A Good Clean Fight

by Derek Robinson

  “Well, the squadron’s on a job. Obviously. Greek George is missing. He didn’t come back from the same strafe you didn’t come back from.” Skull noticed Winkler blink at the word strafe.

  “Probably walk in tomorrow.”

  The MO arrived, smiling. “How do you feel, Butcher?” he asked.

  “Fine. Terrific. Mind you, anything’s bound to be an improvement on yesterday. Yesterday I was sitting under the poor old kite, waiting for the grim reaper.”

  “Ten minutes ago I was standing in the sun, expecting the same thing.” They all laughed, except the Germans.

  “Where’s Uncle now?” Skull asked.

  “In my tent. I gave him a whacking great slug of rum and he went out like a light. He was almost asleep on his feet when he drank it. I don’t think he’s really ill, just . . . you know . . . doolally.”

  “Sand-happy.” Bailey stretched out on a bench. “Been in the blue too long.”

  “Wüstenkrankheit,” Winkler remarked unexpectedly.

  “There you are,” Skull said. “His lot gets it too.”

  “Why don’t you go and take a nap, Butcher?” the MO said.

  “Because I want to see the squadron land.”

  “Well, they won’t be long.” As Skull raised his mug of tea, the first faint groan of far-off aero engines made itself heard. “There you are. What did I say?” He stood, and the two prisoners got to their feet. Bailey jumped up, suddenly refreshed. “Come with me!” he ordered. The corporal trotted after him. Skull and the doctor followed. Winkler did not. “Come on,” Skull urged. “I’ll find you a tent.”

  “Someone must carry my bag.” Winkler had brought a small zip-top bag from the sidecar. “I am an officer and a prisoner of war. It is my right under the Geneva Convention.” He was quite serious.

  “Who brought it in?” Skull asked, and answered himself. “The corporal. So he can take it out.” They stared at each other. “Go ahead. Your German is better than mine.”

  “I have no authority. He is your prisoner.”

  “You want me to order him to carry your bag?”

  “Him or another. It is not my responsibility.”

  “Leave the silly bag.” By now Skull was having to raise his voice to counter the sound of the engines. “We’ll get it later.”

  Winkler shook his head. “It is my right under the Geneva—”

  He was stopped by an abrupt clamor: shouts, whistles, handbells. He cocked his head and listened. The engine-roar hardened and broadened. “Messerschmitt!” he bawled. Skull’s head turned and he looked out at men sprinting so hard that their boots threw up long spurts of sand; while unseen anti-aircraft guns began a hectic, hammering series of crack-booms, until even their racket was swamped by the roar and rip of four Me 109s streaking past in line abreast, strafing the field at zero feet. Skull had never been so close to so many enemy fighters: their gunports blazed red flame and trailed black smoke; the pilots had faces; the tailplanes twitched; all happening just yards away. And then they were gone. What beauty! What menace! What a raucous, murderous, ear-battering roar!

  Skull turned to speak to Winkler and the tent was empty. “Hey!” he cried. A foot moved. Winkler was under the table. Skull felt relieved: how embarrassing to lose the prisoner! “They’ve gone now,” he said. Winkler’s face appeared. He pointed and vanished again. Skull turned back and saw the razor-thin silhouettes of four 109s coming straight at him. They were not a rigid line: each fighter wandered slightly up or down, as if a ripple had washed through the flight. They opened fire simultaneously. Twenty guns thrashed the desert so far ahead that Skull was astonished to see a man’s body being rolled over and over by the impact. Oil drums bounced like ping-pong balls. A small truck was a small inferno. A row of tents fell as if tripped. Skull was too dazed to move until he cringed as finally the 109s bore down on him, bellowing like mechanical bulls, and flashed overhead. The mess tent danced in their backlash. Winkler grabbed Skull’s ankle and Skull fell flat. “You wish to die?” Winkler shouted. Then another flight of 109s slammed across the landing-ground from yet another direction. Their cannon manufactured a stolid womp-womp-womp and something huge exploded. Skull tried to dig with his head. He got a mouthful of sand. He was grateful. He wished there were more.

  The attack lasted a further forty seconds. Long before the end, most of the ack-ack gunners had stopped firing. A couple were dead. The rest were helpless. The German fighters had split into pairs. Every few seconds, a fresh pair bounced the airfield from a new and unexpected angle. They rocketed over the perimeter, did some damage and raced away before the sweating gunners could swivel and find them. As one pair left, another pair leaped in, strafed and climbed hard to make room for a third pair arriving out of nowhere at high speed. It was a brilliant display, packed full of courage, skill and confidence. When the 109s quit, re-formed out of range and droned away, they left LG 181 in tatters.

  Ten minutes later, the first of the Tomahawks came drifting in. It was the pair flown by Pip Patterson and Kit Carson. As soon as they were refueled and rearmed they took off and patrolled the airfield: the 109s might come back, and a squadron was most vulnerable when it had just landed. For the rest of the day, Hornet Squadron kept a section up as a standing patrol.

  That left only three Tomahawks on the ground. Of “B” Flight, Mick O’Hare had failed to return. Of “A” Flight, Pinky Dalgleish, Tiny Lush and Billy Stewart were missing. Well, not really missing. Hick Hooper knew where they were. They were dead.

  So was Butcher Bailey. His was the body that Skull had seen being rolled over and over by the gale of machine-gun fire. When the raid was finished, Skull had approached it and recognized its smashed and bloody face. The flies were already feasting. Skull spread his blazer over the head and walked away.

  * * *

  Captain Lessing was not surprised when Jakowski’s Force A failed to return to the rendezvous. He knew that his Force B was at the right place because he had left a truck to mark the spot before he took his men off to hunt British raiding patrols. They found none, and Sergeant Voss struggled for half a day to find the rendezvous: he overshot it twice and would have missed it a third time if someone hadn’t seen the truck, a tiny smut on the horizon. By then Voss was trembling so much with anxiety, he could scarcely draw a line on his map.

  The cooks gave everyone half a cup of lime juice, a standard issue in the Afrika Korps. Lessing took his and went with Lieutenant Fleischmann where no one could hear them.

  “A thousand to one Schneeberger’s never going to find us,” he said.

  “Ten thousand,” Fleischmann said gloomily. “Right now, Schneeberger’s probably going the wrong way up a one-way street in Old Khartoum.”

  The image struck Lessing as very funny. He laughed until he had to lie on his back and recover. It was the laughter of stress. Fleischmann, pleased at his success, sat and smiled. Eventually Lessing wiped his eyes. “Oh dear,” he said. “All the same, we’ve got to wait for them.”

  “How long? We’ve only got enough water for six days. Assume it takes three days to get back to Benghazi—”

  “I know, I know.”

  “There’s always the radio,” Fleischmann said. “If we were to transmit non-stop, Jakowski’s operator could figure out where the signal was strongest and then they could steer on that bearing.”

  Lessing stood up and stretched until every muscle felt used. The trouble with this sort of desert warfare was you never got any exercise. You just sat in a truck and worried. “Last resort,” he decided. “What else can we do?”

  In the end they created two landmarks. By night a truck’s headlights blazed toward the Calanscio; by day an oil fire pushed a thin black scarf of smoke into the sky. Schneeberger’s men saw neither. They were in the wrong place, heading in the wrong direction.

  * * *

  The burning vehicles were towed into the desert and abandoned. The senior NCOs hunted all over the camp until they had accounted for their men, one way or another. L
ive cannon-shells were collected and made safe. Tents were re-erected. The doctor was up to his elbows in blood when Fanny Barton appeared at the doorway of the medical tent. “Ten minutes,” the doctor said, not looking up.

  “Don’t rush anything.”

  “I shan’t. Not much left to rush.”

  Ten minutes later he came out, wiping his hands with a towel that reeked of disinfectant. “Three dead, seven badly hurt. Two won’t last the night. Plus a lot of cuts and scratches, not serious.”

  “Where’s Uncle?”

  “In his tent, sedated. I gave him some rum.” The doctor thought about explaining and decided to let it wait. “Best to leave him alone.”

  “If you say so. Only five dead, then.”

  “Never say ‘only.’ Each one was somebody’s son.”

  Barton grunted. “Doesn’t say much for the Luftwaffe’s gunnery, does it? A pack of 109s gets a free hand and they can’t even reach double figures. Bloody pathetic.”

  The doctor found his words amusing. “Is that what you intend to say at the grave-side?” he asked. “Better than ashes to ashes, I suppose.”

  “I’m not saying anything. Uncle handles all that.”

  “Uncle’s incapable.”

  “He’ll be fit tomorrow, won’t he?”

  “He might. The corpses won’t. My advice is, bury them fast before they start to stink. Meat doesn’t last in the desert, you know.”

  One of the two dying airmen stopped breathing ten minutes later. The other clung obstinately, perhaps point-lessly, to life. Thus there were four bodies to be buried. Each was wrapped in canvas cut from tents too badly shot-up to be worth saving. They were placed on tail-gates unhitched from trucks. Four men carried each tail-gate, not on their shoulders but held like a stretcher. When they were all ready, a flight sergeant said, not raising his voice, “Off you go, lads.” They did not march but walked, in single file, the two or three hundred yards to where the ground had been opened.

  The day was dying, too. Tremendously elongated shadows stalked ahead of the burial parties. In the background the final pair of Tomahawks came in to land, engines just ticking over. They lifted their shark-toothed snouts and flared their wings, touched down and rumbled away to dispersal. When their engines were cut a silence occupied the whole landing-ground as if all noise had been abolished forever.

  The ground crews and the other troops, the cooks, orderly-room clerks, batmen, signals staff, medics, had already gathered. The officers stood together. Everyone watched in silence as, one by one, the white bundles were placed in the ground. There was just enough room. Blood had soaked through some of the canvas. A few men took handfuls of sand and scrubbed their fingers. Then they joined the rest.

  Fanny Barton stepped forward. “Flight Lieutenant Martin Bailey,” he said, reading from a sheet of paper. “Corporal James Carter, Leading Aircraftman George Campbell, Aircraftman Victor Pettiman.” He put the paper away. “These men were all our comrades and our friends. Now they are dead. They died in action, serving their country.” He spoke slowly, stretching the words, because he had very little to say. “I don’t need to speak of their bravery, their loyalty, or their devotion to duty. They gave what we all have to give. That is, our strength and our lives.” He tried to think of some more, but his mind was empty. An evening breeze turned up and skittered loose sand into the hole, where it gathered in the canvas folds. “They were our comrades and our friends,” he said again. A disturbance began behind him, with scuffling boots and harsh whispers, but he ignored it. “And now we must lay them to rest.”

  “No, sir.” It was the adjutant, cap askew, tunic mis-buttoned, and shaking with indignation. “Not in my latrine pit, if you don’t mind, sir.”

  Barton was taken aback. “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Uncle,” he said.

  “Heaven can make its own sanitary arrangements, sir. Those are mine.”

  “Dismiss the men,” Barton told the senior NCO.

  “Come along with me, Uncle,” the doctor said. “We’ll have a nice drink.” But Kellaway was squatting on his haunches, staring at the bodies. “I know these men,” he said.

  Skull strolled toward him. “Time for supper, Uncle,” he said. “Coming?”

  “Have you debriefed this lot?” Kellaway demanded. Skull nodded, smiling. “Well, you’d better get your finger out, old chap,” Kellaway said. “Some of them don’t look too clever.” He put one leg over the edge and prodded the nearest body with his boot.

  “Don’t worry, Uncle,” Skull said. “I promise you that everything here was laid down according to King’s Regs.”

  “That’s different.” The adjutant stood and frowned at Barton. “You didn’t say that, sir. He didn’t say that,” he told Skull. “Makes a big difference. You’re a good man, Skull,” he said. They shook hands. “You can go to my school when I’m dead. You’d like that, wouldn’t you? Lots of books and things . . .” They walked away, chatting.

  Barton waited until Kellaway was safely out of earshot. “Right!” he said. “Let’s get this bloody hole filled up fast, before the daft bugger changes his mind.” Spades swung, and sand thudded onto the bodies.

  Supper was bully-beef stew. After the stew came tinned apricots. Barton quickly ate his meal. “Pip and Skull,” he said.

  They went to the CO’s trailer, and he poured three tumblers of rum. “I can’t stand this stuff,” Skull said. He drank a large mouthful. “War has ruined my palate. See?” He drank some more.

  “Well, we did it,” Barton said. “Here’s to us.” They joined in the toast, although Patterson hesitated. “I told you it would work,” Barton said. “One good kick in the slats and they burst into tears. I told you so.”

  “No, you didn’t, Fanny,” Pip said. “You told Pinky.”

  “Who disagreed,” Skull added. “Said it wouldn’t work.” He topped up his glass. “This stuff gets worse and worse.”

  “Seems he was right,” Pip said.

  “Rubbish! We got the Luftwaffe off its fat backside, didn’t we? First time we’ve seen 109s in a month. See? Strafing works. It bloody well works!” Barton drummed his feet like a boy at a football match.

  “I know it’s a tedious point of fact,” Skull said, “but you didn’t see them. Everybody here saw them. You didn’t.”

  “Thank Christ we didn’t,” Pip said. “If they’d turned up ten minutes later, or we’d been ten minutes earlier . . .” He sipped his rum, a sip that grew into a long swig. “I was out of ammo and low on fuel,” he muttered. “I don’t even want to think about it.”

  “Ah, but we foxed ’em, didn’t we? They came all the way to have a showdown, and it was a fiasco!” Barton enjoyed that thought. “Hell of a long trip for a 109, that. Somebody over there takes Hornet Squadron very seriously.” He grinned like a cartoon tiger.

  “I shall miss Pinky Dalgleish,” Pip said. “Didn’t know him long, but . . . He was a good type.” Being a good type was about the highest praise you could give a man in the Desert Air Force.

  “I expect he’ll walk in tomorrow,” Barton said. “Or the next day. Look at Butcher.”

  “Funny you should say that,” Skull remarked. “I did look at Butcher, and Butcher would have looked at me, except that half his head was missing. I can show you the shape of the other half, if you like.” He found a rusty stain on the front of his blazer.

  “Don’t get sentimental,” Barton said.

  “Well, I won’t if you won’t. Pinky will never walk in. Nor Tiny Lush, nor Billy Stewart. They’re all stone dead. Hick saw it. Hick saw three Tomahawks blown to bits inside ten seconds. He gave me a careful report which I totally believe. So can we please abandon all this romantic tosh about corpses walking in from the desert?” Skull took some more rum. “Excellent filth, this,” he said.

  “I’m definitely going to murder my wife,” Patterson said. He was hunched over his glass, and he was not joking. “Soon as I get back to Cairo I’ll kill the cow.”

  “Feel free,” Barton told him.
“Kill mine while you’re at it.”

  “You’re married?” Skull was amazed.

  “Blame the booze. They took me off ops in England so I got permanently pissed and one day I woke up married to something called Enid. Legs up to the armpits and she banged like the shithouse door. But she hated flying. Hated it. Wanted me to quit. Nag, nag, nag. Christ knows where she is now.”

  “Good Lord.” Skull was still struggling to absorb this news. “I have a cousin called Enid. She plays the organ rather well.”

  “Not half as well as my Enid.” Barton emptied the bottle into their glasses. “Don’t worry, there’s more,” he said. “I’ve been saving the stuff.”

  “I think you would be ill-advised to murder your wife, Pip,” Skull said.

  “What’s wrong with her?” Barton asked. “Is she ugly?”

  “She’s so lovely that it hurts,” Pip said. He sat up straight. He had been crying and he didn’t care who knew it.

  “So what’s the problem?”

  “Bloke called Dumbo Silk . . .” Pip blew his nose. “Flew together, drank together. He blew a 109 off my tail that I didn’t know was there. Best pilot I ever saw.”

  “Dumbo Silk,” Fanny said. “Yes. I’ve met him in Tommy’s Bar a couple of times. Face like a choirboy and he told me the funniest dirty story I’ve ever heard. He went over to Beaufighters, didn’t he?”

  Pip nodded. The tears were drying, leaving faint tracks on his dusty face. “One day I came home and she said I’d had a phone call. Dumbo had bought it. That knocked me flat. I never thought they’d get Dumbo, he was too . . . too good.”

  Fanny said nothing. He had heard others say much the same; sometimes he had been present when they got the impossible, unbelievable news and had watched them grow old in a matter of minutes. It had even happened to him, once, long ago.

  “Not a nice experience,” Skull said. “Not nearly as disgusting as drinking this liquid squalor, but all the same . . .” He washed some rum around his teeth and swallowed. “What happened next?”