by John Harris
A few began to show off a bit. Jones the Body had acquired a throwing knife, swearing after his noisy fashion that he was going to do a German or two. It never seemed to hit the target, however, and didn’t even stick in much.
‘Try it this way, son.’ Jacka flicked his wrist so that the knife stuck quivering within half an inch of the bull, and Taffy stared after him, his jaw dropped, as he sauntered away.
There had never been much time, however, and the cost was measured in broken bones. Nagged by Murdoch’s shouts, they continued to push a little harder and, because Bunch was nearly twice as old as most of them and could still keep up despite his age, a few who were young pushed still harder to prove themselves; one man sprained an ankle and was ruled out of the operation, while another twisted his back and a third broke three fingers.
Some of the accidents were serious. Murdoch’s engineers had bridged a shallow twelve-foot-wide wadi for Brandison’s gangway party to practise on but as they rushed towards it in the heat of the day, one over-eager youngster tripped and fell in. It was a trivial accident and he ought to have walked away from it, but his Sten, in the manner of Stens, went off unexpectedly; and instead of a man with a sprained ankle, they found they had a man with the best part of his stomach blown away and only a faint chance of survival.
Inevitably the careful instructions of experience were ignored. ‘Don’t pull the pin out with your teeth,’ Corporal Cobbe had warned as he drilled them in the use of the Mills bomb, but others knew better and one man was carried away dead and another dying.
Even Babington seemed to have been caught up in the general atmosphere of over-confidence, and when Hockold arrived for a last discussion about the plans he was staring at an assorted selection of weapons on his desk.
‘I’ve been torpedoed twice,’ he said, ‘had my home bombed, lost my brother at Dunkirk, and haven’t seen my kids for over two years. I feel I have a little spite to work off. It’ll be a piece of cake.’
Hockold had an uneasy feeling that Babington was simplifying things too much. Nothing in which men put their lives at risk was a piece of cake. But they were committed now, and there was no question of changing the plans at this stage.
When he returned to camp, Captain Cadish and his squad of Americans had arrived. Cadish was a tall good-looking young man who reminded Hockold of a few Hollywood heroes he’d seen at the cinema. He was festooned with weapons and had what seemed to be an inordinate amount of transport for twenty-one men.
Stiff and correct, Hockold laid his cards on the table. ‘From now on your people will walk,’ he announced. ‘They will also be split up among my people - ‘
Cadish made an uncertain protest. ‘They won’t like that, Colonel.’
‘Neither did my people. But they’ve got used to it. They might even discover to their surprise that Americans aren’t overpaid, overfed and oversexed, as a lot of them believe. And, doubtless, your people will teach them a thing or two - even if it’s only how to play poker.’
The arrival of the Americans brought out the members of 97 Commando to watch, and Tent 7 waited suspiciously as a tall thin youth with acne proceeded to toss down his equipment.
‘Hank Broecker,’ he introduced himself. ‘From Paris, Illinois.’
‘Paris is in France,’ Encyclopaedia Jones pointed out firmly, determined not to be pushed around by any smart-Alick Yank.
‘Yeah?’ Broecker seemed surprised. ‘Well, the one I’m talking about is in Illinois in the good old USA. There’s another in Arkansas, and one in Idaho, and one in Tennessee, and one in Texas. We got two Londons I know about, a Moscow, a coupla Berlins, two Dublins, six Manchesters and about eleven Chesters. Anybody want a smoke?’
Waterhouse thought he could do with one, and Broecker started tossing around not single cigarettes as they’d expected but whole packs, twenty to each man. ‘We kinda get a lot,’ he explained.
The Americans had no sooner sorted themselves out when Devenish and twenty airmen arrived. With them were thirty naval men under a sub-lieutenant who were greeted at once by Waterhouse’s mad screech as they climbed from their lorries.
‘Never trust a sailor
An inch above the knee.
I did, and look what he left me -
A bastard on my knee!’
The sailors were merely supposed to be guides but they’d noticeably taken the precaution of arming themselves with automatic weapons, while Devenish had brought with him three hundred pounds of plastic explosive, one thousand pounds of gun cotton, a hundred and fifty pounds of ammonal, a hundred and fifty incendiary devices, sixty gun cotton primers and fourteen hundred feet of fuse.
‘Thought we’d better bring plenty,’ he explained.
They settled in quickly and, despite his cherubic expression and mild eyes, Devenish acquired a quick reputation as the only man ever to disconcert Murdoch.
They were being instructed in the Thomson sub-machine gun, and Murdoch was showing them how to dismantle and reassemble it blindfold when he noticed Devenish playing with a lump of plastic explosive.
‘I hope you know how to use that,’ he said sharply.
Devenish raised his eyes. ‘Oh, yes,’ he said. ‘Of course. Catch!’
He tossed the plastic pudding at Murdoch who snatched it instinctively out of the air to turn on him with a red and furious face. ‘Don’t ever do that again, you mad bugger!’
Devenish smiled. ‘I always get the chaps tossing it about like that,’ he said. ‘To get them used to it.’
On the same day that Hockold’s additional forces arrived, so did Hochstatter’s in Qaba, and he began to feel that things were turning out well after all. Although the balloons and extra searchlights he’d expected had been diverted at the final moment to the desert forces, his pioneers had turned up at last.
He had almost fallen on the officer in command and dragged him to the Boujaffar to ply him with grateful drinks. The officer, who knew nothing of the anxiety existing in Qaba, was only anxious to be shot of him so he could find a billet and get his head down for a decent night’s sleep.
‘For God’s sake, Colonel,’ he protested, ‘my people must have some rest!’
‘Major,’ Hochstatter said, ‘my men are falling asleep as they work.’
The officer glared at him, his face taut under its mask of dust. Then he recognized the strain in Hochstatter’s face, too, and nodded.
Hochstatter turned to Nietzsche as he left. ‘Tomorrow you shall have everybody back for defence, Nietzsche! I think we’ve won!’
Everybody was thinking that they’d got the whole thing buttoned up.
Though the administrative situation was unchanged, General Stumme was warily optimistic. Ritter von Thoma, in command of the panzers, went further. He was certain they had nothing to fear.
On the other side of the line, however, the Eighth Army were bursting out of their skins with the certainty of success. General Montgomery, as full of bounce as ever, had not - and never had had - the slightest doubts about his plan. His Chief of Staff, Freddie de Guingand, even felt sure enough of their administrative organization to take a couple of days off in Alexandria.
As the Pionier-Lehrbataillon got down to work with Wutka’s men and Hrabak’s men and Baldissera’s Italians, the old hands at Gott el Scoub began chasing across the desert again with their new arrivals to see if they could beat their best time now that they were hampered; by Yanks, sailors and RAF men with explosives. They were all aware that time was going to count.
Hockold knew exactly where he was going to establish Number One Party’s strongpoint and which buildings he intended to fortify, while the men who had to destroy the ships or race for the fuel depot felt they knew enough about Qaba now not to make mistakes. Swann’s job wasn’t difficult either, so long as he didn’t get excited and lose his head, while Collier’s was a simple two-hundred-yard dash with the wirecutters to where the prisoners were held. Once there, they’d all be knee-deep in escaped men, every one of them itching to
bash some German’s head in. It just had to be done fast and without hesitation, that was all, and crowded little conferences were held in Hockold’s office to iron things out.
‘These 47s,’ Meinertz the Hussar said. ‘I can probably knock the first one out without being seen, but the next one could easily pick me off while I’m doing it. How long have we got?’
Hockold turned to Devenish. ‘How long do you need?’
Devenish looked at the naval sub-lieutenant Babington had supplied. ‘We think twenty minutes to half an hour.’
Hockold swung back to Meinertz. ‘Let’s say half an hour and five minutes after we hit.’
‘Prisoners?’ Amos asked.
‘We’re not taking any.’
‘Wounded?’
‘Captain Cadish has organized an American medical party to join us, but anybody who can’t be moved easily will have to stay behind.’
Final adjustments were made because it was found that the tallest men weren’t always the fastest, and the most perfectly developed weren’t always the strongest. Finally, the Three Stooges were switched to Hockold’s group because it seemed to consist of all the smallest men in the camp and might well need a little strength. With them went Mr World, complaining loudly about being badly treated, look you. Murdoch ignored his bleats. His party had a long way to go and was the only one which had to be entirely self-supporting, so that it needed plenty of determination, speed and strength. The fastest arid the strongest of them all, in fact, was Honorary Airman Second Class Uri Rouat and Murdoch watched in disgust as, loaded with equipment, he ran like a stag.
‘It’s no’ a bloody race,’ he said furiously to the RAF sergeant in command of his demolition party.
‘You told him to move fast, sir,’ the airman said patiently. ‘So he moved fast. His English isn’t all that good.’
Speed was also in Sergeant Jacka’s mind but in a different context. ‘You will be watching me for the signal to go,’ he told his party. ‘Like a moggie with its eye on a bit of herring. And when it comes you will get up them ladders and down that mole like a load of mad dogs was after you. You will give it big licks. You will play it loud and use both hands. If you don’t, you won’t half catch a cold from me. If you do, you’ll find it as easy as eating your dinner. Well, perhaps not as easy as that, but a bloody sight easier than if you hang about like you were trying to decide what to buy mummy for Christmas.’
They became men apart, different even from the men waiting in the desert for the battle to begin. The rehearsals were different, too, because the blanks that had been exploding around them as they ran and climbed and cursed suddenly became alive.
‘Duw, man,’ Taffy Jones yelped, hopping about like a cat on hot bricks in alarm. ‘It is trying to knock us off before we start they are!’
No one was hurt but it was only because they’d learned their lesson quickly and they even began to take a pride in the bangs so that a few dummy graves were dug near the cookhouse.
‘Blokes who failed the course,’ Cook-Corporal Rogers explained gravely to visitors.
At last even Murdoch seemed pleased with them. ‘I’m no’ worried about the fighting,’ he said. ‘I reckon you’re bloody-minded enough now to cope with that. The man I’ll be watching for is the runner who’s away with a message, and feels tired enough to have a smoke before he sets off back; and the feller who grabs the first man to be hit and hurries him to the rear without orders. Remember the words of the song -- It’s not what you do, it’s the way that you do it. Any common or garden mob can do our job if they try; only you can do it in the time allotted.’
It was heady stuff and it made them feel supermen; in the warm feeling that even Bunch was a part of things - especially with that awesome war record of his - Tent 7 encouraged him to describe what a real battle was like. They soon wished they hadn’t.
‘July 1st, 1916,’ he said. ‘Opposite Serre, wasn’t we, and going in with the pipes squawking round the corner like strangled moggies, and me brisk as a kipper and innocent as half a pint of water. Well, it was going to be a piece of cake, wasn’t it? The general said so. Easy as oiling a bike. By three o’clock that afternoon I looked like I’d been dragged out of a knacker’s yard, buried and dug up again. You know how many was knocked over that morning? Sixty thousand. All lovely fellers. And two weeks later I was one of ‘em meself, with a lump out of me bum as big as your fist and feeling as lost as a bone in the stew. They said the brigadier was that fed up he put his head in the oven and gev himself a gas supper.’
Bunch was no orator, but he so managed to convey that, despite the most careful preparations, things sometimes went wrong, they all suddenly started wondering whether they’d paid sufficient attention to everything they’d been told, whether they’d put their backs into things sufficiently, even whether they had the courage they’d always thought they had.
Sugarwhite, the youngest in the tent, found himself studying the men with whom he was shortly to go to war with a new interest, as though he saw them clearly for the very first time.
Taffy Jones - and it would have troubled Taffy Jones to discover it - had never counted for much with him as a warrior, and as he listened to him going on about his body and his muscles, Sugarwhite wrote him off quickly. Taffy was all empty threats and bombast, and Bradshaw could always quell him with a sentence so that he had to retire, defeated by nothing more than a superior morale.
As he looked at Bradshaw, Sugarwhite smiled. He enjoyed hearing Bradshaw taking the mickey out of Taffy because he sounded so urbane and civilized. Bradshaw was sound, he knew. Come what may, he would do what he was expected to do, perhaps even more.
Ed By was safe, too. He was writing a letter home with a small frown of concentration between his brows. He could hurl heavy objects vast distances without effort and separate whole platoons of fighting men with nothing but his bare hands, but holding a pencil in his great fist and writing a letter was hard work to By. He looked like the Rock of Gibraltar as he sat on his blankets, but he was always gentle and hard to stir to anger. By was sound.
So was Tinner Eva. Taffy contemptuously called him a gipsy and Belcher, the Cockney, a Five-to-Two - a Jew - but it wasn’t from the Phoenicians or the Romanies that Eva inherited his dark good looks but from the survivors of the Spaniards who had fought their great Armada all the way along the Channel from Lisbon, up the North Sea and round Scotland down to the West Country. Somewhere inside that dark shadowy character there was a proud independence that, like Bradshaw’s urbane intellect, had always baffled Taffy Jones. Eva was safe.
So too, was Auchmuty, with his long silences and his love of loneliness. He had always been one of the few men who had never minded the emptiness of the desert. Gardner was another good soldier, a product of industrial South Yorkshire who had learned through the dark days of the Depression the one thing that above all was needed of Hockold’s group when they got to Qaba -- how to hang on. And Docwra, his eyes as distant as his native fells, and the aloof, withdrawn Cobbe, bolstered by the tradition of a regiment that went back to the time of Charles II; even little Tit Willow, with his willingness and ready smile.
As he reached Waterhouse, an old deep distrust came up in Sugarwhite that stemmed from that first deadly adenoidal insult back at No 2 Transit on the night before they’d come to Scouab. But then he realized that there was also more to Waterhouse than met the eye. From his first week in uniform, Waterhouse had spent half his career confined to barracks for one thing or another; but, noisy, vulgar and brash, nothing in the world had ever got him down. Came the Germans, even the four corners of the world in arms, against him, he wouldn’t be dismayed. The copper-wire hair would only stand up straighter, and the lantern jaw below the hollow miner’s cheeks would merely twist in the half-witted grin they all knew before some equally half-witted jingle put the matter in its proper perspective.
Waterhouse was lazy, and far from being the best of soldiers, but there was something about him that every unit needed. Waterho
use kept them laughing. He was like the soldier Sugarwhite had heard of in the waste of Dunkirk who, surrounded by the wreckage of a whole defeated army and threatened by the German dive bombers, had still raised his voice with a yell of light-hearted defiance: ‘You rotten bugger, ‘Itler! Just you bloody wait!’
Waterhouse was sound, too, he realized, and suddenly Sugar-white was glad to be a part of them all.
11
Due to the exigencies of the battle which had begun in the Western Desert, the operation had to be put off.
They were ready. All they needed now was the start of the greater battle of which they were a part.
As their training ran to a halt, they became aware of movement across the face of the desert. It had been building up for some time, hardly noticeable at first and largely manifested by the low growl of the RAF high in the sky, heading west against the German artillery and lines of communication. Now, however, lorries began to roll forward past the camp, first in small groups, then bigger ones, then in whole columns, grinding by in the last light of the day so that the dust had settled before dawn when the ‘shufti wallahs’ might be overhead. Among them were tanks -- new Shermans, Matildas and Crusaders; self-propelled artillery made out of Valentines, and the new American Priests; and hundreds and hundreds of 6-pounder anti-tank guns to kill Rommel’s armour when it poked its nose out.
The battle was to be different from any previous desert operation and more like the battles of the First World War. It was to be on a grand scale, plain old-fashioned attrition, and the old untidy idea of outflanking movements had been drilled out of the army to be replaced by a faith in a strong frontal breakthrough, a head-on night assault against fixed defences.
