by Colin Smith
Eventually, after a couple of vehicles that should have had the decency to stop had not, they had been towed out by the very obliging crew of an armoured car belonging to the Natal Carbineers. Nonetheless, he had arrived at Burg el Arab much too late for his flight and been lucky to get a place on this one. There had, in the end, been no question of going back by road and rail. It would take too long and this diversion, interesting though it had been, meant that work would be piling up in Jerusalem. He had hardly been gone a full working day and he had already received a brief and lightly coded message from his office via army signals indicating there had been urgent developments concerning the Galilee parachutes.
Now Davison helped load the wounded onto the aircraft, a florid man in late middle age with great sweat stains spreading beneath the armpits of the linen suit jacket he had forgotten to remove. Even with the rear door open it was unbearably hot inside the aircraft and the medical orderlies told him they could manage; but Davison could see they were short handed and he felt better for helping. In any case he wanted to practise his Urdu on the young Sikh.
At first this was harder than he expected. He had bad upper leg wounds and was floating in and out of morphine dreams. Davison, attempting to comfort, told him that he must consider this the first part of his return voyage to the green fields of the Punjab. This roused the boy though not the way he would have wished. For he raised himself slightly and said in a clear voice that he regretted to say the sahib was quite wrong: he knew he would never see Amritsar again.
They had just got all the wounded aboard when a squadron leader came out in his jeep and told the crew they would have to delay take off. Today’s most important passenger had been held up at a meeting. He expected to be with them within the hour, perhaps sooner.
“Yes, I know you’ll be on the ground longer than we’d like but it can’t be helped,” Davison heard the squadron leader say. “This man must be in Cairo tonight.” It was obviously Strafer Gott.
The medics were outraged. They insisted on unloading the wounded and putting them back in the ambulances where they would be cooler. Davison helped again though this time he left his jacket hanging on the door of one of the ambulances and pulled his panama well over his eyes.
Gott arrived about twenty minutes later, apologised for keeping everybody waiting, and the fourteen stretcher cases were lifted back on board. “God will not count your medals but your scars,” the lieutenant-general assured one of them. It was a line from The Pilgrim’s Progress he had been taught as a boy by an uncle who was a bishop.
***
Lang and the Templer watched the civilian in the panama hat, who they had not entirely ruled out as MacMichael - he was about the right height. Even when they saw him helping to put the wounded back on board the Templer didn’t rule him out. You didn’t have to be a politician to make that kind of winning gesture. Besides, it was obvious that the sooner the wounded were on the sooner they would go. Then a staff car turned up but the late afternoon shadow made it impossible to make out the pennants on its wings.
Lulled by their constant vigil, they had missed its actual arrival. Suddenly it was there. A jeep had drawn up alongside it and a number of people had gathered round. They thought they had definitely seen one officer emerge and could easily have missed somebody else getting out the other side of the car. “Well, if it’s not MacMichael,” said the Templer. “It’s a big one of some kind.”
“But is it a Reichsprotektor for a Reichsprotektor?” inquired Lang wickedly.
“With any luck,” said the Templer, refusing to be baited, not now. “I want you to send a signal to Athens. We will not use code. There’s no time. I’ll give it you in German. As soon as they confirm receipt we’re leaving here.”
***
Lance-corporal Colley, having truly mastered the art of getting a brew warming in a cut down fuel tin fire of petrol soaked sand, brought some tea over to Calderwell who was sitting on the running board of his Austin smoking a cigarette. Colley was about to speak to Calderwell when a low flying aircraft made normal conversation impossible for the next thirty seconds. Once the noise from the Bombay’s engines had subsided he asked the policeman, “Have you heard what happened to one of them Polish sergeants sir?”
Calderwell had not and nor was he sure that he wanted to but almost everybody else was working and the lad had just brought him some tea. So he allowed Colley to tell him about this Polish major who had this bloody great box of canned orange juice by his truck yet wouldn’t even give poor old Sergeant Dudek a drop of water when he asked for it, simply pointed him in the direction he was going as if he hadn’t understood a word he had said. Dudek had been absolutely knackered, he was carrying a Bren and… but Calderwell wasn’t listening because he was trying to recall something about orange juice he had heard earlier in the day. He felt bloody knackered himself, a real afternoon low.
Then one of the special operators rushed up to say, Captain Hare’s compliments sir, but would he mind stepping over to the Marmon-Herrington because they seemed to be picking something up. When Calderwell got there the loop aerial on the armoured car was already revolving. He looked over at the bread van which he knew Hare had not yet got properly in position, it was only three hundred yards away, and saw that its aerial was doing the same.
In the Marmon-Herrington it was Dudek on the headphones. Hare whispered, “It’s a very strong signal. They’re not far away.”
“You’re sure its them?”
“Same call sign - R38. Same frequency.”
Dudek pushed the earphones round his neck. “Finished,” he said. “They are very close and they are sending in clear.”
“In English?” Hare asked, remembering Maeltzer’s difficulty with the Playfair code.
Dudek looked puzzled. “No. German sir. They’re sending in German.” He pushed his pink message pad over to Hare. It was all in five letter groups.
Hare pushed it back. “What does it say?”
Dudek picked up a pencil and broke the letters up into words as he spoke them. It says: “Alert Luftwaffe Palestine Excellency departing RAF airfield Burg el Arab two engined transport south-eastwards.”
“What’s Palestine excellency?” asked Dudek.
“He’s called Sir Harold MacMichael,” said Calderwell, turning to Hare.
“I suppose we’d better tell the RAF to bring that plane back.”
This proved easier said than done. They had vehicles full of radio but no direct way to contact the RAF airfield. Then Hare remembered there was an RAF liaison team at divisional headquarters and they called up their communications centre. While somebody was trying to find an RAF officer they heard the Messerschmitts arrive.
There were six of them and the German fighters were much noisier than the Bombay had been, coming in almost on the Mediterranean then climbing. “They had orange spinners,” Colley was yelling to one of the signallers.
But by the time Hare and Calderwell were standing alongside him all they could see were specks at the end of long white vapour trails festooned with dirty puffs of black flak from the Bofors.
“Orange spinners,” Colley was saying. “I could see them clear as anything.”
Calderwell was thinking: orange, yes, what was it about oranges?
Hare had gone back into the Marmon-Herrington. Calderwell found him talking to the Royal Signals NCO who operated the loop aerial. When Hare saw the policeman he said, “We’ve got some good bearings. They’re quite close, the other side of the airfield.”
Sergeant Dudek had his earphones back on in case they started transmitting again. Calderwell watched a great globule of sweat run down the Pole’s forehead, fail to be stemmed by his sparse, almost albino, eyebrows and burst on the message pad. Dudek produced a surprisingly white handkerchief and dabbed it first on the pad and then at his forehead. Calderwell could imagine how much he must have been sweating while carrying the best part of the British army’s small arms catalogue. How badly he must have wanted one of th
ose tins of orange juice. Orange juice.
Calderwell took the earphones off the Pole’s head. Hare said, “For God’s sake man! He’s monitoring.”
Calderwell’s hands had now slipped to the Pole’s broad and powerful shoulders.
“Sergeant Dudek,” he said. “Sergeant, please tell me where you met the Polish major who would not give you water?”
The Pole looked at him as if he had gone mad.
“Was it across the airfield?”
“Yes.”
“What sort of transport did he have?”
“It was a Fiat truck.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure. We had them in Tobruk.”
“And there was orange juice?”
He looked across at Hare again who shrugged and made a little palms up gesture.
“He had a whole box of the stuff.”
“Was there somebody else with him?”
“I think there was somebody else there when I was walking towards them. They had this camouflage net hanging over the truck like a tent. He must have gone under that.”
“This major, he didn’t speak to you. Not a single word in Polish?”
“No. He was a strange one. He saluted the British way,” Dudek gave a perfunctory demonstration, “and he had British badges of rank.”
Calderwell paused and looked at Hare to see whether he had caught up. He had.
“What did he look like?”
“A big man with hair between blond and grey.”
Hare said, “Can you guide us back to him?”
“Of course,” said Dudek. “But you forgot to ask me something. They did have a wireless aerial. It was sticking up through the camouflage net.”
Calderwell turned to Hare. “I’ll take my car. Let Dudek come with me. You follow on in the Marmon-Herrington with all the guns you can carry.”
26 - That Good May Come
One of the stretcher cases was delirious and singing softly to himself in the thin, quavering, accent of North of England music hall. “Oh I do like to be besides the seaside, Oh I do like to be besides the sea.” An RAF fitter, one of two who were acting as medical orderlies, tried to quieten him down, dabbing at his forehead with a damp cloth.
Once again Davison tasted his stomach as the Bombay plummeted then levelled out. At least he wasn’t in the cockpit this time. He looked at Gott who was sitting across the narrow aisle in the jump seat by door. Through the general’s nearest window the fan of the starboard airscrew was visible. Gott gave it a glance then went back to the typed pages of A4 flimsy on his lap, brow furrowed in concentration. Between him and Davison one of the wounded was lying lengthways along the floor, his head and face covered with bandages so that only is eyes and mouth were showing. When Davison had looked at the brown docket on his chest, attached there by white string around his neck, he saw that the man was a corporal from a yeomanry regiment and almost certainly tank crew.
From the direction of the cockpit the medical corps staff sergeant weaved through the wounded until he reached Gott. “Looks like it could get a bit bumpy sir. They’ve just received a wireless message that there are German fighters about. They’re suggesting you keep your seat belt on in case we have to do a bit of duckin’ and weavin’.”
“Right Staff,” said Gott and began fumbling for the buckle. Once he had put it together he went back to his papers. The NCO looked across at Davison but the civilian gentleman was already strapped in.
Stepping carefully over the burned soldier in the aisle, he went to examine the remaining thirteen stretcher cases who were slung like hammocks across the fuselage from the slings attached to its ceiling. The Sikh was the first of these. One of the RAF fitters was holding his head up while he drank water from a felt covered water bottle. “Where the brass band goes tiddly um pum pum,” sang the delirious man.
Davison looked out of his window and saw that the Bombay was flying over a flat, flinty looking plain, and they were very low again just as they had been on the flight up from Cairo. They were so low he could see the dust being kicked up by their propellers and watched a line of little splashes appear on the ground slightly ahead of them. Then there was a noise like a coffee grinder going off inside his head and Davison realised that these splashes in the sand had nothing whatsoever to do with their propellers.
***
When, after a couple of false starts, Dudek found the spot all there was to see was a rubble of cardboard boxes half covered with a folded camouflage net. Some of the boxes had burst and were spilling their cans of orange juice onto the sand.
“They’ve lightened their load,” said Calderwell.
Dudek bent to pick up one of the cans. Calderwell grabbed him by his shirt collar, pulling him back. “Don’t touch it!” he screamed.
The Pole slowly straightened up and Calderwell let go of his collar. “These bastards booby trap things,” he explained.
“Thank you,” said Dudek.
Hare was the first to find the tracks of the Fiat. “It’s still got Italian tyres on - very distinctive.” Only endless cannibalising kept captured enemy transport on the road.
“They can’t be far,” said Calderwell.
Colley, much to his chagrin, was left to guard the boxes and Hare called divisional headquarters and wondered whether they could possibly spare some sappers to check them out. They set out as before with Calderwell driving his Austin with Dudek at his side clutching the Bren. Behind them, standing in the open turret of the Marmon-Herrington and stroking its Lewis gun, came Hare. About fifteen minutes after they had left the boxes, screwing up their eyes against a sinking sun, they caught their first sight of the dust of a single vehicle heading southwest. It was at least a mile ahead of them and even through his field glasses Hare couldn’t see enough to identify the type. But he was fairly sure it was a truck.
***
“I didn’t expect the Luftwaffe to react as quickly as that,” said Lang.
“They were probably already in the area and they managed to get a radio message through,” said the Templer. “If it had nothing to do with your message it was an enormous coincidence. I prefer to believe it wasn’t.”
“Do you think they got him?”
“Yes, he used up his luck at Sarafand. Most people don’t have that much luck twice in the same lifetime.”
“You could say the same about us.”
“We’re what the English call cheeky. We make our own luck.”
“There were a lot of wounded.”
“Too many,” said the Templer.
Lang was driving. He had tied the yellow scarf he had found in the WAAF’s smallpack around the lower half of his face against the dust coming through the gap where the windscreen used to be. The Templer thought it made him look like a Hollywood bandit “There’s another good reason for doing without the glass,” he said. “When you’re near the front line it’s important to hear as well as see.” And in the last few minutes the occasional rumble of artillery that had been with them ever since they arrived at Burg el Arab had begun to sound closer.
“Look at this,” said Lang.
Ahead a Tommy in a steel helmet with a rifle slung over his shoulder was standing by the side of the dirt track they were on, a little red flag in his hand. “Shall I drive over him.”
“No, stop.”
“This side,” ordered the Templer when they stopped for the Tommy had naturally assumed it was a right-hand drive vehicle and the senior man should be seated on the left. “What’s the problem?” he asked when the soldier had come round to his window. Lang noticed he used officer’s English and was no longer trying to sound Polish. He wondered if he had forgotten the flashes he was wearing.
“Shelling down the road past five brigade headquarters sir,” said the Tommy. “Jerry’s been at it all afternoon on and off. Traffic advised not to go that way unless their business is urgent.”
“Well we’re with Polish Liaison and I’m afraid our business is urgent,” drawled t
he Templer.
“Do you know the password then sir?”
Lang felt for his Walther. As he did so he noticed two other Tommies with a Bren gun sitting in a weapons pit by the side of the road.
“Oh God! They’re always changing these bloody things,” said the Templer irritably. “What is it today? Brigade or division’s password?”
“I think it’s brigade’s sir. It’s a number password. You say five and I say seven.”
“Are we likely to be asked it again?”
“There’s another vehicle control point about a mile down the road sir.”
“Well, it’s a bloody good job you told me because nobody else has.”
“That’s alright sir,” said the soldier, pleased with the compliment. “But be careful if you go much past Five Brigade HQ. They’re putting them down right on the road sometimes. And you can’t head due west from there any more sir. The engineers laid a new minefield last week. It’s marked.”
“Thanks.”
When they were about half a mile down the road from the checkpoint the Templer said: “If that had been a German soldier and we didn’t know the password he would have stopped us and called his officer to check us out. But instinctively, the Tommy is not so much listening to what you are saying but how you are saying it.”
“You didn’t sound very Polish.”
“That was because I was Polish Liaison, a fine body of men. I would have lost my authority as a Pole. I would have become a bloody foreigner who didn’t know the password. Very suspicious. Much better to be a British officer attached to foreign troops. Lot on my mind. Won’t stand for any password nonsense.”
“What are we going to do about that minefield?”
“Go round it if we can.”
“And if we can’t?”
But before the Templer could answer there came the kind of clanging sound that might be made by a sheet of corrugated iron falling on concrete. This was followed by a large cloud of dust rising a little to the left of the road about eight hundred metres away and a second or so later the sound of the shell exploding. Three more shells landed, one either side of the road and one in the middle.
