The Thirty Days War

by John Harris

  ‘Gone up a bit, in fact, I’d say,’ Jenno commented. ‘I bet the Germans are paying him top rates. All the same, what’s he doing here? I thought he’d be in the fort at Hatbah with the Irazhis by this time. I think we’d better see what he’s up to.’

  Leaving Flight Sergeant Madoc in charge of the cars and Ghadbhbhan in command of the Belles, Boumphrey and Jenno moved forward. They took two cars in case of accident or ambush so that if one had to be abandoned the crew could escape by clinging to the other. It was a still hot morning but eventually the wind got up, filling the air with flying dust that peppered their faces like buckshot. It lay in the folds of clothing, clung to sweating skins and caked lips and nostrils to give them paste-like masks that cracked in wrinkles round their mouths as they spoke.

  They drove in silence, exhausted by the wind and the flying grit. They were growing tired now. The cars were overcrowded and full of the smell of sweaty bodies. As they gasped for air in the stifling atmosphere, the sight of gazelles leaping across the horizon woke them up.

  ‘Something there,’ Boumphrey said. ‘They’ve been scared.’

  The Rolls-Royce engines were silent as they murmured their way to the edge of the sandhills, then Boumphrey and Jenno moved forward on foot with the dog. The wind was still picking the sand off the ridges and tossing it in malicious bursts at their eyes, throats and noses. Climbing one of the hills, they lay flat on top, careful not to raise any dust. The dog crouched between them, its nose twitching.

  Below them in the valley they saw Fawzi’s group. They had fires going, burning in tins filled with sand on which petrol had been poured, a trick they’d picked up from the British army. Their tins were even the old square British petrol tins cut in half, and they could see the pale flames. The A’Klabs were grouped round them, eating, the metal of their accoutrements picking up the sunshine so that there seemed to be constant movement in the group. They were a few hundred yards away, some of the men in Arab robes, others in khaki trousers and shirts, but all wearing the Arab keffiyehs – and all armed and slung about with bandoleers of cartridges. Jenno indicated a tall man standing near one of the trucks.

  ‘That’s Fawzi himself,’ he said.

  ‘Two armoured cars,’ Boumphrey counted. ‘Nine lorries. I can also see machine guns.’

  ‘How many men, do you reckon?’

  ‘Hundred and fifty?’

  ‘About that. They won’t be moving before daylight. Some of them are getting blankets out. I’m surprised they hadn’t a lookout up here.’

  ‘Overconfidence,’ Boumphrey suggested. ‘I expect they thought we were still tied down at Kubaiyah.’

  ‘I wonder,’ Jenno said slowly. ‘Perhaps they’ve guessed we’d make some attempt to reach Lindley’s column and they’re waiting for us. They can’t be waiting for a column as strong as Lindley’s. Fawzi’s clever enough not to go for someone he can’t wipe up properly.’

  Boumphrey studied the men in the valley. ‘Think a chap’s entitled to dot another chap who’s waiting round the corner with a club to dot him.’

  ‘Best way to deal with that is to have a bigger club,’ Jenno said. ‘Which we haven’t got, so I’d say the AVM’s idea was best. Get our blow in fust. Fawzi wouldn’t feel it wrong. He’s killed plenty of our chaps.’

  ‘How’re we going to go about it?’

  ‘Any ideas, Ratter? You know these hills.’

  Boumphrey studied the land below him. ‘They run in two ridges that are joined at both ends,’ he said, ‘with this bowl in the middle. But there are openings in them where the road runs through. If we appeared up here, they’d head for the gaps like the field going for the first fence at a point-to-point as soon as we started firing. But they wouldn’t go west because the relief column’s on that side. They’d go north or east. It’d be awkward for them if we had armoured cars waiting for them.’

  Jenno nodded. ‘We can handle ’em if we take ’em by surprise. Who’s going to fetch the rest of the chaps up?’

  ‘You,’ Boumphrey said. ‘I’ll stay here and watch. If they start moving, I’ll come back and let you know.’

  Jenno slapped Boumphrey on the shoulder and began to move down the hill, his feet sliding in the soft sand. Boumphrey’s car remained tucked out of sight in a wadi with its crew in case one of Fawzi’s men climbed the hill to where he waited.

  Fawzi had posted sentries but their discipline was slack and they had moved close to the fires for fear of missing their meal. There were men sitting by machine guns mounted on circular bars above the cabs of the trucks, however, though the rest seemed to feel they were safe and had dug no cover.

  Little gusts of steam lifted from the pans on the fires and once Boumphrey even thought he could smell boiling mutton and rice. Occasionally the wind that blew the sand in his face brought the faint sound of laughter. Some of the men were smoking cigarettes and they seemed relaxed and sure of themselves, moving about in a deliberate, easy way.

  The sun was just beginning to disappear and the brassy sky had turned lemon yellow when Boumphrey’s dog swung round with a tiny whimper of anticipation. Boumphrey turned quickly. It was Jenno. Behind him men were climbing the hill.

  ‘All yours, Ratter,’ he advised. ‘I’ll leave it to you to start the ball rolling. In the morning, do you think?’

  ‘First light.’

  ‘Fine. I’ll have my cars covering the exits, with two spare ones ready to nip in and clean up and stop them bolting north or east. OK?’

  ‘OK. The signal for the off will be when I start shooting.’

  As Jenno vanished down the hill in the growing darkness, Boumphrey positioned his men along the top of the hill. They nodded and grinned at him.

  ‘And make sure they keep their hands off their weapons, Ghadbhbhan,’ Boumphrey warned. ‘We want nothing going off by mistake. If the wind bothers them, they can back off the top for shelter. We’ll rouse them at first light.’

  The night was cold, despite the heat of the sun during the day, and Boumphrey sat with the dog huddled in a blanket, his eyes on the little fires in the valley. The sound of chattering died as Fawzi’s men slept but, though his own men dozed just off the crest of the hill, Boumphrey didn’t.

  He suddenly realised how tired he was. He and Jenno and one or two others hadn’t had a single break since the start of the siege. They had flown constantly and in the intervals between had been involved in the counterattacks against Ghaffer’s forces. But he kept his eyes on the camp below and to help him stay awake began to think of Prudence Wood-Withnell. He needed to be married, he felt. He was twenty-nine now and needed to put down roots. It was a feeling that had come on him a lot recently. His parents were growing old and there was a house and land in England that would be his in time – providing, of course, that he survived the war – and he needed someone to share it with.

  There was the faintest light in the east when Ghadbhbhan appeared.

  ‘Now, sir?’

  ‘Yes. Wake ’em up. Get ’em in position. When they’re ready, let me know.’

  The fires down below had died during the hours of darkness, but now he heard the clink of metal and saw the flare of a match. There was a small flower of blue flame as the first of the stoves was lit. As the daylight increased, he saw the A’Klabs begin to move, first one, then another, then two or three. He began to count them.

  Ghadbhbhan appeared. ‘Everybody’s ready,’ he said.

  ‘Guns in position?’

  ‘In position, sir.’

  They were only Lewis guns. Far from the best and susceptible to jamming but, with Ghadbhbhan’s help, Boumphrey had shown his men how to care for them, how to keep them covered up, so that no flying particles of sand clung to the thin film of oil they wore. They had become so particular, in fact, there were occasional fights when one man accused another of carelessness.

  ‘Right,’ Boumphrey smiled at Ghadbhbhan. ‘Give ’em the word.’

  The crash of the first shots turned every face in the valle
y upwards. As the machine guns were pushed over the ridge, raking the vehicles, the A’Klabs began to run, one of them straight for the hill where Boumphrey waited, as if he had no idea where the firing was coming from. Then suddenly he realised what he was doing, stopped and tried to turn, but someone shot him and he rolled down the slope.

  One of the trucks began to head for the gap in the hills nearby but it blew up unexpectedly in a wide pall of smoke. Pieces of steel whistled over their heads and they had to duck as they landed in puffs of dust. When they lifted their heads again one of the men below was leading a charge up the slope, firing a Tommy gun from the hip. He was hit in the chest and sat down abruptly. He was still firing but he was shot again and, as he fell back, the charge he had started crumbled and the men who had followed him began to run back the way they had come.

  By this time the A’Klabs were climbing into the lorries and beginning to scatter, heading for any shelter they could see. As they vanished among the folds of ground, Boumphrey heard the roar of more machine guns and knew that Jenno’s men had found them. For a while the firing continued then suddenly, abruptly, there was silence.

  Walking down the slope towards the remains of the camp where a lorry burned and an armoured car leaned sideways over a punctured front tyre, Boumphrey was wary. Abruptly, a man stepped out from behind the armoured car, his rifle raised, but Ghadbhbhan shot him before Boumphrey had even reached for his weapon. The man fell backwards out of sight.

  There were several weapons lying on the ground, and a lot of dead. There were also a few wounded and Ghadbhbhan, restraining his men from throat-cutting, gave orders for them to be gathered together. As they worked, Jenno’s car came roaring into the valley from the north. He was gasping for air and rubbing his neck where hot empty cartridge cases, falling from the gun on to him, had burned his skin. His head through the hatch cover, he waved and shouted.

  ‘Four lorries back there,’ he said. ‘All disabled. I think we can make two of ’em go and give ’em to Fawzi’s boys to shift their wounded.’

  ‘Two here,’ Boumphrey said. ‘That means only three got away, plus one armoured car.’

  ‘No armoured cars,’ Jenno corrected. ‘One of my chaps shot the driver and it stopped. We’ve got it.’

  ‘There’s one here with a punctured front tyre but we can change the wheel and that’ll give us another. I think we’ve blunted Fawzi’s weapon a bit. How many do you think got away?’

  ‘Hundred or so, including Fawzi,’ Jenno said. ‘But he’s lost a lot of weapons and almost all his transport. That should keep him quiet for a while. I think we can now push on to the relief force.’

  They found Lindley’s column a few miles to the west of the hills. They were strung out and very vulnerable, a long line of black dots across the desert like the beads of a broken necklace, sometimes hardly visible in the distance through the shimmering heat.

  As they approached, an Irazhi Blenheim screamed overhead and they saw two black tulips of smoke blossom ahead and the white-hot flash of anti-aircraft fire streaming up. A truck was hit and a long black column began to lift into the brassy sky.

  There were cheers as they were spotted, then, as they swept forward, they found themselves surrounded by men who looked exhausted and shrivelled by the tremendous heat, worn out by the struggle they’d been having. The first man they spoke to was a captain in the Life Guards from Lindley’s staff. He was struggling to free an armoured car and was lightening it by unscrewing every scrap of armour it carried.

  ‘It’s like Flodden Field back there,’ he said.

  The lorries seemed to have straggled all over the desert, as one group after another had tried to find the way through.

  ‘Which way did you come?’

  ‘By the sandhills,’ Jenno said.

  The cavalryman looked as if he didn’t believe them. ‘Anyway,’ he admitted, ‘we’re damn glad to see you. At the moment everybody’s trying to find somewhere firm to park without sinking up to their hubcaps. It’s a bit like a small boy trying to shepherd a herd of angry elephants into a kraal.’

  They had set off enthusiastically from Palestine, making excellent progress at first. At Hatbah, they found the Irazhi police who had first surrounded it had been replaced by Fawzi ali Khayyam who had occupied the place as Craddock and the Engineers had escaped. The first attempt at recapturing the place had been driven off with casualties and the loss of several vehicles but, with the threat of bombing, Fawzi had apparently decided that the interior of a fort was no place for a guerrilla leader. He and his men had slipped away during the night and the following morning the column had found the place deserted.

  ‘Looked like something out of Beau Geste,’ the cavalryman said. ‘Except that there was a dead horse in there that stank to high heaven.’

  Despite the delay at Hatbah, they had still hoped to reach Kubaiyah in record time, but then the crusty surface of the desert had started to give way under the wheels of the heavy vehicles. Digging had not helped and the sand channels, objects like ten-foot-long cheese graters, had been ground down by the wheels until they were out of sight. Half the lorries in the column were stuck, and the others daren’t go near them to haul them free in case they got stuck too.

  Brigadier Lindley was a brusque red-faced man wearing no badges of rank and he was in a bad temper.

  ‘It took you a bloody long time to get here!’ he snapped.

  When they explained what had happened, he calmed down to a normality of simmering sourness. ‘Craddock’s bloody cavalry led us into this,’ he said. ‘Who’re you?’

  They introduced themselves and the brigadier stared at Jenno’s armoured cars and Boumphrey’s lorryloads of dark-faced men. ‘Boumphrey’s Belles, eh?’ he said. ‘Well, Boumphrey, I shall need your dark-eyed beauties to help me find an alternative route. Can you do it?’

  ‘Without doubt, sir,’ Boumphrey said.

  ‘You sound bloody confident.’

  ‘Absolutely sure, sir.’

  ‘Know this area, do you? Right–’ the brigadier dismissed them, looking a lot happier ‘–we set off at first light tomorrow morning.’

  Jenno and Boumphrey squatted Arab-fashion round a candle stuck in a bottle to discuss the next day’s plans. The air was hot and stuffy but tea and sardine sandwiches had appeared and they drank out of china mugs which appeared to have been stolen from a NAAFI.

  The disaster to the column had been laid firmly at the door of Colonel Craddock and the whole group had spent an exhausting day trying to dig themselves out in a temperature that had risen to 120 degrees in the shade. Rations were running short and there was a lot of worry about water. Boumphrey seemed to be bored by the worrying and Jenno grinned. Boumphrey’s men never carried much water and still managed to travel great distances.

  There was a lot of concern in the column about the Germans because they’d heard that the RAF men at Kubaiyah had been fired on by a Messerschmitt.

  ‘Rather more than a Messerschmitt,’ Jenno said.

  They had seen nothing of Craddock who seemed to be lying low. They’d heard rumours that he wasn’t in Lindley’s best books. Not only had he brought on the crisis in Mandadad – and it seemed everybody with the column had heard about it – but he had over-ruled Barber of the Engineers, and got them both holed up in the fort at Hatbah, from which they had managed to escape only in a hurry and minus their horses and a great deal of valuable engineering equipment. Finally, he had compounded his earlier errors on their return by trying to lead a headlong charge against the fort which had resulted in casualties and the loss of several vehicles.

  ‘Living in the past.’ Their Life Guardsman informant tossed the remains of his tea on the floor and mopped up the residue with a handful of twigs. ‘You don’t make headlong charges these days.’

  ‘Bit out of date,’ Boumphrey agreed.

  ‘Your chaps ever charge?’

  ‘Not if we can help it.’

  ‘Expect he can’t forget that bloody charge he ma
de for Allenby at Assoum that finished the Middle East campaign in 1918 and won him a medal. He’s been behaving like a hero ever since and wondering when he can do it again.’

  When Craddock finally appeared, he seemed to have lost none of his confidence and immediately glared at Boumphrey.

  ‘Young Boumphrey,’ he said. ‘What the devil are you doing here?’

  Boumphrey was conciliatory. ‘Came to meet you, sir. Thought a little help might be useful.’

  Craddock stared at him arrogantly. It had clearly never occurred to him that his precipitate action near the Habib abi Chahla had brought on the crisis that had involved the whole Middle East.

  ‘We’re doing very well without native troops,’ he growled. ‘And I see you’ve had to leave your donkeys behind.’

  Since Craddock had had to abandon his vast hunters too, any retort along those lines might have produced an arid sort of argument and Boumphrey avoided it by merely smiling.

  ‘Jenno, too, I see,’ Craddock went on. ‘With his armoured cars. Pity you chaps couldn’t have been doing your stuff in the air at Kubaiyah. From what I hear, they could have done with you there, instead of swanning around the desert.’

  Jenno followed Boumphrey’s example and smiled. It didn’t seem to be worth arguing about.

  They set off the following morning as soon as it was light, Boumphrey’s lorries in the lead, with Jenno’s armoured cars watching the flanks. Behind them the salvaged lorries growled forward, filling the silent desert with their rumblings. As they approached the sandhills, Boumphrey began to head for the valleys between them and almost immediately a staff car containing the brigadier came roaring up.

  ‘Where the devil are you taking us?’ he demanded.

  ‘Safely to the other side, sir,’ Boumphrey said mildly.

  ‘We’ve already got stuck once on those hills,’ the brigadier snapped. ‘We’ll get stuck twice as quickly in the valleys.’

  ‘I rather doubt it, sir,’ Boumphrey said, again mildly. ‘Doubtless you were following the line of hillocks because at home high ground’s usually harder than the valleys which tend to be soft and waterlogged. In the desert it’s a bit different. The high ground’s covered by light friable soil and gives way. The floor of the valleys becomes compacted by water in winter and that supplies a solid surface in summer.’