Under the Red Sea Sun

by Edward Ellsberg

  Barton was apparently in a dilemma. So also was I, who had to do something or Romeo Barton would surely be murdered either by the Montagues or the Capulets in this strange Italian vendetta over a prostitute, certainly no very attractive modern substitute for Juliet.

  Here was a situation in which even Beatrice Fairfax might have been stymied in giving advice to the lovelorn, and I certainly had no claims to being any “expert” in that field. The only proper thing for me to do as Commanding Officer was to see that the wartime regulations were enforced, and as that seemed to be the best way out for Barton also, who was the only party involved for whom I had any responsibility, I acted accordingly.

  “Winfield, your orders are to see that Saturday afternoon, Barton is suddenly called out of Massawa and that he doesn’t get back Sunday. How you manage it is quite up to you. And then see our Army headquarters in Asmara and see that the contractor transfers Barton to Egypt or Palestine or Arabia or wherever suits them. I won’t have him back in the Naval Base warehouse here again under any circumstances. He’s undesirable.”

  Winfield promised to attend to it. The week rolled along and I forgot all about it in the press of salvage and repair work. That Sunday afternoon for once I had free, and I was in my room writing a letter home, when outside Building 35 I heard what sounded like an antiquated automobile falling to pieces. Then followed the rush of feet up the stairs, a bang on my door, and the next I knew in burst four disheveled Italians I’d never seen before.

  Without any by your leave, they hurriedly scanned my room, which, bare as Mother Hubbard’s cupboard, could be taken in at a glance.

  In broken English, one Eytie demanded,

  “Signor Barton, where ees he?”

  “He’s not here, and I don’t know where he is! Get the hell out of here, all of you!”

  But they needed no invitation to leave. Satisfied I wasn’t concealing Barton, already they were on their way out on the run, heading pell-mell down the outer stairs into their rattletrap machine in which they vanished in a cloud of coral dust, headed for the old town of Massawa, before any Sudanese sentries could be alerted to stop them.

  They left me gasping an instant at their audacity, till I reflected that when you are out to murder someone, a little added misdemeanor like trespass is of slight moment. Whether they were the friends of the bride, ready to stiletto Barton if he didn’t show up at the wedding at 4:00 P.M., or whether they were the friends of her paramour, trying to locate him to stab him if he started for it, I never found out.

  There never was any wedding. And Barton shortly was working for the contractor far away from Eritrea.

  And so it went as July melted into August in Massawa—British, Americans, Somalis, Italians, Sudanese, Arabs—everybody came to lay their troubles in my lap. Sometimes I solved them, sometimes I soothed them, sometimes I couldn’t do anything but wish for a less patriarchal country where all hands didn’t look on the Commanding Officer as the father who had to concern himself with all their problems, their amours, and their personal frustrations. I had frustrations enough of my own, and no one at all closer than 13,000 miles away by sea on whose shoulder I could lay my head and shed tears.

  CHAPTER

  40

  ON SUNDAY, AUGUST 2, I RECEIVED A surprise; for once, a pleasant one. It was in the form of radio orders from General Maxwell to proceed immediately to Cairo for a conference with him there and with the Royal Navy command in Alexandria over furnishing British labor for Massawa—something I had been trying hard to get. I was to expect to be gone for a week to ten days; I should arrange my Massawa affairs for such an absence.

  Hurriedly I got hold of Captain Morrill, Lieutenant Woods, and Commander Davy, liaison officer, and informed them all of it. Then I turned my command over temporarily to Captain Morrill, as senior American officer remaining, warned him against allowing any changes to be made in my absence, instructed him in detail as to keeping things going (fortunately over that period we were starting nothing new), and told him jokingly we would now have a chance to see how the Army could run a Navy. And would he please also start phoning Asmara to get me a seat in the plane next morning for Cairo? Then I left them, to pack my aviation bag for a ten days’ trip while Garza rushed my car over to the garage to fuel it up for the trip to Asmara.

  In an hour I was ready to leave. I stopped a moment on my way out at my office to see what luck Morrill had had with my plane reservation. He informed me he had managed to get Asmara, and while the Army transportation officer there could not immediately give him the seat, I could rest assured the Army would see I got one, even though the plane was going to be a British BOAC.

  And in addition, Morrill with a wry grin informed me that already the news of my departure was all over the Naval Base (though how it had got out he didn’t know; from Asmara probably). That didn’t matter much, but what he thought might interest me was the accompanying rumor that I wasn’t coming back, which he had already heard from several Americans who had dropped in at the office to say good-by to me. They had the straight dope, they said, right from the horse’s mouth—the contractor had finally succeeded in having me kicked out of Massawa as a nuisance; the conference business in Cairo was just eyewash to camouflage the situation a bit. Could that be true, Morrill asked of me? I knew, didn’t I, that the Army Air Corps colonel at the Gura air base near Asmara, who had apparently become persona non grata to the contractor there, had suddenly departed from his command, never to return?

  “The air certainly gets hot around here, Morrill,” was my only comment. “You just see nobody puts anything over on you till I get back, and that’s all I ask. And you might advise those who seem too interested, not to start celebrating. So long; I’ll see you again in about ten days,” and sliding into the car alongside Garza, I motioned him to shove off for Asmara.

  It was a hot ride. Shortly we were out of Massawa and racing at seventy miles an hour across the thirty-mile stretch of flat desert that lay between Massawa and the mountains. Garza’s one shortcoming as a chauffeur was that he also, like the first Italian who had ever taken me over that course, had a speed mania. But on the desert stretch, I didn’t mind. It would allow my Somali to get some of the speed germs out of his mixed blood before we hit the mountain switchbacks. Then in addition we would that much sooner get over that terrible desert.

  To satisfy my curiosity as to exactly what we would have faced twice a day had we ever attempted to drag our Massawa workmen in lumbering buses back and forth to that housing project in Ghinda (and also what the Duke of Gloucester had been subjected to while stuck there), I had brought along with me my special thermometer. It had not seen the light since that day, nearly two months before in early June, when I had exposed it on the dry dock. Now I laid it down on the seat beside me, in the shade this time since it was inside the car, and left it a few minutes.

  When I picked it up, it read 160° F. Fairly warm, I thought, for the shaded inside of an automobile with the breeze streaming through all its open windows at seventy miles an hour. What it might have read had I told Garza to stop while I exposed the thermometer to the still air in the sun outside, I had no idea. Nor had I any desire to tell Garza to stop long enough to find out.

  It didn’t take us long at the rate we were going for our Chevrolet to get across that desert. Once we hit the mountains, I slowed Garza down considerably, aided slightly in my endeavors by the mountain grades we were climbing. Thirty miles an hour suited me there, with reductions to twenty around every switchback. I had considerable difficulty in holding my speed-mad Somali, with all that horsepower at his feet, down to what I wanted. But I succeeded, principally, I think, because Garza knew his only chance of ever getting any part of that increase to fifty lira a day he had his heart set on, rested with my continued existence.

  Before long, we had climbed to over 3000 feet, it had cooled off considerably, and we were in the mountains passing Ghinda and its vast array of now completed and deserted buildings. I could hardly res
train bitter tears as I passed it—supposedly built to help us at Massawa! Permanent brick residence buildings, elaborate recreation hall, huge mess hall—everything to house around a thousand men—completed now and useless except perhaps as quarters for occasional passers-by, stray Eyties, and casual Eritrean goats. I had been forced to slave in Massawa in the heat with little help, begging occasionally for the loan of a single mechanic. I supposed I had made a nuisance of myself everywhere objecting to Ghinda’s continued construction, once I had seen Eritrea. But when I thought of what I might have been able to do on urgent war work with all the wasted American labor and materials on which my eyes now rested, I became almost hysterical. My nerves weren’t as cool and calm any more as they had been when first I came to Massawa. For once, I urged Garza to go faster as we passed through Ghinda; I couldn’t stand the sight of it.

  It took us over two hours to cover the remaining forty miles, more or less, to Asmara, and by that time, I had cooled down considerably, both mentally and physically. By the time of our arrival on the high plateau 7500 feet up, I was completely dressed for the first time in months—jacket, shirt, undershirt, long trousers, and my naval cap instead of a sun helmet—and had laid aside the sun glasses which had practically become a permanent part of my face.

  I went to the Army Officers’ Mess in Asmara for the night to learn there that BOAC had reserved a seat for me next day in the plane. On General Maxwell’s orders, I had the top priority for the plane; there had been no argument. We were to take off at 9:00 A.M.

  Asmara, I noted, was rather cold. All the Army men were wearing woolen O.D.s. As I had with me only the khaki I needed in Cairo and the white naval uniform (with my borrowed shorts) which I felt I must use in Alex where all the Royal Naval officers would be in white, I elected to stay indoors all evening rather than to freeze to death.

  Next morning, Garza drove me to the Asmara airfield and then returned alone to Massawa, to him a heaven-sent opportunity to go as fast as he liked. I could only hope for the best with regard to the car as I stepped into the little BOAC plane and waved him a farewell.

  In a few minutes, we took off on our way to Cairo via Khartoum; our first hop in the little plane would be only the few hours’ ride to Khartoum on the Nile, where after laying overnight, I would board a much larger plane for the long flight to Cairo itself.

  I seized the opportunity while in the air to write a letter home; before it was finished we were circling for a landing over the Khartoum airfield which I knew so well. I looked curiously down on that hard-baked Khartoum field shimmering in the sun, where twice before in March I had nearly expired with the heat. How would it feel to me, now that it was midsummer and August instead of early spring and March?

  I got a pleasant surprise—that Khartoum airfield, when I stepped out of the plane, felt only moderately warm.

  A car was waiting for me to take me into Khartoum itself where perhaps because of the added dignity of my rank as Captain, I was to spend the night in a hotel, the Grand Hotel, of course, instead of that ex-girls’ college dormitory of unblessed memory near the airfield.

  The Grand Hotel in Khartoum, I found, was really grand; it had hot and cold running water and the usual plumbing of any ordinary good hotel. As I gazed on the white porcelain equipment of my bathroom, my mind went back to my last stay in Khartoum. Why, when I had “gyppy tummy” and badly needed that bathroom, had I been quartered in that cursed dormitory with its little well-detached brick cubicles, instead of in this grand hotel where I was when I had little need of it?

  After lunch, I wandered out into Khartoum to do a little shopping, as Massawa offered no such opportunity. To my astonishment, I found every shop in the city closed until after 4:30 P.M., because of the heat. What heat, I wondered?

  I gave Khartoum up in disgust, and went back to the Grand Hotel to spend the rest of the day and all the evening catching up on my home correspondence.

  In the morning, I took off for Cairo on the thousand-mile flight north over the desert bordering the Nile. Having seen already too much of that desert, I ignored it to continue writing home, trying to make up for all the nights in Massawa when I had come in so dead and so hot, I couldn’t do anything but collapse on my bed. Circumspect as I was about mentioning anything, even that I was in Egypt again instead of in Eritrea, I couldn’t help wondering how those letters would look when they finally arrived home after the censor’s razor blades got through cutting them up.

  We landed at Heliopolis military airport and I learned with interest that instead of going into town to a Cairo hotel, I was to be billeted with some Army officers in an Egyptian mansion just on the edge of that military airfield, a very convenient arrangement for me, I thought. The “flap” was over, so far as the Army was concerned. All military personnel evacuated early in July had been returned to Cairo for duty.

  As it was practically evening and too late for any conferences that day, I didn’t go out, instead spending the evening swapping my Massawa experiences for those of half a dozen Army files who had been out in the desert as observers with the Eighth Army in its Libyan vicissitudes. But the round table didn’t last very long. Hardly had nine o’clock struck when all my Army companions got up and prepared to go to bed.

  “What’s the matter with you fellows?” I asked. “The evening’s young, and I’m willing to hear lots more yet on how Rommel chased you all a thousand miles or so way across Libya.”

  “No,” one major answered me, “we better turn in now if we want any sleep. There’ll be an air raid tonight about 1.00 A.M. We won’t get any sleep after that. We’re the target out here, alongside the airfield.”

  “So?” I inquired skeptically. “How do you know what Rommel’s planning tonight? Been decoding his battle orders?”

  “No, Captain, but it’s easy to figure. There was a Nazi snooper plane over at 40,000 feet this noon, taking pictures. That always means bombs that same night; as for the 1:00 A.M., that’s the optimum time for attack, considering all Rommel’s conditions. You’ll see. By the way, I’d better lend you a spare tin hat; I see you didn’t bring any.”

  I had to confess that the omission was due to the fact that in Massawa I didn’t even own one; we had next to nothing out there in the sticks. So I was provided with a tin hat and trooped up to the second floor to bed with my companions.

  Sure enough, at about 12:40 A.M., air raid sirens began to wail all over Cairo. I dressed hurriedly, seized my newly acquired tin hat, and started for the roof to get a good view of what happened, but I was restrained.

  “You can’t go up there,” the major who had fitted me out with my headgear sternly ordered. “It’s too dangerous! Didn’t I tell you before we’re the target here? This building might just as well be in the center of the airfield, so far as the bombers are concerned. We’re right behind the main hangars, and they’re such poor shots they’re as likely to hit us as the hangars. Hell, we’ll shovel a couple of buckets full of shrapnel and bomb fragments off that roof when the raid’s over. We always do. You’d better go down in the basement.”

  “Well, what’s the tin hat for, then?” I queried. “If I go down in that basement you’ve got rigged as an air raid shelter, I won’t need it for shrapnel. And if a bomb gets a direct hit on this house, the whole place will collapse right on me, and a hell of a lot of good a tin hat’ll do me then!”

  “It’s if you want to go out on the portico,” explained the major patiently. “There’s a fair roof over that which’ll catch most of the shrapnel, and the tin hat may take care of anything heavy that manages to get through the roof. But you’ll be safer in the basement, Captain,” he cautioned, “except, of course, if we get a direct hit, when it won’t make any difference where you are.”

  I thought to myself that if safety had been my major consideration, I should certainly never have gone in for diving, let alone volunteering for a war when I was over fifty.

  “Does the portico face the airfield?” I asked.

  “Yes, partly
.”

  “Well, Major, I’ll settle for the portico then. I’m not looking for maximum safety; a reasonable amount’ll do me. This is my first air raid and I’m not going to miss it. You coming along?”

  “Sure thing!” exclaimed the major. “I always watch ’em from there. Let’s go!”

  So, escorted by the major, I went downstairs instead of up as I had first intended, and out on the portico. The roof, which seemed quite substantial, interfered with the view directly overhead; still a fair view out and up over the airfield, as well as over a considerable part of Cairo, was possible.

  By now, the air raid sirens had quit screaming and a dead silence reigned over very thoroughly blacked-out Cairo. But why it should have been blacked out, I couldn’t see. The Nile, gleaming against the desert, running north and south through Cairo, gave any bomber an excellent marker for compass direction, and the Pyramids to the west of the Nile, clearly visible even at night, gave an excellent point of departure from which to lay out a bombing run. Heliopolis airport was the only target in (to the Nazis) otherwise friendly Cairo. Any navigator, with all that to guide him, who couldn’t get over it, blackout or no blackout, should have been sent back to kindergarten.

  Then there were the searchlights. A vast ring of searchlights was fingering the night sky over Cairo, each an immense bluish pencil of light sweeping its own arc of the heavens. Again the blackout puzzled me; if the Nile and the Pyramids didn’t show where Cairo was, how could anybody fail to locate it with all those searchlights encircling it? But whether useful in defense or not, Cairo was still thoroughly blacked out. Maybe it had a psychological value somewhere, either on the attacking bombers or on the Gyppos.