by Max Hennessy
‘It is like Caporetto,’ he said. ‘Except that the events are greater and the men are smaller.’
* * *
The airfield buildings were intact, even if the aircraft were not. The Italian pilots had lived in comfort with dressing tables, all equipped with wing mirrors and scent sprays, but the baths, like most Italian baths, didn’t work and Arab looters had got in and electric lighting, heating and water fittings had all been smashed.
The following morning, with the fighting over, the civilian population streamed back into Zuq in a strung-out caravan; and Avvocato Carloni, the mayor, arrived with the Roman Catholic priest and three police officers, anxious to surrender the town, every military establishment, the Italian, Arab and Greek population, and anything the captors chose to regard as theirs. Those parts of the Italian army that hadn’t fled were prisoners so they hadn’t much choice. With them came the local Arab chief, smiling broadly and anxious to do his bit, with tribal banners flying and drums beating, trailing behind him a sheepish crowd of Italian carabinieri.
Leaning heavily on a silver-topped walking stick Clutterbuck had found for him in one of the looted houses, Dampier accepted the surrender with an old-world courtesy. He wasted no sympathy but he was not harsh, and it occurred to Clegg that out of them all only he could have done it properly. As he stepped back, there was a flutter of clapping from a small crowd that had gathered and he issued orders that were to last until the British army came up and appointed someone in his place. Morton translated his speech as he reappointed the mayor and all the civil officers, ordered them to make sure the shops and businesses were reopened and instructed the civil guard to act with British troops.
Micklethwaite, who had found a German camera in one of the houses, tried to set the surrender down on film for posterity and as proof of the story he hoped to write, only to discover when it was half finished that the camera had a broken shutter. By the time he’d found another one it was over and people were saluting all the British and Australians they saw, no matter what their rank. A shopkeeper took down his shutters and, as others followed suit, the town was in motion again.
As Dampier set up his headquarters in the Palazzo Municipale, on the table was a form filled with the message that Brigadier Marziale had sent to Rome before bolting for Derna: Duce, we are in extremis. Long live Italy. Long live the King Emperor. Long live the Duce. Rome, I embrace you.
As Morton translated, Dampier sniffed. ‘You don’t win wars on such stuff as that,’ he said.
* * *
The first of the pursuing British arrived the following morning. Clegg was standing with Morton as the first tank roared up the street, its exhaust echoing hollowly against the white walls. As it approached, it stopped and the hatch opened, and the head and shoulders of a lieutenant who looked about sixteen popped up.
‘All right, you lot,’ he said. ‘Mani in alto!’
Clegg looked at Morton and laughed. Captured by their own bloody side after all they’d been through!
‘With respect, sir,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Get stuffed.’
The officer looked puzzled. ‘Who are you lot?’
‘British soldiers. We captured the town for you. You can have it now. We don’t want it any more.’
During the day, more units arrived, their trucks full of looted wine, chocolate and tins of fruit from Italian officers’ messes, a lot of it captured from their own army not very long before. They even had china plates and silver cutlery, many had new watches, binoculars, automatics and cameras, and half of them flew captured flags from their aerials. Aware of his official position, Dampier made an attempt to persuade them to hand everything over but, still aggressive and cocksure after their victory, their response was such that he wisely decided to forget it.
With the town safe, however, he insisted on gathering all of 64 Light Vehicle Repair Unit together and making them a little speech. It was faintly pompous, like most of his utterances, but he surprised them all by saying how much he appreciated what they’d done.
‘Splendid chaps,’ he said, trying to avoid looking at Clutterbuck and Jones the Song as he spoke. ‘All of you. Now I suggest that you go and celebrate – if you can find anywhere open and they’ve got anything to drink.’
Feeling a tremendous warrior and mentally retracting a lot of the things he’d thought about Dampier over the past days, Clegg headed for the Bar Barbieri. Barbieri seemed suddenly to be doing very well and the bar, full of Australians, for once seemed well stocked.
‘From the Italian officers’ messes,’ Barbieri announced. ‘Il Signore Clutterbuck. What a man that is!’
Caccia was helping behind the bar, and Rosalba, radiant in the yellow dress in which she’d been married, was darting about between the tables, dodging the grabbing hands of the grinning Australians.
McBean was there, surrounded by bottles, and he shouted across to Clegg. ‘Come and sit down, mate,’ he yelled. ‘The booze’s on me.’
Clegg took it all in. This was more his cup of tea than fighting, he decided. He put a coin in the music box and to his surprise the music that came out was Gene Autry singing ‘South of the Border’. It made him feel at home.
He smiled. He’d had enough of war and wanted to get back to acting the goat on a stage, to making people laugh, telling them the old jokes – ‘What did the brassiere say to the hat? You go on ahead, I’ll give the other two a lift’ – singing the old comic songs he’d got away with for years – ‘Nobody loves a fairy when she’s forty’. As he came out, he saw Dampier walking with Rafferty just ahead, both of them smart and starched as a British colonel and his warrant officer should be. Still suffering a little from his lumbago, Dampier was limping badly. His age and the limp made Clegg suddenly feel a strange affection towards him. The army was a funny institution, he thought. It roused a strange comradely warmth in the breasts of men like himself who had no martial feelings whatsoever and these two men in front were pretty much the reason why. Both of them unswervingly honest and well aware of their duties – Rafferty with his small poacher’s features and blue, scraped chin and his immense knowledge of army procedure; Dampier, eager, a little pompous, starchy as hell at first but full of courage and a sharp sense of duty.
He was just reflecting on the thought when he heard the sound of an aeroplane engine and turned to see where it was coming from. Howling over the rooftops, bright against the blue sky, the rondels on its fuselage clear with the letter K near the tail, was a Hurricane. He was just about to wave to it when he saw flashes coming from the wings and heard the rattle of guns.
‘You daft silly sod!’ he screamed. ‘Zuq’s ours!’
Rafferty had dived for shelter but, in a split second of shock, Clegg saw Dampier, trying awkwardly to run, flung aside, his khaki cap tossed into the air and blood on his face, then something kicked Clegg’s foot from under him and he fell against the wall. As he hit his head, he passed out.
When he came round, Morton was leaning over him. ‘You all right?’
‘I think so.’ Clegg looked down at his foot, expecting to see it torn open, but the bullet had only ripped the heel from his boot and done him no harm. ‘Did anybody get hurt?’ he asked. ‘I saw the Old Man—’
‘When I arrived,’ Morton said, ‘Rafferty was pushing him into the back of a lorry to take him to the hospital. He looked as if he’d been shot through the head.’
‘Oh, Christ!’ Clegg was shocked at the idiocy of war. ‘Poor old sod! And at his age, too!’ He was silent for a moment. ‘Well,’ he ended, ‘he always wanted to be in the fighting. Pity he had to be killed by it, though.’
Epilogue
That wasn’t the end, of course. Stories go on long after the last full stop.
After the war, like a few others, Clegg went into the theatre in a big way with a whole string of sketches he’d developed in the desert, among them the ludicrous one about a German tourist trying to buy ice cream from an Italian who spoke no German, and the famous Will Hay type act of a hal
f-baked fireman getting into a bucket chain at a fire at the village inn so that the full buckets went back to the tap and the empty ones to the fire. Then, after years of appearing in music hall, he surprised everyone by going legitimate and starring in a whole string of excellent British films before appearing in a repeat of My Fair Lady. When he announced his retirement, he gave interviews to the press, and for the first time the full story of what had happened in and around Zuq appeared in the theatrical magazine Beginners, Please! It was in good theatrical journalese and contained a lot of Clegg’s patter but it was all there just the same.
‘That was a real bit of Elgar’s “Land of H and G”,’ Clegg was reported to have said. ‘I captured Zuq and won the Battle of Alamein. Everybody thought it was Montgomery but it wasn’t. It was me.’
He then explained what had happened to the others. Morton, it seemed, was commissioned in the field, which is always a good way to be commissioned, and since by that time he’d decided he quite liked being an officer, he stayed in the army and, with his degree, his languages and his background, eventually became a major general. ‘He comes to see me when I’m appearing in the West End,’ Clegg pointed out. ‘Sometimes, to please me, in uniform. My agent always demands higher fees on the spot.’
Jones the Song went back to Wales, opened a shop and ended up conducting the local choir. Caccia took over a thriving business in Soho and he and Rosalba now have eight children and a lot of grandchildren. ‘They’ve put on a bit of weight since those days,’ Clegg said.
Rafferty retired and did very well with a spare-parts service for garages. Clinch opened a radio business, while Clutterbuck went into the secondhand car game. Micklethwaite came off worst. He had the biggest story ever and he wasn’t allowed to write it because the army refused to let him give their victory at Zuq to a mixed group of actors, singers, storebashers, deserters, prisoners-of-war and what-have-you. Even when he finally did write it, nobody believed it.
‘He wasn’t blessed with a lot of luck,’ Clegg added.
Then, ‘What about Dampier?’ he was asked. ‘Did you bury him out there?’
Clegg’s reaction was unexpected. ‘God bless you, no! He didn’t die. The bullet only scraped his scalp and did no more than raise a groove like a tram track across the top of his head. When we went to the hospital to pay our last respects, he was sitting up in bed trying to get his mitts on an Italian nurse. He ended up a brigadier with a DSO and lord lieutenant of his county.’
There was also just a little bit more that didn’t appear in Beginners, Please! but was fact, nevertheless.
‘We had a reunion a few years back,’ Clegg said, ‘and he made a speech. Everybody turned up. Coffin and Grady and Fee, who was over on a visit from Australia. Even Scarlatti. Even Schwartzheiss and Erwin from Germany. Schwartzheiss was making a lot of money as a building contractor by then – experience, I suppose you’d call it – and Erwin owned an art gallery in Wiesbaden and was picking up a fortune from American tourists. He wasn’t a bad chap. His only fault was that he talked too much. The only one who couldn’t make it was Clutterbuck.’
‘Why didn’t he come?’
Clegg gave a vast shout of laughter. ‘Why do you think?’ he said. ‘He got involved in a racket at London airport and got mixed up in the Great Train Robbery. He was in jail.’
Next in The WWII Italian Collection:
Picture of Defeat
He must save the past, for the peoples’ future…
Find out more
First published in the United Kingdom in 1985 by Hutchinson
This edition published in the United Kingdom in 2020 by Canelo
Canelo Digital Publishing Limited
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United Kingdom
Copyright © John Harris, 1985
The moral right of John Harris writing as Max Hennessy to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 9781800320864
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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