‘Absolutely,’ Artemis agreed. ‘If I’m going to get blown up, I’d much rather be comfortable.’
Ellie wondered where Hugo was exactly and how he was. ‘The worst thing about all this,’ she explained to Nanny, ‘is not just being separated. It’s not knowing. It’s not knowing whether he’s at home or abroad, alive or dead.’
Nanny nodded, only half-attending. ‘I really should go home, you know,’ she said after a silence. ‘To look after my parents.’
‘Yes of course you should,’ Ellie agreed, although they’d discussed the problem endlessly.
‘The trouble is,’ Nanny continued, looking at the tousle haired baby romping in his play pen, ‘I find it so hard to leave Jamie.’
The Italians had only advanced fifty miles, less than halfway to Mersa Matruh where Hugo waited with the main body of the British contingent, and were now encamped in an ill thought out line of fortified camps.
‘They’re too damn far apart from one another, do you see,’ General Hunter explained to Hugo, ‘much too widely separated to support each other.’
‘Perhaps it’s only a temporary resting place – where is it?’ Hugo enquired.
‘Sidi Barrani,’ the General replied. ‘And I disagree. Scouts tell me there’s no sign of their moving.’
‘All to the good,’ General Wavell said. ‘Reinforcements arrive tomorrow.’
Which they did, in the shape of three armoured regiments, which had been rushed out on Churchill’s express orders.
‘The plan apparently,’ Hunter explained to Hugo as he briefed him a week later, ‘is to surprise ’em. Hit ’em a short sharp blow and knock the wind from their sails, and then push on down to the Sudan and have a go at the second Italian army down there.’
Hugo studied the wall map detailing the enemy positions and their own and asked how the attack was to be effected. General Hunter indicated the initiative would come from the east, hitting the line of camps frontally.
‘With respect, sir,’ Hugo said after studying the lie of the country, ‘that will be where they’re expecting us to come from.’
‘My point entirely, Tanner,’ a staff officer agreed, tapping the table with his swagger stick. ‘They’ll see us coming a mile off, and not only that, they’re not going to have laid out the welcome mat on that approach, are they? They’ll have laid a damn good minefield.’
‘Brigadier Dorman-Smith,’ General Hunter explained, ‘favours the indirect approach. From the rear.’
Hugo nodded. ‘From what I’ve seen that has to be the way, sir. The weather is in your favour if you head round behind and sweep up from here –’ Hugo tapped the board west of Tummar and Nibeiwa. ‘Because at this time of year,’ he continued, ‘the prevailing winds blow from here.’ He tapped the direction and traced the path of the winds down the map. ‘South-easterlies,’ he said. ‘Which will give you a good cover of sand. In fact, they make such easy reading at the moment, we should be able to time to within five or ten minutes the very best moment to strike.’
‘Good,’ Dorman-Smith said. ‘Now let’s try it out on God.’
General Wavell was all in favour, as was General O’Connor who, it emerged, was going to be running the show, although it was General Hunter who privately suggested that Hugo should be invited to go along in person rather than be expected to advise on the feasibility of the weather from such a distance as Mersa Matruh was from Sidi Barrani.
‘He’s a civilian,’ General O’Connor pointed out. ‘We can’t order him about, you know.’
‘I know, I know,’ Hunter replied tetchily. ‘But we could ask him.’
Hugo agreed readily, having decided to volunteer his presence should he not be officially invited. General Hunter advised him what to expect if as a civilian under such circumstances he should fall into enemy hands, but Hugo just smiled and said there was no chance of that, because the British were going to win by an innings.
‘We’ll get you a lift with the Hussars,’ Hunter said. ‘We’ll fix you up with an armoured car.’
Hugo attended the final briefing on the morning of 7 December, and gathered that although numerically they could expect to be outnumbered nearly three to one, thirty thousand men against eighty thousand, General Dick O’Connor’s forces had two hundred and seventy five tanks against the Italians’ one hundred and twenty.
‘And don’t forget,’ the general reminded his officers, ‘fifty of our tanks are “Matildas”. And they can take anything anti-tank the enemy care to throw at us.’
Under cover of dark that evening, the tanks and armoured cars and accompanying forces began their seventy mile approach through the desert. The following night, after consulting the weather conditions, Hugo forecast a light sandstorm which arrived as promised and covered the force’s move through a wide and seemingly unguarded gap in the Italians’ line of fortified camps. Early the following morning, out of a screen of sand the infantry of the 4th Indian Division, led by the 7th Royal Tanks, fell on the garrison of the Nibeiwa camp from the rear, and catching them completely by surprise, took four thousand prisoners for the loss of only seven tankmen.
In the afternoon the ‘Matildas’ knocked over the camps at Tummar West and Tummar East, while the 7th Armoured swept westward and took the coast road, cutting off the enemy’s line of retreat.
At the briefing that evening, the initial feeling was to move on as soon as possible and strike at the heart of the Sidi Barrani position, but General O’Connor advised caution because he was sure the Italians there would have been alerted, and the British were bound to meet much stiffer resistance. Furthermore he had been advised by Hugo of the chance of severe sandstorms early in the day. Hugo was asked when he considered the storms would have blown out.
‘If at all,’ an opponent to the plan argued. ‘And even if it does get up a bit, it’s all to the good. Give us the cover we need.’
‘Not this time, sir,’ Hugo corrected the officer. ‘This time we’re heading north-west, so we’d get the lot straight in the face.’
It was finally agreed to postpone what O’Connor hoped would be the final push in the light of Hugo’s argument, although not everyone agreed, and he was given some distinctly dirty looks by certain officers.
‘They don’t like being told their job by a civilian,’ General Hunter said as he wished Hugo good night. ‘So I hope you’re going to make ’em eat crow.’
‘Just look at the sky,’ Hugo said, as they stood outside the tent. ‘The horizon is disappearing already.’
Even so, despite his apparent confidence, Hugo spent most of the night outside, watching the sky, trying to read the sands, waiting for any change in the omens. But nothing changed. The night turned dark and moody as Hugo thought it would, and by early morning, the wind was howling and already whipping up the sands. Half an hour later it was screaming and shrieking, carrying acres and acres of sand on the air to half bury the waiting tanks, armoured cars, and the attendant armoury.
‘Well done, Tanner,’ General O’Connor said when the storms had passed and the task force prepared to move out. ‘Wouldn’t have done to get stuck in that little lot within range.’
Hugo found his lift and within minutes the column of tanks and armoured vehicles ground out from their position and swung towards their target. Hugo’s vehicle was well to the rear, as ordered, but even so he was still able to get a first-hand view of the engagement. And as so correctly predicted by the commanding officer, resistance was considerably stiffer, with the result that the initial assault was checked, and it necessitated two flanking moves by tanks from the 7th Armoured before Sidi Barrani was overcome late in the afternoon.
All evening the thunder of battle rang in Hugo’s head. The earlier engagements had been somehow tame, as the Italians had offered such little opposition, but the engagement at Barrani was a different show altogether, and even though victory seemed assured due to the great skill and courage of the tankmen, the reality of the battle and the sight of bloody death left Hugo silenced a
nd shattered.
He slept very little that night, his mind filled with images of stricken and blazing tanks, of men on fire, of decapitated and dismembered corpses, with the result that by dawn he had been up and dressed for two hours, watching the skies, and waiting for the desert to declare its hand.
The sands were still, and it was a breathless day, searingly hot and crystal bright. The Italians were on the run now and there was nothing to do but push on, which the force did, meeting no resistance. A reserve brigade from the 7th Armoured Division swept westwards, beyond Buq-Buq, to cut off a huge column of panic-stricken Italians, capturing a further fourteen thousand and netting another eighty-eight of their guns.
It was a glorious day, a victory drive with the enemy running like hunted quarry in front of the approaching vehicles. Soldiers threw down their rifles and started waving to their conquerors as if to old friends, many of them smiling happily as they surrendered themselves and their weapons. Some fell to their knees to pray as the British swept by, while others sat shell-shocked on the ground, uncertain whether to laugh or cry. Out of the smoke and dust of battle, column after column of captured Italians appeared, hands raised or flat on their heads, under the watchful rifles of the Infantry, young dark-skinned thick-haired men who, now that all chance of meeting death in battle had gone, smiled and joked and exchanged smokes with their captors.
Hugo hardly had time to appreciate the vagaries of war before the armoured car he was in swung away from the main column and started to head across the desert towards an encampment just visible in the middle distance. Hugo, who was now standing up in the turret for a better view of the proceedings, asked the officer who reappeared beside him what was the purpose of the diversion. The young Hussar explained that they had just been given orders to check the abandoned enemy encampment for snipers.
‘Best get your head down, sir,’ the officer advised as they neared what seemed to be a quite deserted outpost. ‘Better safe than sorry.’
The two of them disappeared down into the well armoured depths of the car as the driver peered through his letter box window in order to line up their best approach.
‘Just in case of mines, sir,’ he said, ‘there’s a set of wheel-tracks a hundred yards or so right, so let’s follow those, sir, shall we?’
‘Well done, Bates,’ the officer agreed. ‘Sounds like sense.’
‘They have to be fresh today,’ Hugo added, ‘after the storm this morning.’
‘Correct,’ the officer said. ‘And they’re hardly going to have had the time to bung any mines down in their hurry to leave, yes?’
‘No, sir!’ the driver called back, as he swung the car right and picked up the ruts made by some fleeing enemy vehicle. A second later he was dead, sprawled across his wheel, killed by a sniper’s bullet which had hit him in his right eye and blown away half his head. Hugo stared horrorstruck at the carnage, while the officer, once he had grasped what had happened, shouted to Hugo for help as the vehicle began to weave out of control. Hugo grabbed the dead man, pulling him sideways off his seat and half on to his lap while the officer seized the steering wheel in an effort to swing the careering car back on to the rutted tracks.
He was too late. As the Hussar pulled the wheel round hard to the right from beneath came the almighty thud of an exploding landmine, and a split second later the armoured car was catapulted high into the air, turning half a somersault to land on its side and on fire some twenty yards away in the sand.
19
The boat was late. So late that a rumour began to circulate among the waiting crowd that it had been torpedoed. When there was no official confirmation or denial after a wait of six hours, what had started out as a faint possibility had become an unquestionable fact. The liner had been sunk.
Artemis remained seated in the waiting room at the head of the quay, refusing to panic like most of the others around her, although deep inside her she knew there was every chance the ship may well have been attacked, even though it was only an innocent passenger liner. To the Germans, any ship seemed to be fair game, as earlier in the year one of their U-boats had attacked and sunk the liner Andorra Star, inflicting five hundred casualties and causing a panic at the lifeboat stations.
Finally, ten hours late and still unannounced, the ship for which everyone was waiting appeared at the entrance to the harbour, and was cheered by the waiting crowd all the way to its berth. As the first passengers disembarked, Artemis heard that they had indeed been attacked by a submarine that morning off the west coast of Ireland, and the captain had engaged in a brilliant evasive action which had undoubtedly saved the liner and the lives of those on board.
The crush was tremendous, and at first Artemis failed to find Ellie, who was finding it impossible to get down the gangway and off the ship. Finally, one of the officers who’d looked after Ellie on what had turned out to be an arduous journey, found her one of the very few porters to carry her luggage and escorted her through the crowds and down on to the quay, where she at last saw Artemis.
Ellie’s step quickened, and then she broke into a run, pushing her way through all the people until they faced each other at last. They found they had nothing to say.
‘You managed to drive down?’ Ellie asked, as the porter followed.
‘Not only that,’ Artemis said, ‘I managed to drive down in an official car. You’re official business.’
Ellie hesitated, and then took Artemis’s arm, who hurried her as fast as she could through Customs and Immigration and on to where she had parked the official car.
As soon as they were in the car, Ellie turned to Artemis. ‘Now,’ she said, as a matter-of-fact as she could be, ‘tell me how it happened. How, when and where. I want to know everything. I must know everything.’
They’d spoken briefly on the telephone, but the line was worse than ever, and Artemis was afraid that they might be cut off. In breaking the news she had given Ellie chapter and not verse.
‘I’m not quite sure where to begin.’
‘When are they bringing him home?’ Ellie asked. ‘Maybe we could start with that.’
‘As soon as possible.’ Artemis carefully buttoned up her gloves. ‘We’ve chased everyone up this end, Diana and I, and they’ve promised just as soon as they can get the transport from Cairo. How’s Jamie?’
‘He’s just fine,’ Ellie replied. ‘I so nearly brought him and Nanny back. But then I remembered.’ She stopped and gave Artemis a look. ‘I thought of what Hugo said. He said if anything happened to him, to Hugo –’
‘Absolutely, I remember.’
‘I mean what we said, what was agreed. I shouldn’t even be here, actually.’
‘Yes I know.’ Artemis put the key in the ignition and glanced at Ellie. ‘I think we ought to start heading back.’
‘I must just know one thing.’
‘Of course.’
‘Is it really true?’ Ellie asked. ‘Is it true that his mind is a blank? That he doesn’t even know his own name?’
‘So they say,’ said Artemis suddenly impatient. ‘But who knows? They could have got him mixed up with somebody else. Apparently things are in quite a muddle out there, what with one thing and another.’ She glanced at Ellie, who believed what Artemis had just said even less than Artemis did. ‘Look,’ she added, ‘I mean at least he’s alive, Eleanor.’ She pressed the button on the dashboard and started the car.
‘Yes,’ Ellie said, looking out of the window. ‘Yes at least he’s alive, thank God.’
Hugo was returned by sea to England over three months later, in April, just after Rommel swept the British out of Cyrenaica, and back into Egypt, in one brief campaign negating all the hard-won and magnificent victories of the year before.
‘It kind of makes it worse,’ Ellie said to Artemis. ‘It makes it all seem so pointless.’
‘Diana says it’s all Churchill’s fault,’ Artemis replied. ‘Sending the troops to Greece instead of mopping up North Africa. She says everyone out there was convince
d they could have taken Tripoli. But they needed the transport Churchill had reserved for Greece.’
They were on their way down by a slow and desperately over-crowded train to Salisbury, where Hugo was in hospital. Ellie had insisted that Artemis accompanied her, hoping that if perhaps he saw not just her, but both of them, the image might be more emotive, something might jog his memory. Artemis was dreading it, since she now knew Hugo couldn’t even remember the events of the previous hour, let alone those of previous months or years. But she saw no point in disillusioning her friend, who like so many others at such a time lived only in hope.
‘How many more stops?’ Ellie asked as the packed and smoke-filled train ground to yet another unannounced and unsigned halt.
‘I’m not sure,’ Artemis said, trying to peer under the arm of a huge soldier who was standing between her and the window. ‘Five or six. I think this must be Hook.’
‘No, miss,’ the soldier corrected her. ‘This is Winchfield.’
‘I don’t think it can possibly be,’ a woman from behind them said. ‘If it’s anywhere surely it’s West Heath?’
‘Is it like this everywhere?’ Ellie asked Artemis. ‘They’ve painted out all the signs on every station?’
‘Oh yes,’ Artemis replied. ‘It’s a total nightmare after dark. You can end up anywhere, and people usually do.’
After an unrealistically long delay at the unnamed station, where dozens more weary travellers pushed themselves into the already jam-packed carriages, the train moved off again, even more slowly. A child was passed over the heads of those packed in the corridor until it reached its destination, the lavatory just beside where Ellie and Artemis were standing. Ellie knocked on the door and one of a party of soldiers inside opened it.
‘Another caller, I’m afraid,’ Ellie said.
The soldier took the little girl in and turfed one of his companions off the closed we which he was using as a seat. They all then discreetly turned their backs and shut the door.
In Sunshine Or In Shadow Page 48
