselves. In addition, German aircraft were increasing daily and the radio brought news of constant bombing at Kubaiyah. It only required a couple of efficient bomber squadrons and a few fighters to stop the advance dead in its tracks.
They found Craddock in a headquarters he had set up in a private house alongside the road. He was in a bad temper and it soon became clear why. He had heard of Boumphrey’s charge at Dhubban and was resentful of the fact that it had succeeded while his own at Hatbah had failed. He clearly thought they’d been attached to his column and made it clear that he was not going to allow anything of the same sort to happen twice.
‘You’re under my orders here,’ he announced. ‘So don’t let anyone get any idea of acting independently.’
Jenno let him run on, cynically enjoying his comments before allowing Boumphrey to pass on Lindley’s message.
Craddock frowned as he heard them out. ‘Are they suggesting I’m moving too slowly?’ he snapped. ‘They should come up here and try for themselves. I can’t move off the road because of the floods.’ He looked at his map, then glanced up. ‘How the devil did you get here, anyway? Surely to God you never went all the way back to Kubaiyah and then across the desert.’
‘We came through the edge of the floods,’ Jenno said bluntly. ‘Boumphrey found a way.’
Craddock glared. ‘I don’t believe it,’ he snapped.
Jenno shrugged. ‘Better ask someone,’ he suggested. Craddock muttered something to himself then he straightened up. ‘The Irazhis knew I was coming. They sent their navy up here, too. The river’s only half a mile away to the east and their ships are armed with 3.7s. They can hit my people every time we stick our noses out. When do they want me to start?’
‘At once. They want you to occupy the Irazhi reserves up here so they can get in by the south.’
Craddock’s face was red with indignation. ‘They just want to be first in,’ he said. ‘That’s all. Very well. I’ll set something up. What about you people?’
‘Can’t see much point in heading back,’ Jenno said. ‘By the time we arrive, they’ll be pushing the last bit of the way in. They’re at the end of the tram track. They could almost do the job on the public service. We might as well stay with you.’ Craddock looked bitter. ‘We have to do something about the Irazhi navy’s 3.7s first,’ he said.
‘Have you any guns?’ Jenno asked.
‘I have a troop of truck-towed 25-pounders.’
‘If we can borrow one, I think we can get rid of those 3.7s.’
‘With one gun?’
Jenno smiled. ‘Two would be better.’
* * *
Jenno and Boumphrey spent the night discussing their plans with the captain in command of the guns. They had half-expected the move to start immediately, but Craddock was behaving like an old man afraid of making mistakes, afraid of doing something which would detract further from the reputation he had built up. But the years between had taken their toll. He was an unimaginative man and all he could think of was to do again what he’d done in 1918 with Allenby.
‘The bugger’s never going to move unless he’s nudged,’ Jenno decided.
‘If you can do what you claim you can do,’ the gunner captain pointed out, ‘we don’t need him. Can you?’
Jenno smiled. ‘Ten armoured cars can keep any amount of people busy,’ he said.
* * *
The armoured cars led off, with Jenno in front, moving warily on to the open ground towards the river. The Rolls-Royce engines barely made a sound. As the first glimmer of light appeared, they halted and the two 25-pounders took up positions fifty yards apart. They were utterly devoid of cover but the Irazhis had not thrown out a picket and the guns and armoured cars were still obscured by the darkness. Not far away they could see the angular shapes of the Irazhi naval vessels. They were old-fashioned paddle-steamers and their great wheels were silhouetted against the faint lightening of the sky in the east. Small splinters of yellow showed where portholes were open, and one of them, obviously the flagship, was anchored against the bank, its hull protected by the bund.
‘You open the bowling,’ Jenno said to the gunner officer. ‘You ought to be able to finish off the one against the bank with your first couple of shells. As soon as the crew appear on deck, we go into action. Just give us three or four minutes to get into position and try not to hit us.’
Their engines silent, the armoured cars moved to within machine gun range of the river and drew up in a long line. Flight Sergeant Madoc was humming softly to himself and Jenno was nervously fishing for a cigarette when the first of the guns came to life with an iron-throated bark.
‘Here we go!’
The range was short. The shell struck the bow of the flagship alongside the bank and they saw splinters fly into the air from the wooden stanchions that had been rigged to hold an awning. As flames began to lick along the woodwork, there were shouts and men began to appear. At once, Jenno set his car in motion. Madoc’s followed him and the others swept forward one after the other until all ten cars were in motion. Hurtling along parallel to the river, they saw their tracer bouncing off the burning vessel’s deckhouse and men running along the deck towards the silhouetted shape of a gun on the foredeck falling in a heap. As they disappeared, the other 25-pounder fired and the shell burst against the bridge.
‘Lower,’ Jenno muttered. ‘Lower.’
All the cars were in motion now, moving along the line of paddle-steamers, their guns preventing the crews from reaching their weapons, just as they had against the machine gunners on the escarpment at Kubaiyah, keeping heads down, never remaining still for a second. The second shell from the first gun tore a hole in the side of the flagship and the third hit the engine room so that an enormous jet of smoke and soot shot from the funnel and came down in a shower. A pipe began to screech as steam escaped and more men appeared on deck; but Madoc’s car was racing back now, and they dived out of sight again at once. As the car passed, they reappeared, but this time they were making not for the gun on the foredeck
but for the gangplank and were fighting to get ashore – it dawned on Jenno that the vessel was beginning to list.
The guns were banging away now at the steamers in the river. One of them was already on fire near the bridge, and men could be seen taking to the boats. Then they began to range at will over the remainder, as the armoured cars, making enough dust for a squadron of tanks, cavorted effortlessly along the bank.
* * *
Waiting with his dog near the Mounted Legion, Boumphrey saw the first flashes and heard the crack of the guns and the rattle of machine gun fire. Almost immediately, firing started in front and he saw tracer bullets whipping overhead. Rifle fire stuttered and a gun banged, the shell screaming past to explode somewhere behind them.
‘Come on, come on!’ He turned to look at Craddock standing near his staff car, peering anxiously towards the river where the first rays of sun were beginning to push a golden glow into the sky. ‘Now!’
But Craddock seemed hesitant. His second in command, waiting near Boumphrey, turned his head. ‘For God’s sake!’ he said.
Suddenly, unexpectedly, one of the lorries caught fire and Boumphrey was just about to climb into his car to urge Craddock into action when something whirled him round, throwing him to the ground. Sergeant Major Ghadbhbhan was by his side in an instant.
Boumphrey lay for a moment, dazed, the dog anxiously licking his face. He felt as if someone had delivered a tremendous kick up his backside but he decided that at least, since he was thinking, he couldn’t be dead. He put his hand to his rear and it came away covered with blood.
‘Good Lor’,’ he said. ‘I think I’ve been shot up the bum!’
When he was hoisted up, he found he could stand and he held on to the side of the car, trembling a little with shock, while his blood-drenched trousers were cut away.
‘I don’t think it’s serious, sir,’ Ghadbhbhan said portentously. ‘It seems to be only a flesh wound.’
‘Where?’
Ghadbhbhan’s handsome actor’s face lifted and his white teeth flashed in a smile. ‘Fortunately, where there is most flesh, sir. I don’t think you will miss the little that has gone.’
Still holding on to the side of the car and craning his head round in an effort to see, Boumphrey became aware of engines roaring to life. Craddock had climbed into his car and was waving his arm. As the car moved forward, it was followed by the lorries carrying his cavalrymen. The Mounted Legion vehicles roared to life and Boumphrey swung in alarm on Ghadbhbhan.
‘Ghadbhbhan,’ he said painfully. ‘This is going to go wrong! He’s left it too late! Get the boys on foot and well dispersed.’
As Craddock’s car swept past, Boumphrey stared. What should have been a steady advance on foot was being turned into a cavalry charge.
‘Get me in the car,’ he told his driver.
He made it to the front seat, his face twisted with pain, and grabbed the top of the windscreen.
‘Take it slowly,’ he said. ‘Until I get the hang of it. I don’t want to sit down suddenly.’
As they moved to the smoke ahead, they saw flames and realized the advance had already come to a standstill. Ghadbhbhan appeared, blood on his trousers.
‘It’s been stopped, sir,’ he announced.
Craddock’s lorries were already trying to retire and Boumphrey noticed that they were empty and the cavalrymen were lying on their faces behind any scrap of cover they could find. For a moment, Craddock, on foot, his car burning, tried to urge them on, upright in the middle of the firing, then Boumphrey saw his hand jerk and the riding crop he was carrying flung away in a spatter of blood. Slowly he sagged to his knees and, just as slowly, subsided until he lay on his face.
‘Oh, you fool,’ Boumphrey said softly. ‘You poor bloody old fool!’
13
When Jenno arrived, Boumphrey was face-down in the rear seat of his car, his feet in the air, his backside swathed in bandages, the dog sitting by his head, industriously licking his face.
Jenno was in a rage that Craddock’s stupidity should have stopped them in their tracks just when they had overcome the opposition from the Irazhi Navy.
‘After all we did,’ he snarled, ‘to get nobbled because of a stupid old fart trying to pull off a double!’
But he also had news from the British embassy, picked up on his radio, that the German and Italian ministers and Ghaffer and all his pals – even the Grand Mufti – had bolted for Persia, and by the time Boumphrey was moved to an ambulance, the northern arm of the attack was roaring down the road between the now silent Irazhi guns. They passed the wrecked Lafwaiyah Club at a rush – hardly noticing the charred furniture and fittings stacked in the garden, the smouldering buildings and broken windows – and when they came to the tram track they simply commandeered the trams and continued to head southwards, bells clanging, Bedou Legionnaires and British soldiers clinging to the sides and yelling with delight.
Great clouds of dust hung over the column and Irazhi soldiers tramping to the rear eyed them sullenly. A little man with glasses appeared in front of Jenno but no one took any notice of him and he was moving from truck to truck pleading for someone to listen to him. It was only later that Jenno learned he was trying to surrender the city.
As they reached the city centre, they ran into the Southern column and from then on they moved together. A gang of young hooligans in plus-four Ruftwah uniforms threw a brick into a truckful of Gurkhas, but the Gurkhas promptly threw it back and jumped out, kukris in their hands, to wipe up the opposition, which immediately disappeared into the back streets. In some parts of the city, a riot was developing. It had started round a liquorice factory, and a bazaar had been stripped and shop owners were barricading themselves in.
Because he knew the way, Jenno was the first to reach the embassy. As he arrived, he saw people in the tiled courtyard, a fountain playing behind them. It looked a little like a country house party, especially when the ambassador, in white drill suit and topee, stepped forward to shake his hand.
It hadn’t been too bad, he said. They had been surrounded but the water and electricity had never been cut off and enterprising traders had sold sweets, tobacco, cosmetics and even out-of-date issues of the London Evening News at the gate.
In no time the place was full of soldiers seeking people they knew, and Jenno found himself facing Christine Craddock.
‘So you made it,’ she said.
‘I made it,’ he agreed.
‘What about my idiot of a husband? After stirring up trouble here he disappeared into the bloody desert. What happened to him?’
‘He was badly wounded early this morning.’
Her face remained expressionless and Jenno half-expected her to produce some sneer. But she didn’t.
‘I’ll get my things,’ she said, turning away. ‘I suppose I’d better go to him. He’ll need me.’
* * *
Now that it was over, the clearing up started and the injured were hurried to hospital at Kubaiyah. Boumphrey found himself in bed, the roof above him still pitted with holes from shrapnel, bomb splinters and machine gun bullets, but outside now there was no sound more violent than the growl of lorries and ambulances, and the trumpeting of the band of Verity’s Assyrian levies playing a triumphant tune that was a mixture of braying Western music and ancient Arab notes.
By this time, men of the Indian Division, flown up from the south, were appearing everywhere, complete with tents, folding baths, polo sticks and fishing rods, as if they were prepared for a two-year campaign and didn’t intend to miss any of their usual comforts. To their amazement they found that the Irazhis had three-inch mortars which they did not have, and Bren guns with the Skoda mark still on them, while the British were armed with Hotchkiss guns used in the Boer War forty years before.
They had found aeroplanes grounded on Irazhi fields for lack of spare parts, their swastikas painted over in Irazhi colours, their German or Italian crews vanished northward to Turkey on the Taurus Express. Jenno’s cars ha
d even rounded up German and Italian fitters, a few officers and a whole host of German ‘technicians’, still in sports coats and flannels and grimly clutching cameras in the vain belief that their identity was still secret.
But Boumphrey was under no delusions. Despite what the BBC was saying, they’d been very lucky. The timing of Ghaffer’s rising had been wrong and the Germans had procrastinated when procrastination was foolish. But even so, the rout of an organized enemy by a makeshift air force of unpractised crews in training machines had been a pretty good effort. They had saved Kubaiyah, rescued the relief column, and captured Mandadad with less than two thousand men against twenty thousand.
Now it was just a case of getting the place in running order again. The Engineers had taken over the one surviving paddle-steamer of the Irazhi navy as an officers’ mess and the only thing that marred the sweet feeling of success was the knowledge that in Crete the Germans seemed to be winning, though the British had invaded Syria to make sure that it would never again be used as a base for Nazi activities.
Boumphrey sighed. He couldn’t stand up for long and when he grew tired he had to return to the hospital so he could lie on his face to recover. The man who had preceded him in command of the Audax flight and suffered the same indignity, gave him tips on how to handle it.
A few gongs were said to be on the way and Boumphrey had made sure that Darling would get an immediate award. He had disappeared now to the Middle East but not before calling to see Boumphrey, walking with his elbows out so that nobody could miss the brand-new chevrons on his sleeves.
