A Good Clean Fight

by Derek Robinson

  “They’re General Schaefer’s men,” Schramm said. “And Schaefer’s in Tripoli.”

  “Send him a signal.”

  “Saying what? We’re worried? He’d blow a fuse. Schaefer works on facts, hard facts.”

  “I’ll give you a hard fact,” di Marco said. “Let Major Jakowski make one tiny mistake out there and the desert will make it ten thousand times worse.”

  Schramm went back to Barce and looked for Benno Hoffmann. He found him watching men installing separate trip-wires around each machine in a squadron of Messer-schmitt 109s. The trip-wires used strong black thread, which would be invisible at night. A raider might notice the thread as he broke it, but by then he would have no chance of planting his bomb, which was what mattered.

  “Di Marco thinks Jakowski is in dire straits,” Schramm said. “He didn’t put it so bluntly, but that’s what he was thinking.”

  “Then why hasn’t Jakowski signaled for help? He’s only been gone a few days. He’s got a hundred and fifty men, for God’s sake.”

  They stood and watched the mallets whacking stakes into the ground.

  “Maybe I can borrow an airplane tomorrow,” Hoffmann said. “Fly there and make a search. Find Jakowski and land, if the desert’s flat enough. Want to come?”

  “Thank you, no,” Schramm said. “I nearly killed myself down there once already.”

  * * *

  After a long day of cautious driving in low gear, with spells of digging out vehicles that had wandered into soft sand, Lampard’s patrol emerged from the Great Sand Sea. Ahead lay a plain of gravel. It was late afternoon.

  “Well done,” Lampard said. “Time for a little fun, I think. This place looks like a race-course. We’ll have some races.”

  They were all weary, and their skin was gritty and streaked with salt where the sweat had dried. It was a long time since the last meal. Nevertheless, Lampard’s decision was right. Too much slow driving had left everyone mentally sluggish.

  Lampard matched one jeep against another in straight sprints until they produced a champion, Corporal Pocock. Then they raced each other round a circle, the jeeps starting back-to-back and passing at mid-point in a test of nerve as to which driver claimed the inside track. Captain Dunn won that. Finally, there was a race to find out who could drive backward the fastest, swerving in and out of a twisting line of jerricans. Sergeant Davis was best by far. It was all very exhilarating, full of rush and noise and intense competition. “Brilliant idea, Jack,” Dunn said.

  “Good training, too. You never know when you might have to back out faster than you went in.”

  They sat in a jeep and watched the sunset. The smell of fried ham began to tinge the air.

  “Depending on what we find when we get wherever it is we’re going,” Lampard said, “there’s a possibility I might decide to stay, in which case it’ll be up to you to lead the patrol home.”

  “I don’t understand,” Dunn said. “Stay? Stay where?”

  “Probably in the Jebel. I might hole up somewhere with a sack of bombs and make a nuisance of myself.”

  Dunn found that prospect too peculiar for words. “I see,” he said. Obviously he did not see.

  “It’s an idea the colonel and I dreamed up over a bottle of whisky,” Lampard told him. “It’s between him and me. Just an option. I might not do it. Depends on how . . .” He stopped because Dunn had grabbed his arm.

  “I can smell a fuse burning.” He shoved Lampard. “Get out. Run.”

  Both men jumped out of the jeep. Lampard shouted; “Any bombs in the back?”

  “Yes, yes, dozens.” Dunn kept running. A time-pencil-fuse used acid. When the acid was released it burned through a wire until the wire snapped and fired the detonator. If he could smell it the fuse must have been burning for a long time. He looked behind him. Lampard was climbing into the back of the jeep.

  “Where are the fuses?” Lampard called.

  “In a box, on the left. I think.” Dunn watched him shifting the load. “Forget it, Jack. If one goes off, they’ll all go off.”

  “Maybe. Is this it?”

  Dunn could not move. He was not standing far enough away. If that box exploded, even if it detonated only one bomb, the jeep would be blown into tiny bits, and the blast and the bits would kill Dunn before he knew it had happened. But as long as Lampard was standing in the jeep, picking out fuses and looking at them and putting them aside, Dunn could not move.

  “Here’s the little scoundrel,” Lampard said. He put the box down and hurled the fuse into the desert. After a few seconds, they heard the hard crack of its detonation, like firewood splitting.

  Dunn walked back to the jeep.

  “You were right to run,” Lampard said. “No point in both of us dying. I wonder how it happened?”

  “I expect it was the races. All that zigzagging. The box got chucked about, and it cracked a pencil.” Lampard nodded. Dunn hesitated, and then said: “You know, it wouldn’t have been the end of the world if you’d left it alone. We can afford to lose a jeep.”

  “Maybe. But bombs are different, aren’t they? Every bomb is another Messerschmitt destroyed. I hate to lose bombs. They’re like children to me.”

  “I never heard such bollocks in all my life.” Dunn laughed, and Lampard joined in. But the image that lived in Dunn’s mind was of Lampard sorting through the fuses as if he were organizing his stamp collection.

  * * *

  Midway between Big Cairn and Kufra, with nothing but a flat plain of gravel reaching to the horizon, and with the horizon buckling under the heat, Lampard halted the patrol and announced that they would go for a walk. Quite a long walk, he said: five miles, perhaps ten, even twenty. The going was good, so they might run from time to time. It all depended.

  “Are we going anywhere special, sir?” Sergeant Davis asked.

  “Toward Kufra, still. I’ll leave a driver for each vehicle, plus Corky. Everybody else comes with me. Bring a weapon, a pint of water and a rucksack with a dozen bombs. No fuses. Corky: drive slowly. When we need you, we’ll find you.”

  For the next three hours, Lampard led his men on an erratic course that roughly paralleled the route of the jeeps. He had a long stride. There was no give in the stony surface of the desert. They had to work to keep up with him. The bombs were heavy. Skin chafed under the straps. Sweat soaked through the uniforms, ran into the eyes and blurred the vision with the sting of salt. If a man allowed himself to gasp, his mouth quickly dried and was leather against his tongue.

  Lampard paused for five minutes’ rest after the first hour. Nobody sat. Once you sat it was twice as hard to get up and go.

  He strolled up and down. “Trouble with these patrols is we don’t get enough exercise,” he said. “Sitting in a jeep’s no good to anyone. Suppose you lose your jeep? What d’you do then? Wait for a bus?”

  Nobody spoke. The five minutes were soon up.

  “Stay awake,” Lampard said. “When I whistle, fall flat.”

  They walked fast for another thirty-five minutes. Trooper Peck was sucking a small stone while counting each pace up to a hundred and then starting all over again in an attempt to dispel an image of cold and sparkling beer that kept drifting seductively into his imagination, when Lampard blew his whistle and turned. Peck was still falling. Everyone else was flat.

  “You’re dead, Peck,” Lampard said. “Run two hundred yards.”

  They picked themselves up and brushed bits of gravel from face and hands. Peck ran, his thumbs hooked under the rucksack straps. Soon the scuff and scrape of his boots faded to nothing.

  “That looks easy,” Lampard said. “We’ll do it backward.”

  They ran backward until they caught up with Peck. Lampard turned and strode on. “You won’t hear the bullet that kills you, Peck,” he called.

  “No sir.” Peck’s chest was still heaving, but he forced his voice to sound as level as Lampard’s.

  “You’re never safe, night or day, not for a minute.” Lampard discr
eetly dropped a thunderflash. It cracked the massive silence of the desert. The noise scattered his men into a wide defensive circle, looking out, weapons cocked. The bang faded and died. “Good,” Lampard said. “On we go.”

  After a few more miles, a few more whistle-blasts, another thunderflash and a couple of short sprints, he led them back to the vehicles. When Dunn took his rucksack off, he felt as if he were floating. The soles of his feet seemed to radiate heat. He had been saving his pint of water; now he took a long swig. His throat was greedy for more.

  “Now for the drivers,” Lampard said. In a matter of minutes he was leading them into the desert. When they returned, late in the afternoon, he still had that same thrusting pace.

  “It’s not worth going on,” he said. “We’ll camp here.” Nobody complained.

  The meal was tinned ham and tongue and tinned sausages, with the last of the fresh potatoes and cabbage they had bought as they drove out of Cairo; and tinned pears plus a squirt of condensed milk. There was even some stale bread to go with the cheese.

  No rum in the tea. The cook took the bottle out and Lampard put it back. Nobody had done anything to justify rum.

  All day long an indecisive breeze had come and gone. As the sun set, the wind strengthened and blew steadily from the west. The rush of cool air sent men looking for woolen jumpers or even blankets to drape around their shoulders.

  “Smell that!” Lampard told Sandiman. “That’s the pure air of the desert. You don’t find it near the coast. You’ve got to get right away from everything. How far are we from Cairo, Corky?”

  “As the crow flies? Say five hundred miles. We covered six or seven hundred.”

  “And where’s the next nearest city?”

  “Benghazi, I suppose.”

  “What’s south?”

  “Oh, south the Sahara goes on forever. A thousand miles or more. I’d have to look at my maps.”

  “And west?”

  “Nothing until you hit Algeria. That’s got to be a good thousand, too. Why? Want to buy an evening paper?”

  That amused Lampard. “No, I like it here,” he said. “I like this wonderful air. I like to think that it’s blown across a thousand miles of pure desert to get here, and it will blow over another five hundred of the same before it reaches the stink and the bumf-shufflers of Cairo. God did a good day’s work when he made the desert.”

  “Glad you like it,” Davis said, comfortably, “because you can have my share for ten bob, cash, any time.”

  “It’s priceless,” Lampard said. “Like freedom.”

  They had had a hard day. Nobody wanted to debate freedom with the patrol leader, who would win anyway.

  They listened to the news bulletin on the BBC. There was nothing about the Western Desert. In the Pacific, Corregidor had surrendered to the Japanese. The RAF had bombed the Skoda munitions factory in Czechoslovakia. The Red Army was fighting hard near Kharkov. It all seemed very remote.

  * * *

  Kufra was not like any oasis that Hollywood had conceived. It was sprawling and shapeless, with thousands of dusty date-palms and two salt lakes of brilliant blue. In the town there were two sorts of building: ramshackle, in which the natives lived; and rectangular, which the Italians had put up. The main buildings included a hospital, a school, a cinema (bombed) and a mosque. On the military side there were some stores, a barracks and a small fort. Most had been knocked about in brief struggles between the British and the Italians.

  When Lampard’s patrol snaked through the date groves and drew up in the square, half the town followed them. Soon a squad of black African soldiers arrived to clear a way for the military commander of Kufra. Major Tickenham was an elderly officer, short and stocky, with a broken nose like a twist of putty. Before Kufra, he had trained recruits for the Sudan Defense Force in Khartoum. His shorts were starched and creased as stiff as boards.

  Lampard saluted. “I’ve brought your reading matter, sir,” he said. It was a box of books of all sorts.

  “Thank God. D’you know what I’m reduced to? King’s Regulations and Army Law, which I know backward, and How to Learn Welsh in Three Weeks, with half the pages missing.” He plucked a volume from the box. “Zane Grey. Wonderful . . . Look, I’ve had what used to be the Italian army brothel fumigated since you were last here. Your chaps might like to use it as their billet. Come and see. It’s rather special.”

  The building was bullet-pocked but otherwise intact. “I put in new beds and had everything whitewashed,” Tickenham said as they entered, “but I left the propaganda. It has a certain quaint charm.”

  Each wall carried a different slogan. Tickenham pointed at one: II Duce ha sempre ragione. “Imagine trying to buck up the British army with signs that said ‘Churchill is always right,’” he said. “Your average Tommy would immediately fear the worst.”

  They strolled into another room. “Credere, Ubbidire, Combatiere,” Lampard read aloud. “Trust, Obey, Fight. My goodness. What a way to run a knocking-shop.” He prodded a mattress. “Luxury indeed. I’m most grateful to you, sir.”

  “I believe I counted three officers. Four including yourself. I look forward to your company at dinner. Six o’clock?”

  Lampard enjoyed the rest of the day. He took a jeep and drove Dunn, Gibbon and Sandiman out to the lakes for a swim. The water was so dense with salt that they floated effortlessly. Swimming was a wasted effort; they lay in the water and drifted as the breeze caught them; it was the complete rest-cure. They drove back to their billet and showered the salt away. There was ample time for a leisurely shave and a long drink—Pocock had found a supply of ice somewhere—before they dressed in fresh khakis and walked through the deepening dusk to Tickenham’s headquarters. “I approve of this,” Lampard said. “Any fool can be uncomfortable. It takes a certain skill to go to war and enjoy oneself, don’t you agree?”

  Tickenham met them at the entrance.

  “Hot from the fleshpots of Cairo, as you are,” he said, “you chaps don’t realize what a pleasure this is for me. Come in. You’ll have a drink first, won’t you? Good, good . . . Just go through there, you’ll find the others waiting . . .” Lampard went first, into a large room that was bare except for a few cane chairs and some vivid rugs hanging on the walls. A smiling Sudanese soldier, black as boot polish, held a tray of drinks. A bearded man in the garb of a Catholic priest stopped talking and turned toward the arrivals. The man he had been talking to was Henry Lester.

  Lampard felt like a man who has trodden hard on a stair that isn’t there. For a moment nothing connected, everything was misplaced, and he was standing naked in the bedroom of Mrs. Joan d’Armytage. The shock was such that he actually felt naked: his skin crawled, and his genitals shrank in panic. Then he recovered.

  Lester was being introduced by Tickenham. “Yes sir, that’s my baby,” Lester said. “I don’t think you know my friend Malplacket.” Lampard shook hands and said the right things, but he knew that Lester had seen the bewilderment in his eyes.

  News from Cairo, even if it was rumor, was welcome in Kufra. Conversation was brisk. Dunn noticed that Lampard was not giving it his full attention. As they went in to dinner, he said: “Corky says the Pope got married again.”

  “Good for him.”

  “Wake up, Jack.”

  “What? Oh. Sorry.” Lampard took a deep breath, and forced a smile. “I was thinking about the Black Cat Club.”

  “What about it?”

  “Nothing. Came into my mind, that’s all.”

  Dinner was curried goat, enlivened by a range of side dishes: chopped coconut, sliced bananas and dates, roast peanuts, small boiled eggs, diced onion, grated cheese, and sour goat’s milk sprinkled with herbs and lime juice. Lampard recovered his confidence as he satisfied his appetite. Toward the end of the meal he asked Lester if he had had a pleasant trip to Kufra.

  “We flew here,” Lester said. “Took four hours and thirty-five minutes in an RAF Hudson. Just enough time to read the Cairo papers, eat a sandw
ich and have a snooze. I recommend it. It’s the only way to travel.”

  “For the privileged few, yes.”

  “Fortunate rather than privileged,” Malplacket said. “Lester has an American friend in Transport Command. He arranged it.”

  “The seats were going spare,” Lester said. “We didn’t do the war effort any harm. Besides, Malplacket’s part of the war effort. He’s in charge of gung-ho.”

  “And you? What brings you here?”

  “Strictly hush-hush. Tell you later.”

  “I may not be here later.”

  “Oh, we have time to talk. Are you an early riser? I like to see the sun come up. Care to join me? It’s scheduled for dawn.”

  “Why not?” Lampard said. He shrugged, and Lester smiled, and Major Tickenham looked on with approval. He liked his guests to hit it off.

  * * *

  Malplacket drank too much coffee at dinner. It was made Arab-style, thick and black and strong, and it guaranteed that he had a restless night.

  When Lester woke him he was too groggy to get dressed. He pulled on a jellabah, the loose cloak worn by the natives, which he had bought in the market. “I’ll do the talking,” Lester said. “My dear chap,” Malplacket mumbled, “I am incapable of speech and intend to remain so for the indefinite future, so please talk all you wish.”

  Lampard was waiting in a jeep. He drove them to the edge of the oasis. They sat and watched the sunrise. “Hot stuff, eh?” Lester said.

  “Blindingly obvious,” Lampard said.

  “I make that fifteen-all,” Malplacket said. They looked at him. “Never mind,” he said. “It would take far too long to explain, and I honestly haven’t the strength.”

  “You want to know why we’re in Kufra,” Lester said. “You want to know the score. OK. I’m an accredited war correspondent for the Chicago News. You can see my documents if you want. The SAS seems to me to be the only outfit that’s doing any actual fighting. I want to go with your patrol and watch you do your stuff, whatever it is. Simple as that.”

  “If it’s so simple,” Lampard said, “why didn’t you obtain permission through the usual channels in Cairo?”