by Max Hennessy
For a month they moved about the desert between Sidi Barrani and Mersa Matruh. The Italians had been the first to push forward in 1940, making a hesitant thrust into Egypt, which had been wiped away before the year was ended as Wavell’s army flung them back all the way to Beda Fomm on the bulge of Cyrenaica. Unfortunately, while they’d still been crowing at their success, there’d been a shout for help from Greece and, with half the crack units of the Desert Army crossing to the mainland of Europe, while nobody was looking a lot of uncomfortably aggressive Germans had appeared in Africa and in no time at all had slammed the British back again so that, after a little to-ing and fro-ing, the line had finally settled down just west of the Egyptian border. It was now considered to be the British turn again.
At the end of May Clegg was asked to put on a few performances at Zuq, which was just beyond the Egyptian frontier. They’d all been to Zuq at one time or another. It was a picturesque coastal settlement that had been part of Mussolini’s scheme for the colonization of Libya, one of those strange bastard towns on the coast which was neither Arab nor Italian, but a mixture of both. To create jobs, under the Ente Colonizazzione Libia, put in force by the Italian government after they had acquired the territory from the Turks after the war of 1911, there were smallholdings providing vegetables and fruit for the Italian mainland, and a furniture factory where Arab craftsmen created excellent North African furniture to grace the homes of party officials in Rome, and a cheaper range that was not so excellent to fill the small box-like houses the government had provided for the colonists.
There was a mosque among the palms and spreading bougainvillaea, a bombed-out white church and a few shops, a governor’s residence, a hospital and, in the centre of the town, an amphitheatre dating back to the empire of Hadrian. It was only small and at some time in the past it had been partly destroyed by an earthquake, but there were still tiers of stone terraces and a lot of chambers filled with drifted sand. Finally, just outside the town there was a fort looking like something out of Beau Geste, built years before by the Italians as an observation post but now out of date and used only as a transport base, and, near the harbour, a few corrugated-iron huts and warehouses erected by whichever army happened to have possession of the place in the backwards and forwards sway of the war, or by the few Libyan or Italian civilians who had businesses there.
Clegg agreed at once. Zuq, he felt, was far enough forward for them to be performing to genuine front-line troops but just far enough back for them to be safe from anything but a prowling Messerschmitt.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘We’ll give it a go.’
As it happened, it didn’t work out quite as they expected because before long other people became involved. Among them Colonel Horace Thomas Dampier, MC and Bar, Inspector of Equipment to the Army in the Middle East.
Chapter 2
Colonel Dampier wasn’t naturally an even-tempered man. He was tall, good-looking, inclined to plumpness as age caught up with him, but upright in bearing in the best military fashion, complete with greying temples and brisk clipped moustache.
For months now, he had been struggling to stop the theft of army stores. In other wars, plundering hadn’t started until you’d beaten the enemy, and it had never been easy anyway, because in those days everyone moved about on foot and you had to carry your loot on your back. Nowadays, nobody bothered to wait until the enemy was in retreat and, since everyone now used lorries, the loot had grown larger and things were a great deal easier. With half Egypt waiting with open arms for anything that was going, people simply stole everything that wasn’t screwed down and flogged it in the Cairo black market.
To Dampier, a magistrate in peacetime and so honest it hurt, people who stole military equipment in wartime were like maggots in cheese. A landowner in his home county of Devon, he had done all the right things, hunting, shooting, fishing and the rest, and to his blunt mind there were only two shades – black and white. He had won his MC in the holocaust that was the first day of the Somme in 1916 and the bar to it in the same area in 1918. By 1939, he had in the very nature of things grown a little pompous, but he was patriotic and brave and, confident the army would welcome him back with open arms, had left his adoring wife and family and offered himself once more, fully expecting to face the enemy at once with teeth bared and eyes ablaze. At fifty-one, however, Dampier was a touch too old for front-line stuff and, to his fury, he was given the humdrum job of running a training camp in the north of England until he finally exploded and demanded to be sent where there was some risk to life and limb. The army obliged by sending him to Cairo, where, if anything, he was safer than in England and you had to look very hard about you to find the war. There was certainly no sign of it in the Gezira Sporting Club or the Continental Roof Garden, though it was occasionally mentioned at the Turf Club.
To his disgust he found himself laying on concerts and film shows for back-area troops, to say nothing of boxing and cricket tournaments and football matches against Egyptian teams. A second furious explosion translated him once more, this time into the head of a team investigating the disappearance of army equipment. In his no-nonsense way, Winston Churchill in London had noticed a vast discrepancy between the stores shown in the manifests of merchant ships aimed at the Middle East and those which the army claimed to have available for use, and had demanded that someone should do something about it. Because everybody else was comfortably established and Dampier was a newcomer – and a nuisance to boot – he found himself with a lorry and a brief to investigate.
At the permanent camps round Tel el Kebir he found the pilfering was amazing. A two-ton charging plant had been removed miraculously on donkeys between dusk and dawn; and a consignment of fifty thousand razor blades destined for the troops had dwindled to twenty-five thousand by the time it reached the army canteens. It didn’t take him long to decide that the Sudanese watchmen recruited for their honesty were in reality the eyes and ears of the gangs.
Without realizing it, the army had picked the right man for the job. Cairo had always been noted for its thieves, prostitutes, pimps and swindlers, and the arrival of a vast army had merely worsened the situation. Caught up in the vast net of conscription, it was inevitable that a few shysters had arrived in the Egyptian capital and it hadn’t taken them long to realize that the army, preoccupied with fighting the war in the desert, had little time to look after its rear end, and almost at once a traffic in spare parts, tyres, food, even arms, had sprung up. Soldiers who fell for Egyptian girls in the cabarets in Emad-el-Din Street overstayed their leave and, provided the girl they followed home hadn’t a large boyfriend waiting round the corner with a knife, became the target for Egyptian wide boys eager to get them into their clutches.
In addition, the War Department employed four hundred thousand Egyptian civilians who had no compunction about robbing it blind. Even the payroll system for hired help invited frauds. And when the vehicles of the Société des Autobus du Nord came to a standstill for lack of tyres, supplies with the War Department mark removed quickly arrived from the army dumps, with steel, chemicals, textiles, cigarettes and food, all of which were up for grabs and leaking in a steady stream from military warehouses into civilian channels.
Since all Egyptian labourers wore flowing robes it was impossible to search them unless you hung them upside down by their ankles, and women employed in the married quarters went home mountainous with the sheets and pillowcases they stuffed under their clothing. Even the men wore cache-sexes beneath their galabiyahs in which they secreted spanners, torch batteries, spark plugs, cap comforters, knives, watches, compasses and anything else that was small enough to fit in easily. Once when Dampier instituted a search at the gate of a maintenance unit the home-going crowd of fellahin collected in a scared gibbering group, and the ground where they had waited was found later to be littered with unexpected jetsam. Trains, whistling to waiting gangs, slowed down to allow bales and boxes to be tossed to the side of the track. Sleeping soldiers woke to find
their tents gone. One bright spark arrested for setting up a totally non-existent scheme for which he drew labourers’ wages had actually received a mention in despatches for his work on it the day before he was picked up. You could buy counterfeit rubber stamps in the back streets of Cairo and in twenty-four hours have a set of forged papers that made everything easy and, because the Egyptian police were slack enough never to check lorries at the gates of the dumps, every crime imaginable involving bribes, stolen property and trafficking in currency was taking place. In many cases even the police were involved.
Dampier managed to get a few people jailed – a corporal caught driving a lorry containing a million cigarettes which no one would admit losing, a man running a mobile laundry that was the cover for the fact that he was pimping, a warrant officer running a repair shop who was equipping private cars, a welfare officer smuggling radio sets to Syria, Naafi managers flogging spirits from their stores. While Dampier regarded looting as stealing, for the most part his anger was only laughed at. Captured Mercedes cars, horses, large consignments of wine, were reputed to be finding their way home for the use of fortuitously placed high-ranking officers, and there was an apocryphal story about a brigadier who, insisting that loot was not something he was interested in, had been hit by the grand piano which had been blown out of the back of his bombed lorry.
Dampier found a major at a base ordnance depot who was selling rifles to Palestinians for use against British troops in Tel Aviv, and even turned up a group of Italian prisoners of war who, unknown to anybody, had set themselves up as a base repair depot on the outskirts of Alexandria. Wearing Arab galabiyahs, they had infiltrated themselves among the local workers who went every day to labour in one of the base stores depots and, with the tools and equipment they managed to steal, had gone into business on their own. Having all at one time worked in England or America, they could speak English, and they finally went so far as to change their galabiyahs for British uniforms, pose as Maltese and employ their own Arab labour. There was, Dampier noted, far less stealing from their base than from others.
Finally, incredible as it seemed, he had discovered that a contractor whom he’d been watching for weeks over missing consignments of steel was a German. Small, dark-haired and swarthy, he had been clerk to a German liaison officer with the Italians and had been captured in Wavell’s advance in 1941. Having escaped, as a means of earning money he had set himself up as a shoe-shine boy and fly-whisk seller. Becoming a waiter, the German had decided it would be more profitable to own a restaurant himself and, when he resolved to enlarge his premises and had met the contractors, had finally realized that, if he wanted to be really in the money, he ought to be a contractor himself. He was running half a dozen rackets when he was picked up by the Military Police for no other reason than that he had one night parked his car outside the flat where he lived with his Egyptian mistress, and it happened to be passed by a Special Investigation Branch officer with a keen sense of smell who had detected the scent of musty hay which meant smuggled hashish.
While the fighting units roosted austerely on sand, and in winter wore drill despite having begged for greatcoats and leather jerkins, the base units helped themselves to the rubber cushions of ambulances to make mattresses, to driving mirrors to hold photographs of their girlfriends, and to batteries to power bedside lights; and cut up tents, tarpaulins and signal cable to make bed springs on stolen rifle racks. As many as thirteen blankets were found to be possessed by some men, while others used them as curtains and tablecloths or, nailed to walls, as makeshift wardrobes to keep best uniforms clean. Despite the shortage of timber, enormous bedsteads had been erected for the comfort of both officers and men, some even with a tier beneath for books and boots and clothing. It was a wonder, Dampier thought, that they didn’t paint the bloody things to match their pyjamas.
‘This war,’ he growled, ‘will not be won on soft beds, tea and buns and moaning for cigarettes. And I intend to see that it isn’t lost.’
He had finally found his niche. He had been successful enough to draw attention to himself and, with Churchill now complaining indignantly that the number of vehicles the Eighth Army claimed to have in the field was nowhere near the number which had been sent out from England and asking what the Eighth Army intended to do about it, Dampier was upped a step in rank, designated Inspector of Equipment to the Eighth Army, and told to find out which units were holding stores and vehicles they were not supposed to have.
By this time the gleam had reappeared in his eye and he was beginning to enjoy himself. He smelled with the eagerness of an old warhorse, if not the enemy, at least his own kind of battle; his unit now consisted of a warrant to hold inspections without warning, a group of clerks and storemen in Cairo, and a couple of expert assistants.
Warrant Officer Patrick Rafferty was an ex-quartermaster and a first-class fitter who could unravel enormous and complicated lists of spares and tools without blinking an eye. Utterly confident in his own ability, he was reputed once to have visited a desert-based cavalry regiment which, as soon as he’d been sighted, had driven all the vehicles they weren’t supposed to have out into the blue. Rafferty had made no comment, done his inspection and gone away, only to return at full speed half an hour later just as the vehicles all returned.
He was a short nutty-faced Irishman, a regular soldier who looked a little like a leprechaun with his thin blue-jowled face, black hair and pale blue eyes. He had a marked Irish accent, a mischievous sense of humour, and, for a man who had reached warrant rank, took an odd delight in seeing senior officers make asses of themselves.
He had a briefcase full of documents, both British and foreign, to which he constantly referred and there was little he didn’t know about the supplies and supply methods of any army – British, French, Italian or German. He knew backwards the G1098, the booklet which set out in detail what arms, equipment, vehicles and stores each unit should hold, reckoned about forty thousand items could be scrapped from it without being noticed, and could spot at once what a quartermaster’s store was holding that it shouldn’t be holding. ‘I was once bet a fiver by an RASC adjutant,’ he said with a smile, ‘that I’d find nothing irregular. At half-time he retired to his room, saying he felt ill.’
In addition, because radio spares – even whole radios – were being flogged to the Egyptians to listen in to Radio Cairo, perhaps even to Radio Rome or Grossdeütsche Rundfunk, Dampier had been allotted a corporal wireless operator from Signals called Clinch who not only checked radio equipment but also drove their Bedford three-tonner. He was a young man with a face as blank as a cowpat but, despite his blond hair, blue eyes and an expression as innocent as a choirboy’s, had a reputation for knowing his way about.
In no time they had recovered a complete consignment of radio valves, turned up a deserter who had acquired thirty thousand gallons of petrol by the simple process of appearing at an army filling station and filling his lorry with fuel which he then promptly sold in the Cairo black market before going back for more, and discovered that, at a time when army tyres were fetching ninety pounds apiece, civilians could get new ones merely by leaving their cars in a certain square in Cairo with a sum of money hidden under the dashboard.
‘Given a chance,’ Dampier pointed out, ‘they’d steal an anvil.’
Rafferty smiled. ‘One did,’ he said. ‘I caught him staggering home bow-legged with it strapped round his waist and hanging between his knees.’
When they were ordered into the desert, where the forward troops were complaining that when they sent a vehicle back for repair it never returned, it was a challenge that pleased Dampier. In his own small way, he felt that at last he was contributing to the winning of the war, if only by putting behind bars a few of the people who seemed intent on losing it. But he wasn’t deluded.
‘I suppose,’ he said cynically, ‘the truth is that somebody decided we were getting too close to his own pet little racket and were best out of the way.’
Chapter
3
Because they were going to be away from the bright lights for a while, the Desert Ratbags each in his own way made a point of having a good night-out before setting off for Zuq. Jones the Song, his heart aching for the Land of his Fathers, looked up another Welshman from Swansea, his home town, and got drunk singing Welsh songs. Caccia, who was a great one for the girls, especially in such a randy-making climate, headed for a dance hall he knew. Clegg and Morton ate at an Egyptian night club, where Clegg tried to set fire to the muslin drapes of the belly dancer. He was always inclined to be aggressively mischievous when he’d had one or two.
The following morning they drove out of the city past the single-decker trams hooked together like trains, the gharries, the crowding fellahin, the businessmen in tarbooshes, the beggars asleep in the gutters, the befezzed policemen with whips, and the inane Arab music from the cafés where the customers crouched over their hookahs and dominoes. At the level crossing outside the city the usual hold-up was taking place. Clad in stolen army boots, a discarded British topee worn backwards, several days’ growth of beard, and two frilly women’s dresses circa 1905 draped over plus-fours, the gatekeeper seemed to be enjoying the uproar.
