Fortunes of War

by Olivia Manning

  Harriet was due back in her office next morning and had to catch the last train. Leaving the restaurant, Guy was intercepted by a man who wished to gain favour for a stout youth who came lagging after him. The son had to take a book-keeping examination and the father pleaded for him. ‘I feel, Mr Professor, sir, he should have an extra understanding of this subject.’ The subject was not part of Guy’s curriculum but he listened patiently and gave what advice he could. The conversation ended with an invitation to cakes and liqueurs. When could the professor come? Any day of that week or the next week or the week after would be suitable. The whole future was open to him so there was no excuse, no chance of escape. Harriet made off before the invitation could be extended to her.

  In the hall she could hear the man shouting, ‘So, then, you come Thursday week, professor, sir?’

  ‘If Rommel doesn’t get here first.’

  ‘Very funny, professor, sir. You make a joke, eh? You make a joke?’

  Passing out through the black curtains, they found the city adazzle with moonlight. Harriet was reminded of another night of full moon, the night of Hugo Boulderstone’s twenty-first birthday. Just as tonight, they had left the blacked-out restaurant and entered this startling light that cut the buildings into shapes of silver and black. Harriet remembered Hugo’s face white in the moonlight and the voice that told her they would never see him again.

  Now Guy, his head full of productions and plays and all the theatre talk of the dinner-table, stopped to declaim, ‘On such a night as this . . .’ and pausing, turned expectantly to Aidan Pratt who took the lines up, speaking them in a voice so charged with emotion and melodic resonance that his two listeners marvelled:

  In such a night

  Troilus methinks mounted the Trojan walls

  And sighed his soul out to the Grecian tents

  Where Cressid lay that night . . .

  At the end of Jessica’s speech, he bowed to Guy, inviting him to continue.

  Guy, in his rich, pleasant voice, said, ‘In such a night stood Dido with a willow in her hand . . .’ and broke off to add, ‘And on this very shore.’

  ‘Somewhere further west,’ Aidan gravely amended and Harriet turned to hide her laughter.

  Walking towards the station, Guy persuaded Aidan to recite other speeches from other plays, adding others himself and so, quoting and counter-quoting, the thought of the invaders was lost in the poetic past. They left the sea behind and came into the gimcrack district near the station where a whole family might occupy a corner of a room. One of the last bombs had fallen here. Three houses had collapsed together on to the basement where people had been sheltering. Some of them had survived but were trapped inside. They were calling through cracks in the masonry, pleading to be released.

  Neighbours, mostly of the balani poor, stood in the road before the ruin, grinning with embarrassment because the pleadings were in vain. No one had the means to move the vast mountain of rubble heaped on top of those who cried.

  Guy, Harriet and Aidan, coming upon this scene, felt they should act or conduct action but realized they were as helpless as the rest. Seeing a policeman at the rear of the crowd, Guy asked what was being done for the prisoners. When would they be released? The man put on a show of official competence on hearing an English voice and said, ‘Bokra.’ Guy did not think this good enough. Something should be done there and then. The policeman said that the civil authorities had no rescue team and no machinery for lifting heavy material. They usually depended on the good will of British servicemen, but now the servicemen had gone away. The people in the base-bent would have to wait and see if help came. In an earlier raid, survivors were similarly trapped and had been still crying out a week later.

  ‘What happened in the end?’ Harriet asked but no one had the answer to her question.

  The survivors, overhearing what was being said, set up a more furious wailing and the policeman, going to the rubble, shouted in to them to be patient. Very soon, perhaps that very night, the whole German army would be here to dig them out. At this, the prisoners began to curse the British for bringing the house down on their heads.

  Guy said to Aidan, ‘If we organized these fellows into a gang, they could clear the site by passing the stuff from hand to hand.’ When the policeman returned, Guy repeated this plan in Arabic and the bystanders, realizing what he had in mind, wandered off in all directions.

  Soon there was no one left to form a gang and the policeman, twisting his face into a grimace of pity, apologized. ‘Those very poor men, effendi. Those men not strong.’ Guy had to agree. The fellah, weakened by hunger and bilharzia, could not do much. The policeman said, to reassure him, ‘Bokra police come. Bokra all very nice.’

  Harriet said, ‘Bokra fil mish-mish,’ and the policeman could not keep from laughing.

  Guy appealed to Aidan, ‘What’s to be done?’

  ‘Nothing, I’m afraid.’

  That being so, they had to go on, with the cries of the abandoned prisoners dying away behind them.

  Harriet’s train was about to leave and she had no time to argue with Guy but, leaning out of the carriage window, she pressed him, ‘Darling, when will you come to Cairo? Tomorrow?’

  ‘No, not tomorrow. I’ll come at the weekend.’

  Aidan was smiling with satisfaction that, at last, he had Guy to himself. The train began to move. Before it was under way, Harriet heard him beginning to tell Guy about his friend in Damascus who had gone out to see what was happening and died with a bullet in his head.

  Five

  The Column did not form itself as rapidly as had been expected. The infantry Was there but the guns and gunners had not arrived. Hardy was also expecting another lieutenant. Simon, who for the moment was in charge of both platoons, told Ridley that he had heard there was a serious shortage of artillery. Ridley mournfully agreed. ‘We could be hanging about here till Christmas.’

  Simon oversaw the digging of slit trenches and he envied the men because they had this occupation, but the digging was easy and the job quickly done. After that, boredom was general. They were occasionally strafed by a passing Messerschmidt but they were too far back to rate serious attention by the enemy. There were no diversions and nothing to do but camp chores. The day’s events were the visits from the mobile canteen and the Naafi truck that sold cigarettes and beer.

  Early in the morning, the men kicked a ball about — there was a belief that the enemy never attacked men at play — but as the heat increased, activity lost its pleasure and the players flagged. After the mid-day meal, the old soldiers would fit up a ground sheet or blanket to form a bivouac and the newcomers soon copied them. Everyone in camp slept through the afternoon. Simon, who had regarded sleep as a time-wasting necessity, now discovered it could be bliss. Whenever he had nothing better to do, he would get into his sleeping-bag, which protected as much against heat as against cold, and hiding his face from the light, would sink into sleep. Sleep devoured boredom. Sleep devoured time. Here, he thought, they were all like the Cairo beggars who at noon gave themselves thankfully to oblivion.

  But there were enemies that could deprive one of sleep. The flies were the worst. The newcomers became, after a while, inured to the bite of mosquitos and sand-flies, but nothing could repel the tormenting flies that buzzed and hit one’s face and dragged their feet over sweaty flesh. Simon told Ridley of the black blanket of breeding flies he had seen on the Red Sea shore and Ridley described the fly traps that the men constructed from wire. ‘At Mersa,’ he said, ‘we caught the buggers by the million.’ When the traps were full, there would be a mass burning of flies but the flies lived off the dead and the stench of the pyre would linger about the camp for days. For this reason fly burnings were now forbidden.

  After sleep came the evening and the men longed for evening as a parched man longs for water. When the sun touched the horizon, the pressure of heat lifted and the flies disappeared.

  At the end of their first day at the new camping site, Hardy�
��s driver put a folding table and chair outside the HQ truck and Hardy sat down with his radio to listen to the news. When Simon came within hearing distance, Hardy said, ‘You can get yourself a chair from the truck, Boulderstone,’ and so, each evening, Simon joined Hardy beside the radio set. After a while, attracted by the sound of the radio, the men began to collect at a distance, at first respectfully standing but, as the entertainment became a habit, seating themselves in groups, smoking and even occasionally making a comment which Hardy ignored. He sometimes grunted or gave, when a news item disturbed him, a bitter, coughing laugh, but he said nothing to Simon who, isolated at the table, would have preferred to be with the men.

  The Column was, joined by a gunner officer called Martin and a third chair was put out at sunset. Martin was a sandy Scot with an inflamed skin and a bristling red moustache. As he was a captain, Hardy could not ignore him altogether but neither man had much to say. On his second evening, Martin brought a bottle of whisky to the table and sent the driver to find glasses. When he poured drinks for himself and Hardy, he made a grudging movement in Simon’s direction but Simon said he only drank beer. That was Martin’s first and only gesture towards Simon who was then ignored by both officers. With them, but apart from them, Simon wondered if there was any creature in the army more wretched than a subaltern who had no contact with his seniors and was not allowed to consort with his men.

  Talking to Ridley about the non-arrival of the guns, he said, ‘We might have been living it up in Cairo all this time. Why were they in such a hurry to get us out here.’

  Ridley, solemn with the consciousness of his own wisdom, said, ‘We’ve got to be here. That’s the point, see.’

  ‘Even if we’re doing nothing?’

  ‘Lots of chaps out here are doing nothing, but they’ve got to be here. What’d happen if they wasn’t?’

  Simon laughed. ‘I see what you mean.’

  ‘After all sir, it’s experience.’

  ‘Pretty dreary experience, sarge.’ Simon’s early apprehension had begun to fade. So little had happened that he began to think that nothing ever would happen and he wrote home to say what an odd business it was, living here in the desert, like nomads, with nothing to do. In his opinion, they were worse off than the nomad Arabs who sometimes passed the camp. The Arabs had tents, and tents were homes of a sort, but the army men slept under an open sky. For several nights Simon was worried not only by the lack of cover but the intrusive magnificence of the Egyptian night. The stars were too many and too bright. They were like eyes: waking in mid-sleep, finding them staring down on him, he was unnerved, imagining they questioned what he was doing there. And there was the vast emptiness of the desert itself. The leaguered trucks formed a protective pale but as there were only four trucks, they could not join up. Between them could be seen dark distances that stretched for ever — and what might not come out of the distance while they slept? Some men found the space about them so threatening, they would seek refuge under the lorries. This was a fool thing to do, Ridley told them. There were freak rain storms, even in summer, and lorries had been known to sink into the wet sand and smother the men while they slept.

  But in spite of their fears, the dawn came too soon for them. The guards, whose watch had been spent in the last bitter hours of the night, had the job of rousing the camp. Their shouts of ‘Wakey, wakey’ sounded a note of heartless relish for the men dragged out of sleep. Getting themselves up in the steel-cold daybreak, they could see no reason in their lives.

  The first warmth of sunlight lifted the spirits. For a while the sand was the colour of a lightly cooked biscuit, stones threw shadows as long as sword blades and the whole desert was as airy and exhilarating as an endless seashore. Simon thought, ‘If only the sun would stand still . . .’ but the sun inched up and up till its heat was an affront to the human body. The water ration those days was a gallon per man and this had to serve for washing, shaving, washing of clothes, cooking and drinking. Simon was tempted at times to drink the lot and leave himself unwashed.

  Hardy, speaking as though he had given the matter long thought, told Simon to find himself a batman. ‘Got any preference, Boulderstone?’

  ‘I’d like to have Arnold, sir.’

  ‘Arnold?’ The choice seemed to surprise Hardy. ‘You think he could cope?’

  ‘I’ve found him very capable, sir.’

  ‘Indeed? I don’t know much about him but Ridley thinks he’s a bit of a wet.’

  Simon said, ‘He’s all right, sir,’ and Arnold was granted him. He understood Ridley’s doubts about Arnold but he also understood Arnold. What he knew of him, he had discovered by direct questioning. Unquestioned, Arnold was not one to reveal himself. Simon had several times found him gazing at some desert creature — a spider or lizard or a beetle rolling a ball of dung before it — and realized that his interest went beyond curiosity. On the last occasion, Simon asked, ‘What did you do in civvy street, Arnold?’

  ‘Student, sir.’

  Simon had to ask three more questions before he discovered that Arnold had studied Natural History at Durham. He had taken his degree a week before the outbreak of war. He not only observed the desert creatures, he was forced to observe the games the men played with them. The men would catch a couple of spiders — not tarantulas that were dangerous to handle, but the big white spiders, of fearful appearance but harmless — and goad the creatures into fighting each other. Or, a more popular and spectacular sport, they would pour petrol round a scorpion and light it so the creature was ringed with fire. They would then gleefully watch its attempt to break out until, in the end, unable to endure the heat, its sting would droop slowly and penetrate the scales on its back. While the other men whooped with joy, Arnold would watch as though he shared the creature’s agony.

  Simon thought it wretched sport but he recognized the men’s need for some sort of diversion in this God-forsaken wilderness. Arnold, helplessly shifting his feet or twisting his hands together, felt only for the animal world. Usually he was silent but once he burst out, ‘Why do you do it? Why do you do it?’

  The men laughed at him and said, ‘Look what he’d do to us if he got the chance!’

  ‘And why not? We don’t belong here. This is his habitat — his home, I mean. We’ve no right here. He has to defend himself against us. Why not leave the poor things alone?’

  Arnold was a joke. The men said, ‘Poor old Arn, he’s sand-happy,’ but the officers were less tolerant. The outburst had been talked about and Martin said to Simon, ‘I don’t know why you want that squit as a batman. You can’t trust those quiet types and that one, he’s nothing but an old woman.’

  Ridley was held to be the most knowledgeable man in camp. He was in Signals and so had the means of picking up information. At work in the HQ truck, he gossiped with other transmitters, picking up and purveying all the rumours, scandals and jokes of the line. When not at work, he talked to the drivers of the supply trucks that visited the camp and if they had nothing to tell him, he usually had something to tell them.

  Simon, for some reason, was a favourite with Ridley who would come to him first with any news worth passing on. Ridley was ready to help Simon because Simon accepted help and advice with gratitude and humility. Ridley could sort out the noises that came from the forward position and could tell Simon which was the sound of a field gun and which a medium or ack-ack. He warned Simon about minefields and uncharted areas where a jerry can or an old baked beans tin might be a booby trap, set to blow your head off.

  Simon was troubled by this information and not understanding why, he brooded on it until suddenly, like a returning dream, he remembered the dead boy in the Fayoum house. All the incidents of that day had become remote for him and the people he had met seemed to him beings of an unreal world. He now knew the real world was the fighting world where his companions had a substance and significance that set them apart from the rest of mankind. Only Edwina had circumstance in his world because she was Hugo’s girl and
Hugo was constantly in his mind. One day, feeling he now knew Ridley well enough, he asked him, ‘Could you discover the where-abouts of a Captain Hugo Boulderstone?’

  ‘With respect, sir — a relation of yours?’

  ‘My brother.’

  ‘Ah!’ Regard for this near relationship lengthened Ridley’s long face. ‘Shouldn’t be difficult. Not what you’d call a common name.’

  Soon after, Ridley discovered that there was a Captain Hugo Boulderstone attached to the 6th New Zealand Brigade at Bab el Qattara. Simon eagerly asked, ‘What chance of getting a lift down there?’

  ‘Couldn’t say, sir. You’d have to bring it up with the major.’

  Simon brought it up that evening, beginning, ‘Do you think, sir, I could get a lift down to Bab el Qattara? I’d like . . .’

  ‘Don’t be a fool, Boulderstone,’ Hardy interrupted him, ‘you can’t get a lift anywhere. You’re not out here on a sightseeing trip.’

  Next day Ridley had word that the Bab el Qattara box had been evacuated and German forces had moved in.

  ‘That doesn’t sound too good, does it?’ said Simon.

  ‘There’s no knowing. Chaps think the Auk could be up to something.’

  Two field guns and two anti-tank guns and their gunners joined the Column which was now complete except for the lieutenant due to take over the second platoon. He arrived next day when Simon was helping Arnold, whose job it was to collect rations from platoon headquarters. Simon and Arnold were both on-loading the section’s water-cans and sacks for supplies when a staff car drew up a few yards from the truck. Simon had thrown off his sweat-soaked shirt: his shorts needed a wash and his desert boots were covered with sand. Arnold looked no better than he did and the lieutenant, fresh from the discipline of base camp, eyed the pair of them with acute distaste. Wearing his best gabardine, carrying gloves and cane, he had obviously got himself up to present himself to the officers of the Column. Extruding his superiority, he shouted, ‘I say, you fellows, is Major Hardy about?’