Recognizing the voice rather than the man, Simon said, ‘Good God, it’s Trench,’ and would have embraced him, had not the new arrival taken a disgusted step back.
‘Who the devil are you?’
‘Don’t you recognize me? I’m Simon Boulderstone. Where’ve you been? We’ve been waiting for you.’
Trench’s fair hair had bleached white under the Egyptian sun. With his fine, regular features and military moustache, he could have posed for a portrait of the ideal young officer, but at that moment he lacked the calm assurance for the part. Instead, disconcerted, he looked Simon over to make sure he had not lost officer rank then, smiling sheepishly, he gave a halting account of his movements since leaving the ship at Suez. He and Codley had been taken to Infantry Base Depot to await a posting. Giving Simon a reproving glance, he muttered, ‘How is it you’re doing what you’re not supposed to do?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You’re loading a truck.’
Simon laughed. In that moment it was revealed to him that Trench was an ass. His friend, whom he had admired beyond all other men, was one of those asses who thought familiarity with the men was ‘bad for discipline’. He was a ‘spit and polish’ officer, a sort of man Simon despised.
‘You need to get some service in,’ Simon said. ‘When you’ve been out in the blue for a bit, you’ll be glad to do anything to break the monotony.’ He turned to Arnold and winked at him. ‘OK, Arnold, carry on. Don’t forget oranges and cheese. Try and bag some fresh meat this time. If they offer you pilchards again, tell them where they can stuff them.’
Arnold saluted with uncustomary smartness. ‘Sir. We could do with some Cruft’s Specials, sir.’
‘They’ll let you have plenty of those.’
‘And it’s our turn for jam, sir.’
‘Good show.’
Arnold’s manner was deferential and Simon, seeing him off, gave him every possible attention, apparently forgetting that Trench was waiting to be led to Major Hardy. The truck went off. Simon, turning away from it, saw Trench with surprise. ‘You still there? Come along then, I’ll take you to the HQ truck.’
They walked together in silence, both knowing that the old intimacy was lost to them. Some time passed before they thought about it again or understood how, or why, it had ever existed.
The Column, completed, was ordered to prepare for a move and Hardy made an inspection of weapons. As he walked with Martin between the ranks, Ridley asked in the obsequious whine he reserved for senior officers, ‘Think we’ll get a scrap, sir?’
‘Could be. Could be.’
‘Make a nice change, sir.’
Hardy was giving nothing away but Simon felt his apprehensions revive. Bored during the waiting days, he would have wished for action. Now action threatened, he thought longingly of boredom. Doing his best to appear calm, he asked Ridley, ‘What’s it like, being under fire?’
‘You don’t feel so much at the time. It’s the thinking about it, is worst.’
‘You mean, you get your blood up?’
‘That’s right. Couldn’t’ve put it better m’self. Back here you think you don’t hate jerry, but when you go in, it’s different. P’raps you see a pal cop it — a decent bloke, p’raps, what’s done you a favour. You think “Right you bastards, I’ll get you for that” and so you go in fighting mad. You get to hate them like hell. You got to, y’see, you wouldn’t be no use if you didn’t.’
The thought of being injected with hate, as with a drug, did nothing to reassure Simon. Hate could make you reckless but recklessness did not make you safe. During the night before the dawn departure he woke several times. Hearing the other men stirring and muttering, he knew they were as tense as he was.
Next morning delay would have been welcome, but this time they started as the first cherry red strip of light appeared between the black earth and the black sky. Simon felt no inclination to talk. He was beside Arnold in the leading truck and the leading truck was the one that copped it if they struck an uncharted minefield. As the strip widened, the desert was flushed with red. Simon had been provided with a compass for this journey which took them over sand flats as featureless as mid-ocean. The sun rose and the hours passed. Soon enough they were in the dusty glare of noon, the most painful hour of day, with mirage stretching like water over the track. A hill appeared in the distance, not high but unique in this part of the desert.
Simon stirred himself to ask what it was. Arnold said, ‘It’s the Ridge, sir.’
The Ridge, as they drew near it, could be seen in detail, a long, narrow outcrop of rock, its flanks fluted as though innumerable rivulets had run down it for centuries. Simon had been told that they were going south of the Ridge so he imagined the journey would soon be over. As they came level with the rock, a wind sprang up and ran along the rock base lifting the sand like the edge of a carpet.
‘We’re in for a bit of a storm, sir,’ Arnold said. ‘Think we should call a halt?’
Simon was uncertain but as they rounded the eastern end of the Ridge, the sand had thickened like a fog in the air and Arnold advised him, ‘If we brew up now, sir, it could be all over by the time we’re finished.’ He put up the flag and the Column was halted. Simon, running back to consult with Hardy, was thankful to find they had done the right thing.
They drank their tea, bunched together with backs to the wind, waiting for the storm to die down. Instead, it grew worse and Ridley said morosely, ‘Could go on for days.’
Breathing sand, eating sand, blinded and deafened by sand, the men crouched by the trucks for shelter and picked sand from their noses and the interstices of their ears. Ridley became more gloomy. ‘Known this go on for weeks,’ but at sunset, when the air glowed as though the sand had become incandescent, the wind dropped and the world became visible again. In the slanting light the Ridge with its fluted sides looked like a monstrous millipede. Beneath it, there was a large encampment and Simon would have been glad to leaguer to its rear but Hardy decreed that they make another mile before darkness fell. As they moved off, guns opened up behind them and Simon, his stomach muscles contracting, felt he should have written home before leaving camp. He thought of his mother first, then remembered his wife. He should have sent letters to both of them, preparing them for whatever happened to him, but in terms that made light of it all. He tried to think of his wife but the few days of their honeymoon had disappeared into the past. He made an effort to recall her face and saw instead the long, fair, drooping hair of Edwina Little. Troubled by his infidelity, he took out his wallet and gazed at the photograph of Anne and all he could feel was that her face was not the right face. He wanted to see the laughing, sunburnt face that had leant towards him from the balcony in Garden City but the truth was, no face could distract him now. The whole of the pleasurable world had dwindled out of sight, leaving him with nothing but a sense of loss and an awareness of the danger he was in.
The Column leaguered in a service area where supply dumps and transports were camouflaged with nets. It looked safe enough, rather like a vast workshop, but the trucks had just drawn up when the guns started again and hammered their senses as they sat round Hardy’s radio waiting for the news. The newsreader announced that later in the evening there would be a commentary on ‘The Alamein Line’. Simon asked Hardy, ‘What’s that, sir?’ and Hardy, who would not admit ignorance, said, ‘If you pay attention and listen, Boulderstone, you’ll find out.’ This admonition was so familiar to Simon, it occurred to him that Hardy had been a schoolmaster in his civilian days. The commentator told them that the Alamein Line stretched from the coastal salt lakes to a mysterious hole in the desert called the Qattara Depression and his description suggested that there were bodies of well-armoured troops in close formation for forty miles. None of the officers questioned this but Simon, who had seen nothing of such a line, spoke to Ridley before going to his sleeping-bag. ‘I say, sarge, you heard that about the Alamein Line. Where exactly is it?’
Ridley,
as much at a loss as he was, gave the matter thought and said, ‘This is it, I reckon. There’s the South Africans up north and a couple of Indian divs down south, and the Kiwis are under the Ridge, and our chaps are in between. They’re a bit thin on the ground but it’s a line all right.’
Ridley seemed satisfied but Simon, who had pictured the front as a carnage of gun-fire, bursting shells and barbed wire hung with the dead and dying, felt disappointment as well as relief. ‘It’s not much of a line, sarge.’
‘It’s all we’ve got. Still, it’s not what we’ve got but what they haven’t got that’ll make the difference. It said on the intercom today that the Auk’s trying to make an army out of remnants. That’s it — remnants. The Auk’s a great bloke but I don’t fancy his chances.’
‘Do you fancy anyone’s chances, sarge?’
‘Ah, now, sir!’ Ridley pulled himself up and spoke with confidence, ‘We’ll do for them, yet — you wait and see.’
Driving next morning into open desert, the guns booming behind, the Column was as exposed as a fly on a window-pane. Arnold, peering out for markers, also kept an eye on the sky but it was not till mid-morning, when they had stopped to brew up, that enemy aircraft observed them. Ridley was carrying tea mugs over to the officers when three Italian Macchis buzzed the trucks. Before any of the men could drop to the ground, bullets were spitting about them. The officers sprang back and Hardy, the eldest of them and the most alarmed, lost his balance and fell, his voice rising in a thin, protesting cry, ‘Oh, my wife and kids!’
The Macchis, having strafed the Column from end to end, flew off. No one had been hit. Ridley helped Hardy to his feet and everyone behaved as though the fall had been an unfortunate trip-up and said, ‘Bad luck, sir.’ Simon, thinking he alone had heard Hardy’s cry, decided it must never be mentioned, not even to Arnold.
Driving on, they came into a region where rocky outcrops, miniatures of the great Ridge, rose, one after the other, out of the flat mardam. These outcrops changed in colour, the usual Sahara yellow taking on a tinge of pink and the pink growing and deepening until the rocks and sand had the faded rose colour of old red sandstone. Hardy called a halt between the rock ridges and the Column leaguered in a wide, flat area, like a rose pink ballroom aglow with sunset. In the distance, when evening cleared the air, a dramatic range of high ridges could be seen on the horizon. Hardy, consulting his maps, told the officers that the range marked the terminal of the line. Beyond it was the Depression and the Depression, it seemed, could not be crossed. So the Column need go no further. ‘Tomorrow,’ he said, ‘the men’ll make slit trenches and dig in the vehicles.’
They had arrived.
Six
Rumour came to Cairo of a battle fought inside Egypt at a railway halt called El Alamein but, it seemed, nothing had been settled. The Germans were still a day’s tank drive away and their broadcasts claimed they were merely awaiting fresh supplies. Any day now the advance would begin again. Egypt would be liberated and Rommel and his men would keep their assignation with the ladies of Alexandria.
Though the situation had not changed, the panic had died. Those who were, or believed themselves to be, at risk, had gone. Those who remained felt a sense of respite but were warned they might have to leave at short notice. They were advised to keep a bag packed.
When Harriet, returning for luncheon, found a note at the pension to say Dobson had rung her, she supposed the evacuation order had gone out. She took out the small suitcase, the only luggage she had brought out of Greece, and put together a few toilet articles. The suitcase was already packed. She could leave in minutes, but she did not intend to leave without Guy. She thought of a dozen arguments to bring down on Dobson when he telephoned again and his voice, when she heard it, startled her. His tone was jocular. Instead of ordering her to the station, he invited her to meet him for drinks at Groppi’s: ‘Come about five-thirty.’
‘You sound as though you had good news?’
‘Perhaps I have,’ he spoke teasingly. ‘I’ll tell you when I see you.’
Back at the office, she looked through the news sheets, but they gave no cause for rejoicing. Whatever Dobson would tell her, it could have nothing to do with the war.
That morning she had heard that her job at the Embassy would not last much longer. The promised team from the States was about to fly to Egypt. Mr Buschman, not caring to tell her himself, had sent her a typed note. Dispirited, she went to the wall map where the black pins converged upon the Middle East.
She had taken it over during the great days of the Russian counter-offensive when everyone was saying that the Russian winter would defeat Hitler as it had defeated Napoleon. Marking the Russian advances, she rejoiced as though pushing the enemy back with her own hands. Guy had picked up a new song from one of his left-wing friends and repeatedly sang it to what was, more or less, the tune of The Lincolnshire Poacher:
To say that Hitler can’t be beat
Is just a lot of cock,
For Marshal Timoshenko’s men
Are pissing through von Bock.
The Führer makes the bloomers and his generals take the rap,
But Joe, he smokes his pipe and wears a taxi-driver’s cap.
In the desert, too, the Germans had been in retreat. The British troops, who had been making a hero of Rommel, now turned their admiration on to Stalin and the Russian generals. But that had all passed. Harriet, bringing the black pins closer to the Kuban river, thought, ‘A few more miles and they’ll have the whole Caucasus.’
Inside Egypt, the black pins stretched from the coast to a hatched-in area of the desert named on the map ‘Qattara Depression’. When Mr Buschman wandered over to see who was where, she asked him what this Depression was. He stood for some moments, rubbing his small, plump hand over the back of his neck, and then gave up: ‘All I know is, it’s the end of the line.’
‘But why is it the end of the line? Why don’t they come round that way? If they did, they could surround the whole British army.’
‘Too right, mem. They surely could.’
Harriet asked Iqal about the Depression but he had never heard of it.
‘How is your German these days?’
He smiled an arch smile, the runnels of his face quivering so he looked like coffee cream on the boil. ‘I brush it up now and then, but I don’t know! These Germans should make more haste.’
‘I told you they wouldn’t get here.’
‘That is true, Mrs Pringle, and perhaps you spoke right. But on the other hand, perhaps not. It says in the broadcasts they regather their forces and then they come — zoom! So what is one to think? See here, Mrs Pringle, they exhort us, “Rise against your oppressors,” they say, ‘Kill them and be free.’”
‘You don’t think the English are oppressors, do you?’
Iqal raised his great shoulders. ‘Sometimes, yes. Sometimes, no. When they break through the palace gates and tell my king what to do, what would you call them? Are they not oppressors?’
‘We’re fighting a war, Iqal. If the Egyptians really felt oppressed, they would turn on us, wouldn’t they?’
‘Ah, Mrs Pringle, we are not fools. My friends say, “Time enough when the Germans are at the gate — then we cut the English throats.” ’
‘Oh, come now, Iqal, you wouldn’t cut my throat?’
Iqal giggled. ‘Believe me, Mrs Pringle, if I would cut your throat, I do it in a kind and considerate manner.’
‘You wouldn’t hurt me?’
‘No, no, Mrs Pringle, indeed I would not.’
Harriet reached Groppi’s when the sun was low in the sky. She passed through the bead curtain into the brown, chocolate-scented cake and sweet shop as the great round golden chocolate boxes were reflecting the golden sky. The garden café, surrounded by high walls, was already in shadow. It was a large café, sunk like a well among the houses, with a floor-covering of small stones and it disappointed people who saw it for the first time. A young officer had said to Harriet, �
�The chaps in the desert think Groppi’s is the Garden of Sensual Delights — but, good grief, it isn’t even a garden!’
It was, she said, a desert garden, the best anyone could hope for so far from the river. It was a garden of indulgences where the Levantine ladies came to eye the staff officers who treated it as a home from home.
The ground was planted, not with trees, but with tables and chairs and coloured umbrellas. But under one wall, where there was a strip of imported earth, zinnias grew and an old, hardy creeping plant spread out and up and covered lattices and stretched as far as the enclosure that stood at one end of the café site. This creeper sometimes put out a few copper-coloured, trumpet-shaped flowers that enhanced the garden idea. But this display, and there was not much of it, would have died in an hour without the water that seeped continually through the holes in a canvas hose. In spite of the water, the mat of leaves hung dry and loose, shifting and rustling in the hot wind. Only the tough, thick-petalled zinnias thrived in this heat.
When Harriet entered, the safragis were taking down the umbrellas, leaving the tables open to the evening air. At this hour people were crowding in, searching for friends or somewhere to sit. Dobson must have arrived early for Harriet found him at a vantage point, in front of the zinnias. He had seen her before she saw him and was on his feet, beckoning to her, his smile so genial she wondered if he had news of a victory.
She asked, ‘Has anything happened?’ He did not answer but waved her to a chair. Whatever he had to tell, he was in no hurry to tell it.
A safragi, his white galabiah given distinction by a red sash and the fez that denotes the effendi’s servant, wheeled over a gilded trolley laden with cream cakes. Harriet asked for a glass of white wine. Dobson urged her to choose a cake, saying, ‘Do join me. I think I’ll have a mille feuille. Good for you. You’ve lost weight since you came here.’
Fortunes of War Page 15
