by Gavin Lyall
At last he took out a folded handkerchief and wiped his lips, ignoring the sparkle of sweat on his deep forehead. After a sip of wine, he said carefully: "I am very sorry, but it is all right now. But tell me.. what is John Tyler dying from?"
Maxim blinked at him, puzzled. Agnes shrugged and muttered: "Le baisage."
"John? That is strange… in the desert, he was like a monk."
"In the desert, did you have any choice?"
"A-small amount. And certainly a choice of conversation."
Maxim asked: "And what are you dying of, sir?"
De Carette seemed to ignore him. He got up slowly and walked around the room, weaving carefully between the furniture until he reached the south wall. That was the only one with window seats built into it. He stared down into the valley.
"I saw you coming. I have watched for a long time because I knew that one day somebody would come. And I thought they might be too late. The doctors told me I have la tuberculose. You see, they cannot call it cancer of the lung because the government owns the monopoly of tobacco and so we do not have cancer of the lung in France. It is probably forbidden by some law of some thirteenth of July…"He lifted his hands in a weary gesture, and turned back from the window.
"So you are right, Major. And… I also thought to write a letter. But I could not decide where to send it. My wife is dead, my sons… I am not sure they would understand. Perhaps you will, Major." He came back and sat down. "Some more wine…"
Maxim got up quickly and poured it; that just about killed the bottle, and de Carette took a small telephone from beside the fire and gave orders.
"The family de Carette has always been of the Army. Some to the Navy, but most to Saint-Cyr. You can see…" The panelled walls were lined with austerely framed photographs of groups of officers, some sitting in rigidly posed rows, some grinning across the crumpled mudguard of a Sherman tank. Many were far too old to be of this de Carette, but his career was all there: the stiff-necked graduate of Saint-Cyr, the sous-lieutenant among black troops in Africa, sharing a jeep with Ledere, being decorated by de Gaulle, in Hanoi with de Lattre de Tassigny…
But not in the desert with John White Tyler.
An old lady came into the room carrying a new tray of glasses and a bottle, the cork already drawn. De Carrette thanked her brusquely.
"And so… when I had my commission, I was humiliated to be posted to Africa. We all knew, we young officers, that a war must come in Europe – was that hope, perhaps? – but nothing could come to Fort Archimbault or de Possei. But a soldier who argues with orders is arguing with his luck, perhaps his life. We listened on the radio as France died, day by day, and we cursed God. Yet the officers who stayed there were defeated or dismissed. And the few – there were some – who tried to maintain the Army of the Armistice at Vichy, to keep something sacred from the politicians and Germans, something they could one day build on again (perhaps I understand those men better, now) after the war they were assumed to be collaborators and anybody who had been in Africa was a hero."
He smiled at Agnes. "Enfin, I became a hero."
But not quickly. He was among the first to come north and join up with 8th Army in the desert, but his knowledge of English doomed him to a series of liaison jobs with the Staff. He saw little action except in Cairo bedrooms – "They were all spies, those girls, but they learned nothing from me, not in any way, alas. I was very young…" Then it was 1942. Alamein, and what really did seem like the last push westwards. He was to go forward to Benghazi and on by single-engined Waco down to join the Long Range Desert Group, who needed a French officer. His contact would be Captain John White Tyler. "But of course, you know all this from John's book."
"We'd like to hear your version, sir," Maxim said.
De Carette took a mouthful of wine and cocked his head as if he were tasting it for the first time. "It is bizarre. What I most remember is how we all smoked cigarettes, all the time, whenever anything happened or did not happen… I smoked far more cigarettes than I fired bullets…"
25
The patrol started from Zella oasis, the new headquarters of LRDG, about two hundred miles south of the coast road where the armies fought and where – thank God – the insects stayed. They kept just over the horizon from the next oasis at Hon, where the Italians were supposed still to have a thousand soldiers in residence, and near the end of the first day came out onto the flat gravel of the Hamada el Homra, the Red Desert.
It was a small group, just ten men spread among two jeeps and two much-converted thirty-hundredweight Chevrolet trucks. They were looking for a unit, or advance guard or patrol – call it what you like because it could be pure rumour – of French colonial troops coming up from somewhere in West Africa.
From the beginning of the war, there had been over 120, 000 French soldiers in Africa – regular, colonial, native and Foreign Legion – vaguely loyal to Vichy but mostly just counting their fingers. A few, Ledere and de Carette himself among them, had come up to join 8th Army long before. Now, after the Allies had landed in Morocco and Algeria and the Germans had torn down and thrown away the Vichy government like old Christmas decorations, there was a rush from the other French garrisons to get back into the war.
They appeared almost anywhere. They raided and even captured Italian outposts, they ambushed convoys and sometimes each other – but the one thing they never did was tell anybody else what they were doing.
"If a French officer came to me," a choleric colonel in Benghazi had said, "and told me where he'd been, what he'd done, and where he was going next, I'd have him shot as a German spy. He'd be no bloody Frenchie!"
De Carette had begun to wind himself up into a cold fury, but then remembered that he was very young and junior, and that this colonel was his door into the romantic behind-the-lines warfare of LRDG, so shouldn't be slammed carelessly. And anyway, he knew there was enough truth in the comment to agree politely. Very coldly, but politely.
That was their only task: to find the rumoured French unit. Contact with the enemy was to be avoided. On the other hand, it was a big desert and the enemy might not know contact with him was to be avoided, so they carried the more-or-less standard armament of twin Vickers K guns fired from the right-hand seat of the jeeps, with a single Lewis and a belt-fed Vickers machine-gun in the Chevs. They also had rifles, pistols, Tommy-guns, grenades, land-mines, 808-type plastic explosive and a few incendiary candles. Just standard equipment.
The patrol seemed to be one big family, perhaps more than a family, since the ones who didn't fit had been thrown out. They came from any unit in the desert and wore any bits of uniform they happened to have – most of it all at once, in the January chill, topped oif with a greatcoat or goatskin jacket. Nobody wore the flowing keffiyah head-dress any more: it looked splendidly romantic, but it also caught in the steering-wheel or the chattering bolt-knob of a machine-gun. A knitted woolly 'comforter' didn't.
Nobody seemed to use ranks or even real names. Tyler was 'Skipper' and only de Carette was 'sir' – the newcomer, the outsider. He wasn't sure he really wanted to be part of the family, but he did want to be asked.
"They were very fair," de Carette recalled. "They saw I could drive perhaps better than any of them, so they let me have one of the jeeps. John drove the other. You are too young, both of you, to remember, but before the war most French and English soldiers could not drive at all. Except a few who had been drivers of trucks for a job, and the boys of parents with some money. My family had some money, and I had driven a car in Africa since I was big enough to see over the steering-wheel. I expect it was illegal even then, but…"
An hour before sunset they stopped for the night. Just stopped, because on the flat plain there was nowhere to hide. The Signals sergeant from the wireless Chev erected his flimsy aerial and started tapping out a position report. Others unloaded just as much as they needed for the night and no more, because they might need a fast getaway. They serviced the vehicles, cleaned the guns and everybody fi
lled his water bottle. Nobody went anywhere without a full water bottle.
They had done 150 miles, not bad considering the basalt rocks above Hon and it being a first day when newly-stowed stores could shake loose and even fall off. But Captain Tyler was strict about things like that, preaching gently that a tin of meat and veg wasn't important in itself, only when you couldn't find it. At twenty-seven he was older than any of them except the Signals sergeant.
One of them cooked a stew of tinned M and V over the traditional 8th Army stove: one of the old flimsy petrol tins bodged with holes and half-filled with petrol-soaked sand. It burned surprisingly tamely for a surprising time. The tea came thick and horribly sweet, made with condensed milk. De Carette made no comment.
At the moment of sunset, the Red Desert suddenly lived up to its name. The rusty plain turned to blood in the horizontal light, then richened through all the scarlets and purples of raw meat as shadows stretched out from inch-high pebbles. Only the colours moved; everything else was quite still. Everybody stopped and watched; none of them had been this far west before. They lit cigarettes and the smoke drifted almost straight upwards. Then the colours faded and darkened to colourlessness, and the patrol gave appreciative grunts and went back to their jobs.
"Always something new," Tyler said, his long face becoming an opera devil in the red light. "Ex Africa semper aliquid novi. We may impress ourselves with what we're up to, but I doubt we'd impress old Pliny. Although it was some Greek who said it first…"
He rambled on in his slow, serious voice, and de Carette flattered himself that Tyler might be glad to have a companion to whom he could quote Latin. Yet the scholar and soldier seemed to blend without a seam showing, and Tyler wasn't condescending when he argued with Corporal Bede about the unnecessary complication of the Tommy-gun. Was this some Anglo-Saxon duplicity?
But he was right about the desert: always something new. To some it was a mysterious woman, to others an old bitch who never knew her own mind. Neither pretended to know the 'desert'. It would change subtly, from gravel to tiny stones to bigger ones and then sharp rocks that carved at your tyres until your arms were limp with winding the steering-wheel and your speed had dropped at least ten mph (or ten mih – miles in the hour – as the Army put it, just to remind you this wasn't a Saturday afternoon picnic). And then the lady might throw a real change of mood at you, like a crumbled escarpment that fell away a full three hundred feet that you wouldn't have chanced even in one of the new Sherman tanks.
Or perhaps a miniature mountain range, jagged as broken glass, poking out of the plain like the backbone of some vast dinosaur. All quite unexpected, of course.
The desert was a very old lady. And there were almost no maps of her face.
Tyler poured everybody a mug of rum, lime-juice powder and water, then one by one they wrapped themselves in sleeping bags under tarpaulins stretched from the vehicles like tent-halves.
The night turned viciously cold under a sky crowded with stars that shone, not twinkled, in the diamond-clear air. They were all young, fit and well rested, so nobody felt very tired yet. There wasn't much talking, but matches flared and cigarettes glowed until well after midnight.
Around noon on the third day they slid down the western escarpment off the Hamada and, according to dead reckoning navigation, crossed into Tunisia.
Unexpectedly – as you'd expect – the desert changed to short, sandy-grey hummocks wearing toupees of crackly brush that broke off and jammed in the track rods and exhausts. It had a depressing and unnatural nastiness, like the man-made deserts of rubbish and broken cars beside the railway yards outside big cities. It slowed them anyway, but they also went more cautiously.
That night they leaguered three-quarters of a mile before a track that wasn't properly a road but had been in use long before most other roads in the world. From the Mediterranean in the north it reached down some 1800 rambling miles through the real Sahara to Tamanrasset and finally Kano in Nigeria, and camel trains had been plodding it since Hannibal's day.
If the French had got this far, they had almost certainly used this track. But so would any Afrika Korps unit which had picked up the same rumour. They put a watcher at the trackside while the rest of them went on with the evening chores.
About half an hour before sunset, two aeroplanes flew northwards on the far side of the track. Through glasses, Tyler identified them as Stukas. They were flying suspiciously low and slow, although the nearest landing-ground was at least seventy miles away. De Carette felt a ripple of unease run through the patrol, and when the aircraft noise had faded, several of them quietly went around checking the camouflage nets and bushes piled on the vehicles.
"We shan't see them again today," Tyler said. "They don't have the night-flying lights and whatnot on the landing-grounds here. It's probably safer lighting a fire at night than by day. There must be dozens of Arab fires up and down the track." He gave a little chuckle, but went on frowning at the humps that were the Chevs. "Oh well… if you knows of a better 'ole, go to it."
Then he had to explain the old First War cartoon of the soldiers in a shell-hole to de Carette.
They kept watch on the track, in relays, until midnight. De Carette felt left out at not having been chosen, but the last watcher let him know why. It was a corporal called Bede, rather quiet and serious.
"Only a few camels," he reported. "But when it was clear I went down and took a shufti and there's been a lot of wheeled stuff recently. No tanks or half-tracks, just wheels. Some Opels and Volkses and some I don't know, Skip. I tried drawing a couple of them." He shone his torch on the signals pad and held it out – but to de Carette, not Tyler.
"I tell you," de Carette smiled, "I thought it was fantastic, quite absurd. How could I recognise the patterns of some old French tyres? I could not even tell you the patterns of my own cars or the jeep I had just been driving. But then I saw: all of them would know just that. Like their own signatures. I was ashamed and angry, but now I know they were telling me something. I might tell them about Africa, but they could tell me – the only professional soldier – about war. John knew it, of course."
He chuckled at the memory, coughed carefully, and said: "He asked Bede if he could tell which way they had been going, these tracks. But he could not. So John sent him back with his torch, a long useless walk, to have a look. It was his sort of discipline."
26
They renewed the watch again from before dawn. At half past nine, Tyler went off to take a stint himself. Without him, de Carette felt even less a part of the family, and suddenly very frightened. Here they were, behind enemy lines (insofar as that part of the desert had 'lines' at all) but they weren't dashing about, blazing away with machine-guns and watching fuel dumps go up in fountains of flame. They were crawling under the camouflage nets to tinker with the engines and guns, brewing up tea, smoking, re-reading tattered old letters from home, snoozing,… it was all so normal that it made the war seem very much more total than just the bombing of children and old women.
One of the Chev drivers, a lance-corporal known as Griff, came over with a blackened tea-can. "Cuppashay, sir?" He was a handsome boy from somewhere in London, his hair ink black except for the dust, and the lower half of his face looking as if he'd washed in ash. By now they all had four-day beards, ranging from the True Explorer to the Sadly Adolescent. Nobody shaved in LRDG; it was a waste of water but more than that a waste of hot water, which took fuel and time. What they heated, they drank asshay, though no Arab would accept Griff's brew as real tea.
"Thank you very much." De Carette offered him a cigarette.
"Ta, sir," Griff squatted down and puffed. "Is it true what they say about the Arabs around here, sir? I mean them not being like the Sennoos?"
"I am afraid that it is. Here, I think it would be a bad mistake to trust them."
"Yer." Griff frowned as he thought out the implications of this. In Libya, the Senussi were the LRDG's best allies against Italian overlords who shut them in
concentration camps and, occasionally, took their chiefs up in an aeroplane and pushed them out without benefit of a parachute. But in Tunisia the French were the hated overlords, and de Carette had spent too long as a child in North Africa to have any illusions about it. Vichy had gained some popularity with its anti-semitic laws, but most popular of all – according to Intelligence – were the newly arrived German troops with their rigid good manners and open-handed payments for food and services rendered.
If 'liberation' meant a return to tight-wad French rule, most Tunisian Arabs wanted nothing to do with it.
"Yer," Griff decided. "Could make it tricky, that, sir. Mind, the Skipper speaks Arabic, did you know that?"
"He speaks it better than I myself do, and I was born in Algeria. He also speaks better French than I speak English."
"Yer." Griff nodded, satisfied. "He's dead clever, the Skipper. Wonder what he'll do, after the war? I s'pose he'll go to Oxford or Cambridge and be a professor. I can't see him wanting to be a bleedin' general."
It was a simple assumption, but Griff didn't live to see it come true. Ten minutes later, the aircraft found them.
The first was a lone CR 42, an old biplane fighter and just about the last of its type that the Italians dared fly over Africa. It droned along, weaving lazily, parallel to the track. The pilot was obviously searching the ground but whether he was looking for anything in particular… In any case, all they could do was lie still in the best cover they could find. Even if the vehicles hadn't been immobilised by camouflage, they couldn't have dodged among those hummocks.
The pilot could have seen something as small and chancy as the glint of a well-scrubbed cooking-tin; more likely it was the sheer bulk of the Chevs. They stood at least five feet high when loaded and even parked between the hummocks couldn't be made to look like small bushes. But whatever he saw, the moment was quite clear. The fighter stiffened out of its curving flight, then its engine howled as it climbed flamboyantly against the sun.
