The Old Trade of Killing

by John Harris

  Copyright & Information

  The Old Trade of Killing

  First published in 1966

  Copyright: Juliet Harris; House of Stratus 1966-2012

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  The right of John Harris to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

  This edition published in 2012 by House of Stratus, an imprint of

  Stratus Books Ltd., Lisandra House, Fore Street, Looe,

  Cornwall, PL13 1AD, UK.

  Typeset by House of Stratus.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.

  EAN ISBN Edition

  0755102290 9780755102297 Print

  0755127501 9780755127504 Mobi/Kindle

  0755127781 9780755127788 Epub

  This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author’s imagination.

  Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.

  www.houseofstratus.com

  About the Author

  John Harris, wrote under his own name and also the pen names of Mark Hebden and Max Hennessy.

  He was born in 1916 and educated at Rotherham Grammar School before becoming a journalist on the staff of the local paper. A short period freelancing preceded World War II, during which he served as a corporal attached to the South African Air Force. Moving to the Sheffield Telegraph after the war, he also became known as an accomplished writer and cartoonist. Other ‘part time’ careers followed.

  He started writing novels in 1951 and in 1953 had considerable success when his best-selling The Sea Shall Not Have Them was filmed. He went on to write many more war and modern adventure novels under his own name, and also some authoritative non-fiction, such as Dunkirk. Using the name Max Hennessy, he wrote some very accomplished historical fiction and as Mark Hebden, the ‘Chief Inspector’ Pel novels which feature a quirky Burgundian policeman.

  Harris was a sailor, an airman, a journalist, a travel courier, a cartoonist and a history teacher, who also managed to squeeze in over eighty books. A master of war and crime fiction, his enduring novels are versatile and entertaining.

  Quote

  You are learning, between willing and unwilling,

  The trade of fighting, the old trade of killing.

  Arundell Esdaile

  Prologue

  Summer 1942

  We’d known for weeks that something was coming. We were all old hands by that time and after two years in the desert you developed a sharper ear than most for desert sounds and a keener feeling for military moods; and somehow, in spite of the briefings we’d had to be ready to move on into Libya, we’d all long since guessed that things weren’t as they ought to be and that before long the route was going to change to east again towards Egypt and not further west as we’d been told.

  We were waiting in a neat little hollow scooped out by the wind, with high sides where you could post a sentry and where you could remain unseen and even light a fire to boil tea. We’d stopped there several nights before, with the heat like an oven and the wind whipping up the surface of the desert in clouds so that we’d bad to do everything with our eyes half closed and our backs to the sand as it had piled in drifts against the wheels of the vehicles.

  The land stretched away from us under the full blue of the sky. The coarse gravelly surface beyond the few ridges of dunes where we waited was hard and looked like brown sugar, with clumps of camel-thorn and rock here and there. It was tawny-yellow and dead, though the dunes were sculptured into fabulously beautiful shapes by the wind, and the camel-thorn made a tremulous shadow pattern of sorts where the land was flat.

  We’d sat there for what seemed weeks now, tending our weapons and measuring our water in precise drops so that there was always some to spare for the radiators, never once letting up in our vigil, straining our gaze against the glittering light of the desert, watching not only towards our front but also towards our rear as we waited for the tanks to come up and relieve us. We’d laid down beside our vehicles at night in the cooling sand, our ears full of the mutter and rumble of guns to the north, our eyes, prickling for want of sleep, seeing the flicker and flash of distant artillery along the coast and alert all the time for the unexpected geometric shapes against the sky that meant enemy vehicles.

  We knew nothing, of course. We’d been told to wait there and it was nobody’s job to tell us why. The only news we picked up was from the BBC on the receiver.

  Near the coast road, hundreds and hundreds of vehicles had been bumping across the sand for days as the Eighth Army had got itself into motion towards Libya. Nobody had come near us, however, except for a few stray British fighters from the north. Rommel had been taken by surprise. We all knew that. He hadn’t even been near his headquarters when the first blows had fallen on his startled troops.

  Up there, young men from the Rhine and the Black Forest and the Harz Mountains and the great cities of Hamburg and Berlin and the marshy plains of Prussia waited with jaws clenched and the tense look of agonised concentration, their eyes ringed with exhaustion and lack of sleep, knowing their lives depended on the attention they’d paid to detail. As we’d done more than once, they were watching the approaching line of shell-flashes and ducking at the whirring stones and shell-splinters, biting their lips and clenching their fingers until their nails dug into their palms, praying all the time that the next lump of shattered flesh wouldn’t be their own.

  ‘Think Tobruk’s been relieved, sir?’ the wireless operator asked, looking up at me.

  I shrugged and he went on, wishfully, voicing the thoughts of us all. ‘It’s about time,’ he said. ‘If they’ve done it right, it ought to be a piece of cake.’

  I nodded, saying nothing, but missing nothing either. I was still hardly more than a boy at the time, desperately young to be leading a group of men like these with their deadly weapons and the dust-covered vehicles in which they had learned to live. But, like so many more of my age, I’d acquired a precise consideration for every precaution, a care that belonged to someone older in years than I was, that must have made them somehow trust me, so although they called me ‘Pat’ or even ‘Son’ to my face, they showed a surprising respect for the two pips on the shoulder of my oil-stained bush-jacket.

  I had all the bad hats of the Group with me, I knew, and I sometimes stopped to wonder why I was stuck with them. The Colonel had once encouraged me by saying, ‘It’s the bad hats who fight best when things are sticky,’ and to a certain extent he was right, but it didn’t make life any easier between the fighting.

  I’d always assumed it was because I was the youngest officer in the outfit and that nobody else would have them, but, curiously, in spite of barely having got rid of the down on my cheeks, I’d never had much trouble with them.

  In my sentimental moods I liked to think it was because I was a good officer, because I considered their comfort and took care of their safety, but in my heart of hearts I knew it was less of my doing than that of Morena, my sergeant mechanic, a hard, square-faced regular with a tough, lean body, who never smiled much and had been in the habit of mothering me ever since I’d first arrived as a dewy-eyed second lieutenant just out from England.

  I’d learned a lot since then, but Morena still managed to drop his hints on what I should do, just as he always had in the first days, savin
g me from embarrassment or disaster, his tips always arriving just when I was most doubtful. It was Morena who’d chosen our present position in the hollow, discovering it with the instinct of an old desert fighter and dropping his suggestion that we halt in such a way that for a time I’d almost believed I’d found it myself. Morena would have been a good officer if he hadn’t been such a good sergeant. Though I’d learned how to run my little party, I still knew where its strength lay and who it was that held it together, because they were a tough enough crew to require someone just that little bit harder than they were.

  Nimmo, for instance, my corporal: none of us knew much about Nimmo apart from the fact that he’d been at one of the great public schools and that he could have been a captain or even a major if he hadn’t been such a trouble-maker, because he’d got twice the flair for it most of the time than I had. He had the background and the instincts, and with that flaming red hair and those handsome features of his, all it required to make a leader. As it was, however, he couldn’t even keep the stripes on his arm for more than six months at a time. He was a lot older than I was and had a faintly contemptuous attitude towards me, because in spite of the pips on my shoulder, I was still the youngster of the party.

  He was always on his own, the only one among us, even including me, who didn’t have a nickname. Even Morena, with his black hair and dark Spanish eyes, was ‘Wop’, a term that covered all Latin races in the same way that ‘Wog’ covered all coloured races, but in spite of being an artist of sorts, a fact that would have got anyone else called ‘Raphael’ or ‘Rembrandt’ or something like that, Nimmo had always been just ‘Jimmy’ – Jimmy Nimmo, an odd clownish name that went so incongruously with his background and accent. Perhaps it was because somehow he never showed much affection towards any of the others and never asked it for himself. His was a sardonic manner and it was one of his jokes to carry a cheque-book around with him wherever he went and get people to cash dud cheques for him. He regarded it as rather a game, and there were always plenty of strangers around in the desert who could be impressed with a cheque-book handled with confidence.

  Then there was Leach, six-foot-four and sixteen stone, an arch-scrounger who was inevitably known as ‘Tiny’, an uncertain figure of sudden moods, sullen tempers and rocky steadiness in battle, a man whose greatest delight was to slave all day with a shovel or lift heavy equipment that normally took two men to handle, showing off his strength and willing to dig anyone’s slit trench just for the pleasure of using his muscles. And Houston, with the clipped accents of Carlisle, whose chief interests at all times were women and seeing that the tea was brewing; and pipe-smoking Gester, who’d been a Pole when there’d been a Poland and whose one joy in life was to kill Germans; and Bummer Ward, who got his name from the fact that he was always short of money and was constantly trying to wheedle it out of others; and Morris, who liked to read poetry in his spare time – and was tough enough to get away with it; and Smollett and Pike and a few more.

  It was still a matter of wonder to me that such men would accept directions without question from me, Patrick Alan Doyle, until recently only a prefect at school. Usually, I put it down to the fact that I was simply part of the Group, and they’d been in the desert long enough to cherish their own kind.

  They were all tough old-timers, a special breed of men with sun-dried, desert-wise faces who could remain shirtless and capless even under the burnished sun. They were burnt an Arab brown and marked with months of desert sores. Their rations and cigarettes and their hot sweet tea were all that mattered to them, and they were contemptuous of anyone whose base was nearer to Cairo than theirs.

  There were a few beards among them and one or two Arab head-dresses – the most gorgeous of all inevitably that of Houston, who was a great man for the girls – worn mostly out of open and undiluted affection, because they looked good when they got among more conventional troops. They had learned to live easily in the desert and were untouched by the changing fortunes of war. England had long since been forgotten, because none of them from the first day they’d left it had ever expected to see it again, and even Cairo and Alex were only somewhere to go for a break. One of the deserted beaches to the north served them just as well for a weekend off.

  They always had one eye squinting cynically at the brassy bowl of the sky for the sudden gleam of wings and one ear always cocked for the thud-thud of guns or the clatter of tank tracks in the silence. They had learned to ignore all shooting unless it was immediately dangerous, but when it was they leapt unhesitatingly and instinctively for the right kind of cover. They cursed constantly, using the same monotonous word for everything – at the enemy, the vehicles and me, but curiously always with a strange sort of warmth, because they were all – the enemy, the vehicles and me – sharing their lot. That was the point. We were all in it together, and it bred a strange sort of oneness that completely overrode rank. Nobody appeared to show anybody else any respect at all, but underlying all the chaffing there was an immense regard for each other, bred of interdependence and the knowledge that their companions were all experts in their own way.

  In spite of the harsh comments in the ‘Conduct’ column of their files, I thought the world of them and I’d fought tooth and nail more than once against the Provost people when one of them had been in trouble.

  The muttering that had been going on for days swelled up again that night and there were those bright flickerings in the north once more, and the sullen rumble of guns, with the occasional thud-thud-thud of nearer firing. Then the next day it seemed to die away to nothing again and for a while there was a lull, and with our sharp sense of desert fighting we knew that this was the crucial moment, after which the battle would begin to move swiftly – east or west. Always it had followed the same pattern – first, the thin rods of wireless antennae coming over the horizon and then the tanks, jinking and swaying as they cut between the patches of camel-thorn, and men running as the bullets and cannon shells traced pathways across the stony floor of the desert, whining and whistling and tumbling end-over-end as they came to the limit of their flight. It was always the heavy blow, followed by confused fighting, then a frantic haring across the desert, with one side or the other in hot pursuit.

  It was anybody’s guess which way we’d go this time, but we all had our private views as we found ourselves waiting with our nerves on edge for what was going to happen next. From what we could pick up from the radio receiver, it seemed that both sides had had a pretty severe mauling, but the British attack had not been as successful as had been expected, and it stuck out a mile that something else was going to happen before long, so that we hung on tensely, not speaking much, going about our work silently. Then we noticed that the German R/T traffic, picked up by the worried wireless operator with his head down over his set, had begun to grow, and we could hear the fire of the 88s beginning to build up in the west, and the following night we heard the far-distant growling of heavy engines in low gear that spoke of large numbers of tanks on the move.

  ‘Hope to Christ it’s our lot,’ Leach said.

  Houston looked up from the book of strip-pictures that he’d acquired in Alex and grinned. ‘It’s ours all right,’ he reassured him. ‘It’s a move the General thought up in his bath.’

  There’d been a lot of confident talk, of course, in the days before we’d left base, especially from the briskly moustachioed and laundered gentry who came up from headquarters to brief us. ‘It’ll be a walk-over this time,’ they’d told us. ‘There’s nothing to it.’

  But the people who lived at headquarters were always more optimistic than the men who lived in the desert – especially people like us who were the antennae of the army, the listening posts, the long-range groups way ahead of the main body – the men who lived all the time in slit trenches and bivouac tents and in the backs of lorries and jeeps out in the baking sand, covered with dust, the lines on their faces deepening more with every day they stared at the setting sun. And it was too quiet sud
denly, and we were all nervous.

  Houston was talking to Nimmo and Leach now, his voice a little louder than it should have been, and I could hear it plainly from where I sat with my maps.

  ‘…that belly dancer in that bar where we had the kus-kus,’ he was saying. ‘The one who used to pick up pennies between her tits. Remember when Gester heated up half a dollar for her on the top of his pipe. Jesus, that made her jump!’

  The laughter came a little too readily and a little too loudly and died a little too quickly, and very soon they were all silent again, waiting, watching, listening. They had begun to guess what was happening up in the north and they didn’t like it very much. We were too isolated, too much out on a limb.

  While the army probed beyond the ‘boxes’ and the dumps, seeking a gap through the suddenly stiffening ranks of the enemy, we were on our own, unsupported, our position unknown to the RAF who might have kept an eye on us, watching the end of the wire the Italians had erected from Siwa to Sollum to keep the Senussi out of Libya, with the dunes of the Great Sand Sea on our left, the dust blowing off the crests like smoke from a set of factory chimneys. There’d been a little muttering over the mugs of tea at the thought of it, and they’d kept their eyes on my face, looking for signs one way or the other, but, young as I was I’d learned long since to keep my feelings hidden.

  To the men around the lorries, our stay there seemed pointless, an isolated post out in the desert, but I knew we’d been sent there because Intelligence had it that any counterattack by the Germans would come along the coast while the Italians would make a breakthrough in the south. ‘Winforce’ was to the north of us, with Grant tanks, then the armoured cars on our right watching towards the west; and finally us – three jeeps and a couple of three-tonners – spot-ball, right on the end of the line, on the lookout for hit-and-run Mark IVs.