by Max Hennessy
‘They said they was comin’ back to load everythin’ up,’ Clutterbuck said gloomily.
Dampier gave him an icy look. ‘I don’t think they’ll make it,’ he said. ‘So, for the moment, we’ll have you in the car. And don’t try to bolt because we’re armed. We’ll load the lorries with the stores and the tents, Mr Rafferty. Micklethwaite can drive my car, you and I will drive the fifteen-hundredweights and Corporal Clinch the Bedford.’
Micklethwaite looked surprised but he realized he was seeing a bit of real army life which would stand him in good stead when he came to write the book he’d been planning ever since his arrival in the Middle East. ‘Right,’ he said briskly.
Clutterbuck was looking alarmed. ‘’Ow about Dow an’ Raye?’
‘When they return,’ Dampier said, ‘—if they return – they’ll find their little nest deserted and bolt straight back east where, by that time, thanks to the miracle of radio, the Military Police will be looking for them. I don’t see any alternative, do you? They certainly won’t wander far. It’s a big desert and it’s very hot and thirsty.’
Chapter 4
Continuing west into a blaze of orange, Dampier’s party were guided by white tapes through a large minefield to the east of Sofi. As they moved on, they left the cinder-coloured plains behind them and struck red sand which sent up coils like angry flames round the wheels, and they began to notice that the wind had risen. Within an hour the desert was blotted out by rolling clouds of crimson dust fine as flour that got into their eyes and ears and ground between their teeth. Everything was covered with it and it seemed as if the lorry was being lashed by purple streamers under a livid sky. The visibility was only a few yards now, with the sun blotted out, the oppressive murk deepening to a dull orange then paling to a dusky yellow as the wind slackened.
Muffling their faces against the wind, they got their heads down and, as it grew worse, Dampier decided to head north for Zuq itself, where they might be able to shelter for the night and hand Clutterbuck over to the Provost people.
By the time they drove in, however, the wind had increased and most of the town was obscured by whirling clouds of sand which was already building up in drifts against the walls, and it was almost impossible to see what lay ahead. Not that it mattered because they already knew. The place had been bombed and shelled by both sides so often there wasn’t a great deal left. The houses still stood, though some had sagging roofs and walls, and the harbour was filled with wrecks, their funnels and masts showing above the water, rusty relics constantly pitted and twisted by fresh high-explosive until they were almost unrecognizable as ships. But there was still a passage between them so that lighters could move at slow speed from the freighters, which were obliged to anchor outside the harbour, to a pontoon wharf newly constructed from planks and oil drums against the ruins of the old one. The war had swept three times across Zuq and few of the buildings near the harbour had escaped the scars of battle.
By this time the sky had turned a dirty grey and they wore their respirators as they groped about for their belongings. The heat in the flying sand was appalling and they could hear the monotonous beat of the wind drumming the canvas of the vehicle covers. Strangely empty, the town was like a new kind of suburbia with the houses all standardized. Even the furnishings came in three natty shades approved of in Rome.
Reaching a stretch of parched grass beneath a group of wind-whipped palms on the outskirts, they decided not to struggle any further and bedded down inside the three-tonner, taking it in turns to stay awake to make sure Clutterbuck didn’t bolt. With the sandstorm still raging, they became aware during the night of aircraft overhead, and then the whango-whango-whango of guns and the clatter of machine-gun fire. Assuming it was just another air raid on Zuq, they turned over and went to sleep again. The noise was all at the other side of the town and most of the bombs seemed to be falling on the wrecked ships in the harbour.
In his corner of the truck, Micklethwaite was looking miserable. He had developed a nasty case of the trots and kept having to disappear into the darkness with the spade. Fortunately, Clinch had a bottle of tablets which he carried around for just such an emergency.
‘What are they?’ Micklethwaite asked.
‘I dunno,’ Clinch said. ‘And I don’t want to. That way, if they kill you, I’m not responsible.’
Eventually they became aware of vehicles passing and the noise of engines and the excited chatter of men, but they were all tired and weren’t sufficiently involved in army movements to care much. When they woke the following morning, the town seemed more empty than the previous evening and during a lull in the storm Rafferty saw a flight of Messerschmitts heading towards Cairo. He eyed them with a grave face and said nothing, but soon afterwards, seeing rolling clouds of dust to the east, he watched them for a long time before turning to Dampier.
‘With respect, sir,’ he said, ‘I think the Italians are on the move.’
Dampier, who had been leaning on the side of the lorry drinking the first mug of tea of the day, came bolt upright at once.
‘I’ve seen it before, sir,’ Rafferty went on. ‘Something’s up. Where is everybody?’
True enough, the town appeared to be deserted by troops, though a few Arabs were still in residence. The white houses stood in pairs on the yellow cliffs above the harbour, like shoeboxes set at mathematical intervals, all alike and nearly all empty. Once there had been gardens and sheep and cows, but the sheep and cows had long since been eaten and the white houses were beginning to have a shabby look. On the edge of the town, where the road that ran along the coast entered, there was one of the triumphal arches that Mussolini liked to erect in his own honour. On one side of it was his virile slogan: The Italian people and the Fascist people deserve to have the victory. Benito Mussolini. On the other, in case the passers-by had failed to notice the first, there was another slogan: A people that abandons the land deserves to be condemned to decadence. Benito Mussolini. In paint some British soldier had written his reply: And any nation that puts up with a pompous pill like Mussolini deserves all it gets. Arthur Farnall, RASC.
Rafferty and Dampier stared around at the white buildings and the parched lawns. Something very odd had happened. The town was there all right but where were the British troops who were supposed to be garrisoning it?
Moving cautiously round the outskirts, they came across an empty British gun position. Nearby a group of vehicles kneeled forlornly on smashed front axles, one of them still sending up wisps of smoke from burning tyres. Around it were scattered scraps of uniform, and a pile of silver British petrol cans caught the sun. Because they were running short of fuel, it seemed a good idea to fill up from them. As usual, most of them were punctured and only half full.
Rafferty looked grim. ‘I think we’re in trouble, sir,’ he announced. ‘I think that somehow the front’s moved further east in the night and we’re behind it.’
Dampier looked alarmed. ‘You mean our people have pulled back?’
Rafferty looked worried. ‘I mean, sir, that I think Zuq’s been evacuated.’
Even as he spoke, a line of lorries came roaring towards them from the desert through the thinning clouds of sand. The signs and numbers they carried looked unfamiliar and the leading vehicle had a flag flapping from its cabin roof, something the British army didn’t usually go in for. Then, as the vehicles drew nearer, Rafferty recognized the red, white and green of the fluttering material.
‘Howly Mother of God!’ He snatched his cap off and, tossing it into the back of the lorry, knocked Dampier’s off his head to the ground and stood on it. In his excitement his accent slipped back to his native Galway. ‘’Tis Italians they are, sorr!’
Dampier was just about to bolt when Rafferty grasped his arm. ‘Stand still, sir,’ he said. ‘Put on your sunglasses and wave.’
Bareheaded, the badges on their shirts blurred by the coating of dust, they stood by their lorry, grinning like death’s heads and waving as the Italians roared p
ast. Their waves were answered but nobody took the trouble to stop and they could only assume the Italians were in too big a hurry.
‘They think we’re prisoners,’ Dampier gasped as the last lorry passed.
‘No, sir.’ Rafferty shook his head. ‘They’re thinkin’ we’re Italians, and I reckon it might be a good idea if we hopped it. I don’t fancy ending up in the bag.’
Climbing hurriedly into the vehicles, they swung them round and started heading eastwards again. Half an hour later they were obliged to stop once more. Ahead of them in the desert to the south through the rolling clouds of dust they could see a column of vehicles stretching right across their front.
‘Italians, Mr Rafferty?’ Dampier asked.
‘That they are, sir. And a lot of ’em too. And their direction’s east. Which, from our point of view, is the wrong one.’
* * *
At roughly the same time as Dampier’s party was trying to get out of Zuq, the Desert Ratbags were hurtling along the coast road, trying to get in. Their audience was supposed to be waiting, and, directed through a narrow gap at the north end of the minefield east of Sofi, like Dampier’s group, they had been stopped in their tracks by the storm. Bedding down in the lorry among their property baskets and flats and folded curtains, they had passed a disturbed night. There had been a lot of noise in the darkness and the sound of grinding gears but with the dawn they had got going again. By this time, however, though the visibility had improved, the sun was totally blotted out. Their lips were dry but, muffled against the flying sand and aware how late they were, they were in a hurry.
They were passing now through an area of pinky-red gravel with areas of stony ground where the going altered and the land grew uneven, with large plate-like stones jutting from the earth and flat pebbles rattling away from under the wheels. Here and there were patches of shrubs, dried out by the sun, uprooted clumps of it clattering away before the wind which blew with a parching dryness to leave sand in the folds of their clothes and in the sweaty wrinkles of their faces.
‘We can’t let them down,’ Clegg said with showbiz indestructibility. ‘They said they’d fix up a stage for us. They’ll play hell if we don’t turn up.’
The lorry’s engine had been giving trouble after the storm and they had had to stop for a while for the cursing Caccia to stick his head inside the bonnet to put it right. He was now trying hard to catch up on time.
‘We can’t be late either,’ Morton said. ‘We’d start with the audience hostile. The show’d die on us.’
‘Name any theatre you like,’ Clegg replied. ‘I died there at some time in my career.’
Deciding to dress as they drove so they could go into the opening sketch as soon as they arrived, they fought to keep their scarves over their faces against the flying sand.
‘It’ll be a hell of a performance in this lot,’ Clegg observed, scratching at the grit that had got under his shirt. ‘Even Jones can’t sing with his mouth full of sand.’
‘They’ll have rigged something up indoors,’ Morton said. ‘They’ll have found a warehouse or something. There are a lot of old sheds near the harbour.’
After a while, they passed a couple of guns and a few groups of men. They were in khaki shorts and shirts like everyone else in the desert, and like the Ratbags were well coated with dust so that nobody in the lorry took any notice of them because they were busy getting everything ready to go straight into their first number.
‘I think I’m going to have a headache.’ Jones’s nerves always seemed to take over when things went wrong, and his small, ugly, dirty face was gloomy. ‘And I’ve forgotten me lines. What do we open with?’
‘The song. Then the Italian sketch and “I’ve broken me bootlace”. Caccia comes back with “Use spaghetti”. Remember?’
Surrounded by dust, the lorry rolled past another group of soldiers. As Caccia slowed down, everybody stuck their heads out, Italian caps and all, to see where they were. The soldiers, their faces muffled against the sand, waved them past. A few minutes later, Jones looked at Clegg. He’d gone pale, Clegg noticed, and his headache seemed to have started because he was staring with such intensity he seemed paralysed.
He gestured nervously. ‘That lot back there, man,’ he muttered, looking at the uniform Clegg was wearing. ‘They thought we were Italians.’
‘Well,’ Clegg said, ‘that’s what we’re supposed to be, isn’t it?’
‘Why, aye, boy,’ Jones agreed. ‘But that lot weren’t English, see?’ His voice cracked as he expressed the opinion that had already occurred to Warrant Officer Rafferty. ‘They were Italians! Real Italians!’
Part Two
Chapter 1
The thought that had occurred to Jones the Song and Warrant Officer Rafferty had crossed Caccia’s mind, too, because instead of slackening speed when the lorry reached the spot where they were supposed to put on their performance he simply kept going.
Nobody argued. Suddenly they were all too scared. The stage was there all right, in the open against the blank wall of a warehouse, built of ammunition boxes and facing rows of sandbags laid out to make tiers of seats. It might have been a good show, Clegg thought, because the wind was dying and somebody had actually taken the trouble to advertise it. A large handwritten notice had been attached to a door: Desert Ratbags Concert Party. The wind had torn the paper and it was flapping about in the fading gusts, strangely forlorn.
There were a lot of vehicles standing about and the divisional signs on them were none anybody had ever seen before. On one of them was painted an Italian fasces and on the side someone had scrawled Egitto, Veniamo Qui. The vehicles looked dusty and battered and, round them, in corners out of the wind, tired-looking men were eating from dixies and drinking from straw-covered bottles. They were dressed in a haphazard mixture of khaki and grey-green, as if shortages had forced them to wear whatever they could lay their hands on. On their heads were round stubby helmets adorned by a spherical insignia and on their collars a variety of coloured flashes. A few wore narrow-brimmed felt hats or sun helmets with feathers, and they all seemed to be armed to the teeth.
As the men in the back of the lorry stared at them one of the Italians waved and pointed towards the east. Clegg waved back automatically.
‘Quella via,’ the Italian shouted.
Speechlessly, Clegg nodded and forced a grin. ‘What’s he say?’ he asked.
‘He says,’ Morton translated, as if he were gagging for need of a drink, ‘that we’re going the wrong way.’
‘I wish to Christ we were.’
As they reached the other side of the town, Caccia swung the vehicle off the road into a grove of trees. Through the drifting clouds of dust they could see the sea and a few corrugated-iron sheds in the distance, but the Italians seemed to be sticking to the built-up areas of the town and there was no one near them. Still shocked, Clegg heard the driver’s door slam, and Caccia’s face appeared at the tailgate of the lorry.
‘Am I off my onion?’ he asked in a shocked voice. ‘Or were those buggers Italian?’
‘That’s what I said, boyo,’ Jones insisted shrilly. ‘They were Italians!’
‘Well, if they are, where the bloody hell are we?’
‘I’ll tell you where we are, bach,’ Jones said. ‘We’re behind the Italian lines. Our lot have moved back, see, and left us here on our own. That’s what all that noise was last night.’
They had all scrambled out by this time and were standing in the lee of the lorry out of the flying grit.
‘Zuq was full of our fellers a week ago,’ Clegg pointed out.
‘Well, it isn’t now,’ Caccia said. ‘I reckon we’re proper in the dripping.’
‘Something’s gone wrong,’ Jones wailed, his whole shabby shape expressing woe.
Caccia turned on him angrily. ‘Give over, you miserable Welsh gnome,’ he snarled. ‘Can’t you think of anything else to say?’
Jones backed away, his Italian forage cap low over his eyes, his g
reasy hair sticking out beneath it in spikes. Caccia, spruce, clean and polished as any good lady’s man should be, was always bullying him for his complaints and his general grubbiness. ‘My headache’s getting worse,’ he said.
‘The best thing we can do,’ Morton decided, ‘is get straight back in the lorry, turn her round and push off.’
‘And probably get shot for our trouble,’ Clegg pointed out. ‘I reckon, comrades and boon companions, that the best thing is to stay where we are until dark, then head back. It’ll be a damn sight safer. If they can’t see you, they can’t shoot you.’
There was a lot of arguing about whose fault it was but they all knew it was really only the back and forth, the to and fro of the desert war, that was the reason for their plight. It was like fighting a sea war on sand, with lorries instead of ships. You could go in any direction you wanted except up or down and, because the front line wasn’t a set of trenches running from the sea down into Central Africa but just a series of fortified outposts where soldiers sat by their lorries and tanks and watched and waited and bit their nails, it wasn’t difficult for any aggressive group to circle another and come up behind. That, it seemed, was what had happened to the outfit they were supposed to be playing to. The Italians had put them in the bag.
‘All the same’ – the thought seemed to worry Morton – ‘it’s funny we didn’t hear about it before we set off.’
‘These Italians are treacherous bastards,’ Caccia said.
‘Look who’s talking.’ Jones was itching to get his own back and he gave a mock fascist salute. ‘Up the inglesi and fuck Winston-a Churchill.’
‘That bloody Italian uniform’s gone to your head,’ Caccia snarled.
‘I’m glad I was wearing mine all the same,’ Morton pointed out. ‘Otherwise, they’d probably have turned a machine-gun on us.’
