by Gavin Lyall
The patrol swore vividly and scuttled around, re-arranging themselves to meet the line of attack. They rammed magazines into the Tommy-guns and cocked them – and so did de Carette, although he hadn't much faith in pistol-calibre bullets bringing down an aeroplane. But there was no time to tear off the camouflage nets and get at the machine-guns on the vehicles, even if anybody had felt suicidal enough to try.
Fired simultaneously, four heavy machine-guns make a single stretched-out explosion: brrrrrap. The recoil checked the aeroplane for a moment in a sprinkle of falling brass cartridge cases, and dust erupted all around the wireless Chev. The Tommy-guns burped back. De Carette knelt up, the gun stabbing against his shoulder like a pneumatic drill.
The biplane climbed away, followed by the thin rattle of a single Lewis gun.
It was sheer chance that Bede had been working on the other Chev at the time. And it was probably his strict but unimaginative sense of what was right and proper that made him knock aside the bits of bush over the Lewis gun and pull down the netting until the barrel poked through. He might have run away from a Messerschmitt, which was a proper modern aeroplane, but not from some tatty old biplane.
"Get out of there, you stupid bugger!" Griff screamed, and rushed across to the Chev. De Carette saw him ranting at the shadow of Bede inside the netting, but then the biplane turned in again, wings wriggling as it straightened its aim. He heard the first few shots from the Lewis before it was blotted out. Brrrrrrap.
The Chev vanished in a blast of dust, and in the middle of it there was flame. Griff staggered out of the smoke, either wounded or dazed. De Carette got up – so did half a dozen others – but they were slapped down as the whole thing blew. Petrol, mines, grenades, maybe even the plastic explosive, all at once. Blazing fuel cans arced into the bushes on every side and started new fires, and when the first eruption died down, the Chev was a tangle of junk, burning steadily and pouring black smoke into the air. Somebody ran across to Griff, took one look and ran back. There was no sign of Bede at all.
The biplane climbed away rather slower than before, and went into a wide, wary turn. So perhaps Bede, or even one of the Tommy-guns, had got lucky after all. Or maybe it was just out of ammunition, because after one circle, it flew away to the north.
"Get all the camouflage off," de Carette ordered. "Get everything ready to move." They hardly needed telling. The CR 42 knew it had left an unfinished job, and the smoke was rolling two hundred feet into the air before it thinned out. An aeroplane could probably see that from forty miles away. Ammunition began to cook off in the fire, spitting in all directions.
They were ready to move in under five minutes. The wireless Chev had several holes through its wooden bodywork, and there was a strong smell of petrol from a punctured can, but worst of all was a patch of damp on the ground between the front wheels.
"The bugger got her in the waterworks," the driver said. He crawled under and started feeling up around the radiator. "Shit."
"How far can you go?" de Carette asked.
"Dunno, sir… could be a mile or two…"
"Put in some water now, quickly." They moved like a circus acrobatic team. One yanked open the bonnet, another tossed down the can of water, the driver had the radiator cap off, a fourth started pouring. The bonnet clanged shut again.
"Go," de Carette said. "Spread out, go for the track. The Skipper will be coming back, one of us will see him." He slipped easily into command now there were decisions to be made. He must remember that he, unlike them, was a properly trained professional soldier. It was pure chance that they knew more about war than he did.
They picked up Tyler and his co-watcher after only a few minutes, staggering breathlessly back through the hummocks towards the smoke. De Carette gave him a quick report, and Tyler dropped panting into the gunner's seat of his jeep.
"Onto the track, then we'll head south." They charged off again. The first thing was to put distance between themselves and that black signpost in the sky.
They had to stop once, to put another can of water into the Chev; they didn't like using it up that way, but they had plenty for the moment-And in any case, de Carette knew the mission was dead. The loss of a truck and two men wasn't itself so bad: any military unit has to be able to take casualties without falling apart, and the lost supplies and fuel would have been used up by the dead men and wrecked truck anyway. But a single bullet through the wireless Chev's radiator was far worse. If they had to abandon that truck and fit eight men into two jeeps already jammed with gear, they'd have to dump not only the Chev's supplies but some from the jeeps as well.
It seemed very bourgeois thinking, and de Carette reminded himself of his mother in her high-necked black bombazine, old before her time because her chosen age was old, ticking off on her fingers the tiny triumphs of a morning's shopping in Cannes market.
But he hadn't starved at home and he didn't want to starve in the desert. No, the mission was dead. Tyler would know that.
They reached the track and turned south, away – they hoped – from trouble. For about ten miles they ran at speeds of thirty and forty mph, until the Chev's driver waved them down. The radiator was steaming like a kettle.
"Another ten seconds and she'd sieze solid, Skipper."
Tyler looked carefully around. There was a narrow strip of the bushy hummocks on the west side of the track before the real sand began. "Get off the road and dig her in."
They all bumped cautiously into a dead-end wadi, ran for a hundred and fifty yards, then stuck. Everybody except the gunners leapt out and started smothering the truck in netting and bushes. The gunners watched and automatically lit cigarettes. None of the vehicles had windscreens, so it was near impossible to smoke on the move.
Tyler scribbled a quick message on a signals pad and showed it to de Carette. It gave their position, then: No clue French. Lost two men and one Chev air attack. Other Chev probably immobile. Task unlikely completion. Details follow. Tyler.
De Carette nodded. "Does one need more detail?"
Tyler made a grunting chuckling noise and gave the signal to the Sergeant. "Encipher that and get it off as soon as you can, never mind about proper call times. We'll be back by dark."
One of the gunners called: "Planes, Skipper! Up north." He used a deliberately husky voice, as if aeroplanes five miles away might overhear, but de Carette now knew how he felt.
"Start up!" Tyler shouted. They drove out of the wadi and on southwards at a sober speed to keep down the dust.
"They're comin' this way, sir." his gunner said. They called him Yorkie, a solid squat boy from a Yeomanry regiment.
"What are they?"
"Stukas I reckon. Bugger 'em. There in't no hurry, sir."
De Carette had instinctively accelerated, but speed was no use against an aeroplane until it was actually attacking you.
"They 'ave us." Yorkie said. De Carette let the jeep coast, looking back over his shoulder. The two crank-winged Junkers 87's were following straight down the line of the track and as he watched, their engines began to strain, reaching for more height.
He drove on slowly, glancing upwards. The first Stuka nosed carefully over, with the precision of a marksman bringing a target rifle into his shoulder. Yorkie muttered filthy words. The Stuka dived almost vertically but not very fast, a crippled black shape against the pale sky.
"This in't our 'un," Yorkie said. "We'll get 'is mate." He swung up the K guns and fingered the triggers. "Could you keep 'er still a moment, sir?"
De Carette turned the jeep sideways and stopped. The Stuka was already right overhead, going for Tyler's jeep, a quarter of a mile down the track. Yorkie started firing as the Stuka let go two small bombs and began a sharp pull-out.
Tyler's jeep swerved wildly away off the track and two yellow-black spouts of smoke jumped up behind him. The jeep seemed unharmed. So did the Stuka.
'"Ere comes our 'un," Yorkie said, and went on swearing calmly as he changed the pans on the K guns. But he wouldn't
be able to elevate them enough to shoot at a a dive-bomber coming from right above.
"It seems so," de Carette said, surprised at how cool he sounded. He was terrified. He had been in a few night-time air raids in Egypt, and under artillery fire three times. But those had been impersonal, random affairs. Now a man in an aeroplane had chosen to kill him. There had been a choice and that man had decided to kill him, de Carette, rather than somebody else. It was unbelievable. As it toppled into the dive, the second Stuka looked like a gun barrel with wings.
He hauled the jeep around and accelerated furiously north, back up the track and into the diving aeroplane, hoping to force it to steepen its dive even further. But he was going too fast to look up.
"Bombs away!" Yorkie called. De Carette wrenched the wheel, almost overturned the jeep, and crashed into the cover of two bushy dunes. An explosion and a blast of hot air slapped him in the back. He froze, trying to decide if he were hurt, and there came another, longer explosion.
"You bastard! You bugger!" Yorkie screamed in delight. "That's t'first time tha's done that trick, you fucker!"
Shakily, de Carette looked around. A quarter of a mile south, there was a long smear of rich fнame and smoke rising beside the track. The Stuka hadn't quite managed its pull-out. He had never felt so happy that somebody had died.
De Carette backed nervously out of the dunes. They lit cigarettes and watched the first Stuka circling. After five minutes it flew away and they drove down to find Tyler. He was cannily hiding his jeep in the drifting smoke downwind of the burning wreckage.
"Are both of you all right?" he asked. "And the jeep? Good show. Well-" nodding at the fire; "-that's one on the profits side."
Tyler's gunner was a Birmingham boy with a bush of fair hair and a skin that turned red rather than tanned in the sun and wind. He was called Gunner, a nickname that had baffled de Carette until he realised it wasn't because he fired the machine-guns – which they all might do – but because he came from the Royal Artillery. Now he and Yorkie were wrangling like puppies because Gunner was quite sure (so he said) that it was his shooting and not a pilot's mistake that had crashed the Stuka.
"Do we go back now?" de Carette asked.
Tyler frowned at the sky, then the track north. "I don't like leaving them, but… that Stuka probably radioed our position. We'd do best to keep on south. It might draw attention away from the Chev. Hell's teeth, come back here, you moron!" Gunner had gone searching in the wreckage for a souvenir. He scampered back with a battered inspection plate that had sprung loose.
"Did you know they was Eyeties, Skip, them Stukas? They had the three what's-its on the tail. The markings. I didn't know the Eyeties had Stukas."
"Well, I did," Tyler said. "If you join Uncle Adolf's club, you get a badge and free Stukas. Italy, Hungary, Rumania, all of them…" But he still made a note of it for his report.
This, de Carette thought, is a man who takes war seriously. He may be leading small patrols across the desert, but he knows somebody who knows what aircraft Hitler is giving his Balkan friends, and he remembers.
For an hour, they hurried away from this new sky-marker, stopping just now and then to look at rubbish beside the track. They found cigarette packets, mostly Italian, broken wine bottles and a few German food tins that could be months old and still unrusted in that climate. But nothing French.
Finally they stopped for a brew-up and a very late lunch of biscuits and cheese, pickles and tinned fruit. To his own surprise, de Carette found he was getting a taste for the spicy English pickled onion.
As the excitement of action wore off, the mood turned gloomy as they remembered Bede and Griff.
"He was all right, was our Griff," Gunner recalled. "You always got a laugh out of 'im. And Jamie, he was all right, too."
"Aye," Yorkie said in a kind of sigh. "He were all right. Bit serious, mind, but there's worse things to be. And I liked that Griff."
"Right then," Tyler said firmly. "It cost them two men in that Stuka. But you won't shoot any more down with the guns all fouled. Let's get on with it."
They cleaned the guns, refilling the magazines and drove on south, a last stretch of the hand to reach a probably mythical ally. They were just about to turn back when Tyler's jeep suddenly stopped and he raised his arm. De Carette braked and waited, well back. Tyler jumped out, carrying a Tommy-gun, and ran into the dunes east of the track. Everybody lit cigarettes.
After about five minutes, Tyler re-appeared and waved them up. Leading onto the track was a wide, shallow wadi, its sandy floor plaited with tyre tracks. And a twinkling scatter of cartridge cases. Yorkie got down and picked one up, sniffing at it. "Aye, it's German, and recent.20-mil. Likely they've had a scout car down 'ere."
"They did," Tyler said quietly. He nodded up the wadi. "Go and take a look," he told de Carette. "Stay on the side; the track just might be mined."
Two hundred yards later, the wadi opened up into a perfect flat camp-site – except that it was far too close to the track. That was one mistake this French unit wouldn't make again. The burned-out hulks of the three civilian trucks seemed somehow far more miserable than the two military ones. North Africa was covered with wrecked army trucks, and also with little humps in the sand like those along the windward side of the dunes, each marked by a small board chopped off one of the truck bodies.
There were sixteen graves, the names laboriously scratched into the wood with indelible pencil. A lieutenant, two sergeants, a corporal, the rest privates. All French names; presumably none of them native troops. Why hadn't they given them the dignity of upended rifles jammed into the sand as markers? Because they were in Arab territory. A rifle was hard currency here.
Even the smallest battle is horribly untidy. The ground was littered with bits of clothing, cooking tins, tools, patches of dried blood, more cartridge cases and a sprinkling of black and grey ash from the dead fires. All the wreckage was quite cold, even where it had burned hot enough to melt the metal. More than a day ago. Two?
"Vous кtes Anglais, n'est-ce-pas?"
De Carette whipped around, jabbing the safety on the Tommy-gun as it came up level. A man was standing in a small gap between the dunes, ragged and dirty, with a bloody bandage around his left calf and propping himself on a crutch that was a charred plank. As his heart slowed down again, de Carette saw that under the tiredness and the thin beard the man was younger than himself. And the baggy trousers and flared jacket were certainly French.
He lowered the gun a fraction. "Je suis Lieutenant de Carette, Chasseurs d'Afrique."
The man grinned and sagged with relief, then tried to pull himself to attention. He croaked: "Soldat de la premiиre classe Gaston Lecat, mon Lieutenant."
De Carette washed and re-bandaged the wound while Yorkie brewed hot water and Gunner kept watch. Tyler asked the questions, in his careful but fluent French, and de Carette was a little miffed that he seemed to know more about the French army in Africa than he did himself. Yes, they had come up out of French West Africa once the old Vichy Colonel had managed to go down with malaria and the young Major decided it was time they got into the real war. They might have been searching for somebody called General Ledere – was there such a man? No, they didn't have a wireless transmitter with them. It was back at the fort, too big to put in a truck. There had been about forty of them, he thought, and they'd been on the road for eight, or was it ten?, days. They hadn't seen anybody except a few Arab camel drivers, who told them there weren't any Germans down here…
Tyler and de Carette swapped sour looks.
And, of course, the Italians. The Italians who had come up the same track behind them, the day of the attack. They'd pulled off into the dunes for lunch and left a guard hidden down by the road, and he saw this convoy of Italian motor-cars go past. Five of them and one truck. The Italians in the cars seemed to be officers and two women. Yes, the Major had thought that was odd, too. So he'd taken Sergeant Foulque and probably it was four men and one of the Chatellerault mach
ine-guns and gone off in two cars to follow.
And the rest of them had waited – and that night there was the attack. A blast of fire and grenades sweeping the camp, quickly followed by the pumping twenty-millimetres of scout cars charging up the wadi. He himself had never even found his rifle in the darkness, he'd just run until a bullet knocked him spinning down the dune and he hadn't seen anybody since then. He'd crawled away into the night and watched the glow of the burning trucks and heard at dawn the noise of digging, and then the Germans had driven away. He had waited all day, then all night, for the Major, but…
And, just like that, Lecat fell asleep, with a half-full mug of tea and rum in one hand and a burning cigarette in the other. Tyler carefully took the cigarette and ground it into the sand. "He's lucky to be able to do that, not to get hysterical or weepy when it's all over."
"You think it is all over?" De Carette gestured around.
"For him it is. He's found a new commander, the kitten has a new mother and doesn't have to do his own worrying any more. Most soldiers are like that, thank God."
De Carette looked down at the relaxed, very young face behind the wispy blonde beard. "He is only a lance-corporal, one stripe above nothing… So they did come this way. And they got caught. We have made our mission." He may have sounded bitter, hating to see French soldiers come off second best. But three years or more raising and lowering a flag over a Sahara fort was no training to meet the Afrika Korps.
"And what about the Major?" Tyler asked.
"He was caught as well." Now he was sure he sounded bitter.
"He must have gone up the track before we reached it; he left about forty-eight hours ago. And what do you think about the Italians, Henry T "I don't understand it, Jean." It was a tiny joke, switching nationalities on each other's names. – Tyler was trying to cheer him up. "From Ghadames?" That was the walled village – a town by desert standards – down on the edge of the Sahara, a hundred miles south. A strong Italian garrison, when last heard of. The French must have bypassed it without explaining to Lecat.
