‘Any idea what’s wrong?’
‘Haven’t a clue, sir.’
As Simon approached the truck, Hardy, seated at an outdoor table, observed him with black indignant eyes, saying as soon as he was within earshot: ‘So Boulderstone, you have friends in high places?’
‘Me, sir! I don’t know anyone.’
‘Well, someone appears to know you. Or know about you. Your fame has spread beyond the Column — can’t think why. I, myself, failed to recognize your superior qualities, but the fault no doubt was mine.’
Hardy went on at length until Simon, baffled and miserable, broke in: ‘I’m sorry, sir, but I don’t understand any of this.’
‘No? Well, you’re to leave us, Boulderstone. The Column is to be deprived of your intelligence and initiative. We must somehow manage without you. Its activities are obviously too limited for a man of your resource and vision.’
Simon, by remaining silent, at last brought Hardy to the point. ‘You’ve landed, God knows how, one of the most sought-after jobs in the British army. For some reason hidden from me, someone has seen fit to appoint you a liaison officer.’
As Hardy spoke the memory of Peter Lisdoonvarna came to Simon and he murmured, ‘Good heavens!’ never having imagined that the social chat in the Garden City flat had meant anything at all.
Simon began, ‘I did meet a chap in Cairo . . .’ then came to an embarrassed stop. It must seem that he had, ungratefully, sought a transfer behind the back of his commanding officer and he tried to explain.
Hardy refused to listen: ‘I don’t know how you managed it, and I don’t want to know. You’ve got the job. Whether you’re fit for it or not is another matter. It’s none of my concern. It’ll be up to you, Boulderstone, to prove yourself.’
‘Sir! Where am I to go, sir?’
‘You’ll hear soon enough. They’re sending a pick-up for you and you’ll be taken to Corps HQ. The driver will bring your instructions. And I’d advise you to clean yourself up. Get your shirt and shorts properly washed. At Corps HQ, you’ll be among the nobs.’
The other officers of the Column showed that they shared Hardy’s disapproval of Simon’s advancement and it was also shared by Ridley. Ridley who in early days had been Simon’s guide and support, now avoided him and was vague when Simon sought him out to question him. What, Simon wanted to know, were the duties of a liaison officer?
‘Don’t worry, sir. You’ll find out for yourself. You’ll soon cotton on.’
‘You don’t think I’m up to it, do you?’
‘It’s not for me to say, sir. With respect, I’d rather not discuss it. I’ve got to be getting along.’
Simon, unnerved at leaving the safety of the Column, felt an impulse to stay where he was but knew that the appointment came when he most needed it. He was sick of the tedium of eventless patrols. Opportunity to escape was offered and he would not be restricted by the disapprobation of other men.
Still, he was troubled. Hardy’s annoyance came of Hardy’s vanity, but Ridley was another matter. Ridley was hurt by his going and this hurt resulted from affection, even love. In the desert where there were no women or animals, Ridley had to love something and he had chosen Simon. Simon was touched, but not as deeply as he would once have been. His own attachments — Trench on the troopship which brought them to Egypt, Arnold his batman and driver, and Hugo — were dead and their deaths had absolved him from overmuch feeling. He was sorry to leave Ridley, but no more than that.
The transport, which arrived two days later, was not a pick-up but a jeep. The jeep had been assigned to Simon, it was his own vehicle, and this fact, when Hardy and the others heard of it, confirmed them in their belief that Simon had been appointed above his station. They were short with their goodbyes but the men, crowding about him as he prepared his departure, showed genuine regret at his going. They liked him. Only Ridley did not join in their good wishes but stood at a distance. When Simon shouted to him, ‘Goodbye, Ridley, thanks for everything,’ he dropped his head briefly, then walked away. When, starting out, Simon looked back to wave, the men waved him away but there was no sign of Ridley.
For a mile or so Simon was sunk in sadness, then the Column and everyone in it dwindled behind him and he felt the exhilaration of a new beginning. He looked at the driver and asked his name.
‘Crosbie, sir.’
‘You attached to me permanently?’
‘Yes, sir.’
Crosbie, lumpish, snub-faced, with a habit of smiling to himself, showed no inclination to talk but drove with the stolid efficiency of a man who did one, and only one, thing well. He could drive.
They passed the Ridge, almost lost in the dusty haze, and turned on to a barrel track. The track took them eastwards beyond the sound of the guns into the spacious, empty desert where the only danger was from the air. Relaxing from his usual attentive fear, Simon faced the challenge of the work awaiting him. He would have liked to question Crosbie about the corps, but his instinct was to keep himself to himself.
He had started his desert life under Hardy and had relied on Arnold and Ridley. These two NCOs, taking pity on his ignorance, had pampered him as though he were a youngster, but he had tried Hardy’s patience and Hardy saw him as a fool. Well, that episode was over. Simon now had experience of the desert, and no one would treat him either as fool or youngster.
The horizon lightened as they approached the coast. There were aircraft about and Simon, seeing one of them rise, leaving in the distance a long trail of ginger-brown dust, asked from an old habit of enquiry: ‘Where’s that taking off from?’
Crosbie, not bothering to look at it, mumbled, ‘Don’t know, sir!’ Neither knowing nor caring, he was not one to answer questions and Simon decided that he would no longer be the one to ask them.
They reached the perimeter of Corps HQ in the early afternoon. Passing concentrations of trucks and equipment, and all the appurtenances of operational and administrative staff, Simon was awed by the extent of the camp. But this was where he now belonged. Its size denoted his status in the world. When the jeep jerked to a stop, they had reached the dead end of a lane and Crosbie said, ‘This doesn’t look right, sir.’
Simon brusquely replied: ‘Get your finger out, Crosbie. You’re supposed to know where you’re going. The command vehicle is posted. Use your eyes.’
Crosbie might well have pointed out that Simon had eyes and could use them but, instead, he acknowledged authority with a brisk ‘Sir’, and backing the jeep out of the lane, brought them at last to the busy centre of the camp.
Simon was not the only new arrival. The command vehicle, a three-ton truck converted for use as an office, had a canvas lean-to, camouflaged with netting that extended on both sides. A number of officers, all senior to Simon, stood in groups under the lean-to awaiting the attention of the officer in charge. They talked with the flippant ease he had admired in the Cherry-pickers and he saw them as old campaigners to whom the desert was a second home.
Simon, who had been oppressed by Hardy’s doubts and uncertainties, now felt his spirits rise as he listened to these men who had no doubts at all that, whatever happened, the allies would be the victors in the end.
The officer in charge was a major, verging on middle-age, with a thin, serious face, who tolerated the chaffing of the other men but did not respond to it. Simon, when his turn came, expected no more than an acknowledgement of his arrival, but the major, who said, ‘I’m Fitzwilliams. You’ll take your orders from me,’ looked at him with interest and afforded him several minutes of his time.
‘I’m afraid, Boulderstone, you’ve reached us just when the chaps are moving up from their training grounds. A deal of armour will be coming in and you’ll find it a bit confusing at first, but you’ll soon know your way around. Don’t be frightened to ask. You’re in B mess so you can go along now and get yourself a snack. Report back here at 23.00 hours. I’ll probably have a job for you.’
Simon, sitting under the canvas lean-to that w
as B mess, wondered if he had heard right. To the men of the Column, 23.00 hours was in the middle of the night. Was he expected to start work at a time when other men were fast asleep? All he could do was report at the hour given and hope he was not making a fool of himself.
Twenty-three hours, it turned out, was the expected arrival time of an armoured division and Simon was sent to conduct the tank commander to the correct assembly point. Where that point was, Simon had to find for himself and, returning to the jeep, he said casually to Crosbie: ‘I suppose you know the assembly point for tanks?’
Crosbie, who obviously did not, mumbled ‘Sir’ and setting out, stopped to enquire at every hut and bivouac that showed a light. The commander had found the assembly point long before the jeep reached it but Simon did not betray himself.
‘Just been sent, sir, to see you’ve settled in.’
‘Yep, all in. All tickety-boo.’
Thankful to have skirted this assignment safely, Simon relented towards Crosbie and said, ‘That wasn’t too bad. Now let’s hope we can get some kip,’ but their night’s work was not yet over. Reporting back to the command vehicle, Simon found a different officer in charge. He said, ‘You’re the new liaison officer, are you? Well, I’ve got a job for you. D’you know the compound with the dummy lorries? No? I expect you’ll find it easily enough. Look out the ordnance officer and give him a signal: he’s to fit the dummies over the newly arrived tanks.’
‘When, sir? Tomorrow?’
‘No, not tomorrow. Everything here happens at night. The job’s to be done before first light. Now, get a move on.’
An hour later, having tracked down the ordnance officer, Simon apologetically handed him the signal: ‘I’m sorry, sir, but it’s supposed to be done before daybreak.’
Amused by his tone, the officer looked at Simon, smiled and nodded; ‘Received and understood,’ he said.
Free now to sleep, Simon ordered Crosbie to park near the command vehicle in order to be on call. Then, Simon in his sleeping-bag, Crosbie on his ground-sheet, they dossed down on either side of the jeep.
The assembly of the camp was growing and from its proportions, Simon realized that the purpose behind it was not merely defensive. And, as he had been told, everything happened at night. The convoys and units journeyed in darkness, and in darkness took up their positions in the camp. This, he knew, would not happen on a routine training march.
Dummy equipment was collected in dumps and mysteriously moved about. He found, when delivering signals, that the dummy guns and vehicles of yesterday had been replaced by real guns and vehicles, or the real had been replaced by dummies. The purpose was to deceive, and the deceived could only be the enemy. Simon would have been glad to have Ridley with him to make sense of all this shifting and replacement. Several times he almost asked Crosbie, ‘What’s going on?’ but kept quiet, seeing no reason for wasting words.
As Fitzwilliams had promised, he soon knew his way around but he suffered from lack of companions. Two other liaison officers were due and, sitting alone in B mess, he longed for their arrival.
The heat had dragged on into mid-September, and seemed, to tired senses, more exhausting than summer. Under the tarpaulin the air was turgid with food smells and singed by the cooks’ fires. Simon was dulled by inactivity and the atmosphere, when another liaison officer came to join him. This was Blair, a captain, and Simon, standing up, said, ‘Glad you’ve come, sir.’
Blair laughed with the uncertainty of a man who has lost his place in the world: ‘Just call me Blair.’
He was soft-bodied, stoutish, puffy about the cheeks and eyes, and his hair was growing thin. Simon thought him a very old fellow to be living among the hardships of the desert. He was not the companion Simon had hoped for, but any companion was better than none.
Blair sat with Simon at meal times but had little to say for himself. When he was not eating, he would sit with his head down, his hands hanging loosely between his knees. He had been in tanks and wore the black beret, but not with pride. Whenever he could, he would take it off and fold it into his pocket.
The third liaison officer, when he turned up, had no more to offer than Blair. His name was Donaldson and although the same age as Simon, he had finished his year as a second lieutenant. With two pips up, he was able to treat Simon as an inferior. He tried at first to come to terms with Blair, but finding him sad company, he ignored both his fellow liaison officers and sat by himself.
Blair, after a few days, began to talk. Hesitant and nervous, he said he had served in the desert since the first year of the war. In those days, with only the Italians to contend with, it had been ‘a gentleman’s war’. His CO had said that here in the desert, they had a ‘soft option’, but then the Afrika Korps had arrived to spoil things. By hints, pauses and a shaking of the head, he made it clear that some unnatural catastrophe had struck him down near a place he called Bir Gubo. ‘East of Retma’, he said as though that meant anything to Simon. Blair mentioned other names: Acroma, Knightsbridge, Adem, Sidi Rezegh, which all, for Simon, belonged to the era of pre-history when the British still operated on the other side of the wire that marked the Egyptian frontier.
‘With all that armour round you, you must have felt pretty safe?’
Blair’s eyes fixed themselves on Simon: ‘Safe? You ever seen inside one of those Ronsons after it’s burnt out?’
‘Not inside, no.’
‘Imagine being packed inside a tin can with other chaps and then the whole lot fried to a frizzle. What do you think you’d look like?’ Blair gave a bleak laugh and Simon said no more about tanks.
Instead, he wiped the sweat off his face and asked Blair. ‘Does it ever let up?’
‘I’ve known worse summers, but not one that lasted into October.’
October came. As though the change of month meant an automatic change of weather, the hard, hot wind stopped abruptly and a softer wind came cool out of the east and dispersed the canteen’s flies. The nights became colder and jerseys were regulation wear. Those officers who owned sheepskin coats, now wore them swinging open so the long, inner fleece hung out like a fringe.
Hardy, ordering Simon to clean himself up, had said, ‘You’ll be among the nobs,’ but ‘the nobs’ were much less conventional in dress than Hardy and his staff. Hardy himself always wore a carefully knotted tie but the officers at Corps HQ wore silk scarves, rich in colour, and their winter trousers of corduroy velvet — khaki and serge, apparently, were for other ranks — could be any colour from near-white to honey brown. They had for Simon a swaggering elegance and he greatly envied them. He told Blair that when he was next in Cairo he would buy some corduroy trousers and a sheepskin coat.
‘Be careful about the coat,’ Blair said. ‘Those skins can stink to high heaven if they’re not properly cured. Often, with all the smells in the Muski, you don’t notice it till you get it home. If you try to return it, the chap who sold it can’t be found. I had a fine Iranian coat once, best skins, embroidered all over. Was sorry to lose it.’
‘You mean someone liberated it?’
‘No, lost it at Bir Gubo. Lost a lot of things.’
‘What did happen at Bir Gubo?’
Blair, biting into a bully-beef sandwich, tried to smile with his mouth full. He chewed and coughed and managed to say, ‘You mean, to the coat? Got burnt.’
‘Not just the coat. You and the rest of the crew? — what happened?’
Blair cleared his mouth with a gulp of tea. ‘They bought it — all except me. I’d gone for a walk . . . You know, with a spade. Heard a plane go over. Didn’t see it. Didn’t even know whose it was. When I got back the Ronson was ablaze. Couldn’t get near it. We’d been fart-arsing around, not a soul in sight. Must’ve taken a direct hit. I don’t know. Simply don’t know. I just stood there and watched till it burnt out . . .And when I went to look, you couldn’t tell one chap from another.’
‘And what happened to you?’
‘Don’t know. Wandered about . . . sh
ock, I suppose. The Scruff found me and thought I was dead. Just going to bury me when someone saw my eyelids move. Just a twitch, as the chaps say. Saved my life.’ Blair laughed so his tea cup shook in his hand, and Simon felt he knew all he need know about Blair’s descent from a tank’s officer to a messenger who carried signals for other men.
Simon asked him, ‘Any idea what’s happening here? There’s a mass of stuff coming in. Do you think it’s the attack?’
‘Could be. Certainly looks like it.’
‘When will it be, do you think?’
‘Have to be soon. There’s the moon, you see. And you can’t keep a show like this sitting on its arse. The jerries might see it and strike first. There’ll be a showdown all right.’
‘You looking forward to it?’
‘Don’t know. Perhaps. Better than hanging about.’
The moon was growing towards the full and expectations grew with it. In the middle of the month, when anything might happen, Simon was sent south towards the point at which he had parted from the Cherrypickers. Of the big supply base, not a barrel remained but a small force of camouflaged tanks were hull down, in the wadi where the command lorry had stood. The officer in charge was lying on high ground, looking westwards through field glasses. When Simon came to him, bringing a movement order, he said in a low voice, ‘Get down.’ Simon crouched beside him and he pointed to a bluff of rock distorted by the mid-day heat: ‘See over there; that’s the salient. They’ve been there since Alam Halfa. If you listen, you can hear them singing.’
Lying down, Simon bent his head to extend his hearing and there came to him, faint and clear, like a voice across lake water, a song he had heard somewhere before: ‘But that’s an English song!’
‘No, it’s one of theirs: “Lili Marlene”. We picked it up from the German radio.’
The two men, lying side by side, remained silent while the song lasted. Simon, moved by its nostalgic sadness, thought of the first time he had seen Edwina. She had leant over the balcony towards him, her face half-hidden by a fall of sun-bleached hair, her brown arm lying on the balcony rail, her white robe falling open so he could see the rounding of her breasts. She came back to him so vividly, he thought he could smell her gardenia scent. He was impatient of the vision and relieved when the song ended and the officer, laughing and jumping up, said, ‘So we’re to take the tanks up north? Gathering us all in, eh? Looks like things are hotting up?’
Fortunes of War Page 29
