A Good Clean Fight

by Derek Robinson

  “They may have mortars too.”

  “True. All right, we disperse our trucks and—”

  “So now we’ve got no means of moving our mortars quickly, unless you intend to carry them on your shoulders at the double.”

  “No.”

  “The men would admire and respect your amazing devotion to duty.”

  “I think not, sir.”

  “Neither do I. So we keep a couple of trucks to enable us to shift our firepower. What if they attack at night?”

  Fleischmann hunched his shoulders. “All depends,” he said. “Do we know how strong they are?”

  “Do they know how strong we are?”

  They stared at each other, and suddenly both men laughed.

  “If it’s bigger than an armored brigade it’s not fair,” Fleischmann said, “and I shan’t play.” They settled down to work out fields of fire for the heavy machine guns.

  * * *

  The burning oil drum was a mystery, and Dunn refused to guess at the identity of the trucks. Lampard spent ten minutes alone. When he came back he had decided to attack. There was total silence from the other officers.

  “Nobody is cheering,” he said.

  “I just don’t see the point, that’s all,” Gibbon said. “We know precisely where they are. I can steer us well clear of them in the dark. Even if they hear us they won’t interfere. Not in the dark.”

  “There’s no other SAS patrol in this area,” said Sandiman, “but that doesn’t prove it’s Jerry, does it? And if it is Jerry and his radio op gets a message out, it’ll be Stukas tomorrow, a pound to a penny.”

  Lampard tugged his left ear-lobe and looked at Dunn.

  “You’re the boss, Jack,” Dunn said.

  “You’re against it too.”

  “Beda Fomm is our target.”

  “Oh, we’ll hit Beda Fomm. I don’t like the idea of a Hun ambush waiting for us on our way back.” Lampard could see they were not impressed by this argument. “Besides, it’s time the chaps had a bit of fun.” That made Gibbon stare and Sandiman sniff, but Lampard didn’t care. He had made up his mind. He sent for the men and began his briefing.

  * * *

  Lessing, Fleischmann and the senior NCO took it in turns to supervise the watch throughout the night. At four a.m. Fleischmann accompanied the new sentries as they replaced the old. Nothing had happened. The moon was down and the blackness was absolute.

  The new sentry on the northern side was a twenty-one-year-old Berliner called Manfred. He took over the light machine gun, acknowledged Fleischmann’s sharp reminder to stay alert, and for seven or eight minutes he did just that. Then his girlfriend Tania slid into his imagination as sweetly as she had once slid into his bed, and after that his military duty was always on the losing side.

  Her real name was Hannah. Tania suited her much better. She was built like a dancer, but a dancer with real breasts instead of the flat blisters which most dancers had. Manfred had first seen her in a leotard at the gymnasium where he trained, and it was her outspoken nipples that made him gasp. They gave point to breasts that were firm, neat and circular, like her buttocks. A little later he discovered a stunning pair of legs at one end and a delightful face at the other. Manfred was a shy, handsome boy, very good on the horizontal bars, but hopeless at making small talk with any goddess who had outspoken nipples, so he made friends with her brother, Adam, instead. Adam was a cheerful lad and very keen on table tennis.

  Months passed. Manfred had been silently in love with Tania for so long that the pain was now part of his everyday life. One weekend his parents went away to attend a funeral and he arranged to stay at Adam’s house. That was when Tania slipped into his room and into his bed and stole his virginity, using a combination of sweetness and savagery topped with a small packet of nitro-glycerine that sent skyrockets ricocheting between his ears. When he got his breath back she kissed him. To his amazement, he detected gentle affection. She was in love with him. What a brilliant coincidence!

  He sat cross-legged on the sand, stroked the light machine gun, and remembered all the places where they had made love. In the summerhouse. In the attic. Deep in a pine forest, stark naked, while squirrels watched and an oblivious breeze made the tree-tops sigh. In a shower-cubicle, as the hot spray plastered their hair down and made her breasts squeak against his chest. On the back seat of her cousin’s car. Under a bandstand in a deserted park. In a sleeping-bag. Behind somebody’s garage. In a field of buttercups, rich tall yellow buttercups that gave her skin a buttery sheen. That had been a good one; she had said so, tucking an arm behind her head and looking at him with huge shared satisfaction. Manfred inhaled powerfully through his nose and held his breath while he stared at the stars and listened to the tiny howl of life in his ears. Corporal Pocock wrapped his left hand over Manfred’s mouth and cut his throat so expertly that he died in a few seconds.

  The sentry on the western side sat huddled in a blanket until the pressure on his bladder became uncomfortable. He draped the blanket over the machine gun and wandered away. Dunn found a shape that was fractionally darker than the darkness and was about to stab it when he heard a splash and a grunt of pleasure, so he backed off. The trickle ceased. The man returned, took some dates from his pocket and started to chew. Guided by the sound, Dunn moved in and whacked him on the head with a spring-loaded cosh. He caught the body at the armpits.

  Pocock spent far more time listening than moving. In that way he found a man asleep in his blankets, gently lifted a blanket and pressed it over his face as he killed him with a stab under the ribcage to the heart. Or, if not the heart, the aorta. It was a big knife, and double-edged; it was bound to find something vital.

  Dunn smelt the heavy aroma of diesel fuel and carefully traced it to a truck. A man was asleep in the back, snoring sporadically. Dunn tried to climb in. A chain rattled and he froze, right leg in mid-air. Now he could hear two sets of breathing. Too dangerous. He lowered himself, inch by inch. One of the men sat up and asked something in blurred and bleary German. “Uh-huh,” Dunn muttered. He lost himself in the night and waited until his heart stopped kicking itself to death.

  He moved again and his luck ran out. Somebody had a nightmare.

  Lieutenant Fleischmann knew who it was. The same man had a nightmare every night at this time, more or less, so Fleischmann was ready for it. He was sitting in the cab of a truck. He switched on the spotlight, swung it toward the panicking screams and caught Dunn in the beam: black of face and bright of knife.

  Dunn ran. Fleischmann shouted, chased Dunn with the beam and grabbed with his other hand at the Luger in his belt. He briefly caught Dunn, but Dunn was dodging like a rabbit and he vanished again. Fleischmann fired a shot in the air, then dropped the Luger so that he could switch on the headlights. Corporal Pocock opened the passenger door, leaned across and shot Fleischmann through the head.

  At once there was machine-gun fire from the desert. It came from the south, five or six weapons, widely spaced, sending arcs of tracer pulsing toward the German unit.

  Captain Lessing did a smooth job of organizing the defense. He switched off the headlights and the spotlight. He told the rifles and light machine guns to cease fire: the enemy was out of their range. Then he stopped the heavy machine guns blasting away non-stop. Finally he got the mortar crew assembled. Nevertheless there was much shouting and dashing about; and enough enemy fire came ripping through the canvas hoods of the trucks and flinging up streaks of sand to make the scene very lively and noisy. One machine-gun crew had a stoppage; they were cursing softly and hitting the weapon. Corporal Pocock found a rifle and hid by the wheel of a truck. During the next rattle of fire, he shot both the crew in the back. For a moment nobody noticed. Then he heard shouts, orders, whistles. Two men scuttled across and dragged the bodies from the gun. Pocock briefly considered shooting them too. No. Not wise.

  Captain Lessing had had a terrible thought. “What if that’s Jakowski out there?” he said to the senior NCO. They were
lying in a shallow slit trench.

  “Why would Major Jakowski attack us?”

  “Christ knows. Why would the British attack us? They could sneak past and be over the horizon long before dawn. Why look for trouble?”

  “Major Jakowski always looked for trouble,” the NCO said.

  More tracer brightened the night. Dunn, lying on his stomach, saw a machine-gunner outlined only ten feet away. He raised his pistol and shot him. Then he shot his loader.

  “What the hell was that?” Lessing demanded. “What maniac’s using a pistol?” Before the NCO could answer there was a throaty bang: the mortar crew had fired. “Find out what range they’re using,” Lessing said. The NCO heaved himself up and ran. The mortar crew were reloading. One held a flashlight: mortars were tricky, and they had never operated at night before. As the loader dropped the shell in the tube and ducked away, Corporal Pocock shot him. The NCO saw the muzzle-flash. He knocked the flashlight to the ground and used his Schmeisser to spray the area where Pocock had been standing. One bullet took off Pocock’s left kneecap and he collapsed. The NCO rammed on another clip and sprayed again. This time he hit Pocock in the throat and legs. He wasted a third clip, but then he was a good NCO. He always made sure.

  Lessing heard the Schmeisser and it made no sense. He counted to three and sprinted to the radio truck. The operator was sitting inside, waiting for orders. “See if you can raise Jakowski,” Lessing told him. “That may be Jakowski out there. Try him, call him up.” The operator chose a frequency. The light over his set made it easy. Dunn crept to the door, shot Lessing, shot the operator, smashed the valves and called it a night.

  He walked in a wide half-circle that took him back to Lampard’s assault party. “Not many left,” he said. In fact only the senior NCO and three men survived, one of them wounded. In the flat, tired twilight before dawn, the senior NCO surrendered.

  The Germans buried their dead and the SAS buried Pocock. Most of the bodies went into trenches they had been running toward when Lampard’s machine guns cut them down. The last shovel tidied the last grave as the sun swelled and floated clear of the horizon. Everyone ate breakfast, including Lester and Malplacket, who had been allowed to inspect the scene of the action.

  “All I heard was a lot of shooting.” Lester said. “What exactly happened here?”

  “We infiltrated their position and shot them in the back,” Lampard said.

  “They were looking the other way, you see,” Dunn explained. “Toward Jack.”

  “Well, now you’ve seen some action,” Lampard said. “Is it any use to you?”

  Malplacket hesitated. “To be absolutely truthful, I was hoping for more dash,” he said. “More dash and pluck.”

  “You don’t see David Niven playing the part of Pocock?” Lampard said. “Creeping up on German sentries and cutting their throats from ear to ear? No, perhaps not.”

  “What were these guys doing, out here in the desert?” Lester asked.

  “I expect they were up to no good, just like us,” Lampard told him cheerfully. “The difference is we’re rather better at it, aren’t we?”

  * * *

  Many people knew about Greek George. He could tell by the way other Arabs glanced when they met up with his Arabs. Many such meetings took place. The foothills of the Jebel seemed empty, but they gave a living to a great network of families, always on the move, always meeting and exchanging news. Greek George was no secret in the Jebel.

  This did not worry him; after all, the Arabs had already shown him great kindness. In any case they knew he was planning to walk back to the Allied lines. One day they brought him a pair of desert boots, calf-length: probably taken from an Italian officer. Also an army water-bottle.

  Sometimes German patrols passed nearby, on foot or in half-track personnel-carriers. George did exactly what the others did: he stood and watched. The more often it happened, the safer he felt. He was just another Arab.

  * * *

  Schramm’s fears for Lessing’s safety were not entirely wasted. They prompted General Schaefer’s staff to signal Lessing and order him to report by radio twice a day, at six a.m. and six p.m. Jakowski’s policy of radio silence was overruled.

  When there was no six a.m. transmission, Colonel von Mansdorf telephoned Oberstleutnant Hoffmann and asked him to make a reconnaissance flight in the yellow Lysander. Hoffmann asked Schramm to come along and navigate.

  “All right. Provided you tell Schaefer to go and piss in his hat.”

  “For the love of God!” Hoffmann said impatiently. “You’re in a permanent temper nowadays, Paul. What is it? Piles?”

  “No, it’s worse than piles. It’s the knowledge that I wasted so much time on that stupid wop bitch.”

  Later, as they were strapping themselves into the cockpit of the Lysander, Hoffmann said, “She may be a wop, and she may be a bit of a bitch, but she’s not stupid.”

  “I don’t care,” Schramm said, “I don’t care, I don’t care.”

  “The more you say it, the less I believe it. And if you really think she’s stupid, you’re in bigger trouble than I thought. Anyway, that’s your problem. Let’s go.”

  The flight was routine.

  Schramm had the binoculars on the little cluster of trucks as soon as it came out of the haze on the horizon. “Half of them have gone,” he said.

  Hoffmann made a wide approach and circled. “Nobody there,” Schramm said, but Hoffmann could see that for himself. Then Schramm found the row of graves. Hoffmann landed.

  Already the sun had baked the bloodstains black and cracked their surface like old paint. Weapons lay about, smashed and useless. Ammunition and empty cartridge-cases made small heaps.

  “Nowhere to retreat,” Hoffmann said, “and nothing to hide behind. A very short chapter in the history of war.”

  “This wasn’t a chapter,” Schramm said. “It wasn’t even a paragraph. It wasn’t even a footnote. It was a spelling mistake in a grammatical error in a footnote to a footnote that nobody’s ever going to read anyway.” He went off to count the graves.

  They landed at Benina to refuel. While Hoffmann went to a telephone and called von Mansdorf, Schramm looked at the damage from the dive-bombing. Most of the craters had been filled but one was still being excavated. It was enormous. A young Luftwaffe pilot leaned on the barrier, looked down twenty feet and watched dirt being shoveled away from a sixteen-cylinder engine.

  “This is the one that didn’t get away,” Schramm said.

  “Yes sir.”

  “It comes to us all, in the end. I’ve just helped to bury a few friends. Not as deep as this, of course. I was a pilot once, you know.” The other man glanced, and was polite enough to suppress his surprise. “Different war,” Schramm said. “Just as messy, though. I’m surprised you feel the need to study the gruesome remains.”

  “Just killing time. Besides, it’s only strawberry jam, isn’t it?” He chewed at a bit of tough skin on a finger. “When you go in at full bore with a pair of bombs in your armpits, even the strawberry jam doesn’t have any pips.”

  A sling of steel rope was being maneuvered under the engine. A crane driver inched his machine nearer the crater.

  “What do you fly?” Schramm asked.

  “Gustavs, out of Beda Fomm.” The Gustav was the 109G. “I’m just waiting to pick up a replacement.”

  He looks about sixteen, Schramm thought. Probably nineteen or twenty. Ruthless little thug. “Scored yet?” he asked.

  The young man nodded. “Five confirmed kills. Two Hurricanes, a Blenheim and a couple of MC200s.”

  The crane revved, its cable tightened, the engine came out of the earth with a slow, wet, sucking sound, and gently revolved.

  It was not unknown for the enemy to capture aircraft and fly them. Transports usually, not fighters; but anything was possible in war. Schramm pulled a splinter off the barrier and tossed it in the pit. “That’s an Italian machine,” he said, “the MC200.”

  Again the young ma
n nodded. “Their squadriglia gave us some grief. They jumped a bunch of our Gustavs and shot holes in them. Deeply apologetic. Poor visibility, mistaken identification. They thought we were Spitfires. Next day, we jumped them. Two down in flames. Problem solved.”

  The crane had hauled the engine up to ground level. “Excuse me,” Schramm said, and walked around the crater. Men were hosing dirt off the twisted metal. He soon saw what he was looking for: the manufacturer’s name, Allison. That meant it had to be a P-40. The hose washed off something that was not dirt.

  * * *

  The adjutant went over to Kit Carson’s tent and cleared it out. That didn’t take long. He put Kit’s belongings on his bedroll and rolled everything up. Everything except his notebook. Kellaway sat on the folding bed and let the notebook fall open.

  The CO ran away from home when he was a kid, so Mick O’Hare says. Uncle told him. Mick ran away from home too. I know Tiny Lush and Billy Stewart got kicked out of school, like me, except I got kicked out twice. Pinky was an orphan, at least that’s what he says, but you can’t believe everything Pinky tells you. Sneezy and Greek George are like refugees, so most of the squadron has no home to go to. Makes you think. Dunno what it means, but it makes you think.

  Kellaway skipped a few pages.

  Big joke. Butcher force-landed in the desert and got his Tomahawk towed back to the LG by a couple of camels. Turned out he needn’t have force-landed anyway. He forgot to switch over fuel tanks, so he thought he ran out of petrol when he didn’t. Butcher reckoned he deserved a gong but Fanny fined him two weeks’ pay for being such a berk. Butcher said it cost him a month’s pay to hire the camels. Fanny asked the Arabs to give the money back, in exchange for an IOU they could take back to Desert Air Force HQ. The Arabs said OK, they’d give the money back, but only after they’d towed the Tommy with Butcher in it back where they’d found it. Big joke.

  Kellaway skipped some more.

  Billy Stewart sits outside his tent and watches flies. Why?

  And some more.

  Dreamt about T. I wish he’d go away. It’s over a year since he bought it. Everyone knew he was going to buy it, he was such a bloody awful pilot. Poor bugger.