Take or Destroy! (13 page)

‘They’ve got no bloody discretion,’ Belcher complained bitterly. ‘Gettin’ in a man’s tinned fruit like that. I thought the bastard was a raisin and there it was - ett!’

A few fights enlivened the proceedings. On one memorable occasion even the Three Stooges set about each other, bringing down four tents in their titanic struggles until someone thought of By who incredibly managed to hold three large and very angry young men at arm’s length in his great fists at once.

‘Once round By,’ Belcher said, ‘twice round the gasworks.’

One pleasure was football which Murdoch encouraged as a means of keeping them fit. The sergeants played the corporals and the corporals played the privates who, being more numerous, had four teams. The camp cooks had a team, too, picked by Cook-Corporal Rogers, but like all cooks they were too fat and couldn’t run. They lost by forty-three to nil to Privates 4, which was captained by Jones the Body who claimed to have had a trial for Cardiff City before the war. Triumphantly, he threw out a challenge to the officers, so that everybody could laugh when they made fools of themselves; but Murdoch played as if he’d been capped for Scotland and they beat Privates 4 easily, chiefly due to the efforts of Second-Lieutenant Sotheby who, despite his stammer and nervous appearance, turned out to be a born footballer and ran rings round Taffy Jones to score seven goals.

As they lay in their tents, docile, cantankerous, suspicious, swapping grievances and jokes, they tried to remember what it was like to be cold and miserable instead of hot and miserable.

‘When we was on Salisbury Plain,’ Belcher said, ‘we used to share a hut wiv about eight hundred rats. How the poor fings survived the cold and damp, I dunno. It was lovely.’

‘I wish I was ‘obe,’ Waterhouse wailed in mock woe. ‘Stuck out ‘ere, I feel like a bloke who’s bird’s dropped ‘im. Slung away like the paper after she’s fidished ‘er fish ad chips.’

‘Actually - ‘ Bradshaw lifted his head ‘- you’re better off out here with Monty than you realize.’

‘Well -’ Waterhouse spoke grudgingly
‘-
I suppose Monty’s a good gederal.’

‘Wavell was a good general, too,’ Sugarwhite said gravely, and Waterhouse burst into song at once : “
‘But dow ‘e contemplates his navel-’
“

Bradshaw let them sort out who was the best general, then he mildly brought them back to the point. ‘Actually, I wasn’t talking about the army.’ It stopped them dead.

Waterhouse turned. ‘Well, what was you talkig about?’

‘This place.’

‘It’s the bloody sand that gets me dowd.’

‘Actually,’ Bradshaw said, ‘the sand’s mostly dust.’

‘I suppose you know a lot about it, don’t you?’ Taffy said aggressively.

‘Yes,’ Bradshaw agreed. ‘I was in the gallop up to Gazala and back.’

That stopped the argument dead again because Bradshaw had allowed them to think he was a newcomer like the rest of them.

Taffy was the first to recover. ‘I was nearly in that, look you.’

Baragwanath Eva turned. ‘You was never, you gert liar.’

‘I was. Mad I was when I missed it. What was it like being up in the blue?’

‘Marvellous. No one else but us and the Germans.’

‘And the bloody flies,’ Waterhouse yelped. ‘The flies, the sand, the ‘eat and the ‘ard tack!’

‘What’s wrong with that?’ Bradshaw asked. ‘I’ve never found the desert a scene of fretful discontent and disillusion, have you?

And if you have to make war, where better? Any man who’s been part of this army will sit back in his old age and say, “I was one of God’s chosen few.” ‘

The thought gave them a measure of consolation as Murdoch drove them. It was exhausting work in the extremes of temperature but he never let up, drumming advice into them until their brains hung limp between their ears. The sergeants also never let up. The training went on all day, humping weapons and ammunition, running under the blazing sun, their shirts dark with sweat, dropping flat in the dust, getting up and running again. They shed weight by the pound.

‘I think the idea’s to dehydrate us,’ Bradshaw observed solemnly. ‘So they can shovel us into the sea from aeroplanes -- whereupon we swell up and become soldiers again. A whole regiment landed behind the German lines in a brown paper bag.’

Once a ‘shufti-wallah’ came over, droning stridently from the west to look for the Eighth Army. But it was a long time since the Luftwaffe had dominated desert airspace and five Hurricanes dropped on to its tail immediately. For a while, the machines moved about against the blue sky like a lot of flies, and they could hear the bursts of firing as the German streaked for safety. Then one of the Hurricanes slipped into position and the ‘shufti-wallah’ faltered, lost altitude, and with a deepening howl, nose-dived into the ground beyond the ridges a mile from camp. They all heard the crash and saw the pink and yellow mushroom of smoke, flame and sand blossom upwards.

‘Better send a section over,’ Captain Watson said flatly to Bunch in the silence that followed. ‘Somebody might have escaped.’

He didn’t sound very hopeful and all they found were a few charred hands and feet.

Of necessity, their amusements were simple and it was Auchmuty - inevitably Auchmuty, the solitary, silent ex-shepherd -who discovered that among the camelthorn that surrounded them there was a surprising amount of animal life. Jerboas warrened the ground in the gravelly patches. Insects abounded : white-shelled snails, large long-legged ants, and revolting black dung beetles which lived on animal droppings and could always be heard scrambling around in the area of the latrines. There was also a picturesque but sinister selection of sand spiders, tarantulas and scorpions, and scorpion-baiting became a minor sport.

In addition to these pastimes, they could always smoke, drink tea or sing; for a treat they could even take their boots off and think about women. Not much, though, because the desert made them as sterile as itself, and sexual appetites disappeared - something that worried Captain Watson, whose marriage was so far bounded entirely by two days and two nights.

Only Kiss of Death Jones, the Hearts and Flowers Kid, bothered to dwell on the subject. ‘A kiss, look you,’ he pointed out, ‘is only an application at the top of the building for a job in the basement.’

Sugarwhite’s ears flapped. Though Taffy didn’t know it, in Sugarwhite he had the best listener in the tent, because inside the ‘Cut-Price Commando card’ there was still an uncertain boy determined that if he ever got back to civilization again he’d go for the first sizeable skirt he saw. To the experienced, Taffy’s claims always had a hollow ring and his talk meant only that for some reason of his own he needed to put himself across to them, but the fact that in less enlightened days he would have had his ears cropped for his lies made no difference to Sugarwhite. To him, Taffy was the Minstrel Boy himself, the Man of Harlech, Owen Glendower and the red dragon of Welsh Wales all rolled into one for his skill with women. Sugarwhite had been brooding for months on the disaster of his overseas leave when, feeling he might die in battle without ever having experienced physical love, he’d tramped unsuccessfully for hours round London looking for a willing girl.

‘The left one,’ Taffy was continuing with the sureness of an expert. ‘And there’s a state she will be in, boy, because that is where her heart is, see.’

Bradshaw, who had been trying against odds to read, lifted his head from his book and interrupted the diatribe in a bored voice. ‘I always thought your heart was in the centre,’ he said. ‘And since a woman’s ticker’s made of untreated granite, anyway, massaging her mammary glands isn’t likely to stir a virgin’s passions to the point when she gives away what she prizes above rubies.’

Taffy’s open mouth shut with a click. Bradshaw always seemed to interrupt him with a disputatious comment just when he was at full throttle, and usually in words he couldn’t understand. Since he was only too well aware of his own failings, he was .certain Bradshaw did it deliberately, and he’d often considered taking refuge in the last extremity of offering to go outside with him to settle their disagreements with fists like the Stooges. Despite his bulging muscles, however, Taffy was unsure of his courage and there was a strange quiet self-confidence about Bradshaw.

‘There is ignorant for you,’ he said indignantly, smoothing his hair and turning to less imaginative listeners. ‘I am not Tyrone Power but I do not have to wear a sack over my head to warn the girls I am coming.’

‘I rackon they gurls disappear like rabbits down a ‘ole when ‘ee appears, me dear,’ Eva growled. ‘I would, was I a gurl. ‘Tes nothin’ but wind and piss you are. I ‘ad a ferret once just like you, but I never did breed from the mucky toad. ‘Twas useless ‘e was.’

Taffy jeered. ‘Maybe it is jealous you are because
you
do not have any success.’ He turned hurriedly to the undemanding Sugarwhite. ‘What I always do, look you, is get them with their left arm behind their back and hold their right under my left -’

‘But that’s rape,’ Sugarwhite protested.

‘Or else a thumping great fib,’ Bradshaw said. ‘I bet all he’s ever done is tried not very successfully to roger some poor bloody barmaid against the railings one night when she’d had a few gins over the Plimsoll Line after the local eisteddfod.’

‘I know what I am talking about,’ Taffy said furiously.

‘I doubt it,’ Bradshaw said. ‘Most of the time you talk the most blistering balls. You know what the Good Book says :
Pe llefarwn a thafodau dynion ac angylion a heb gennyf gariad yr wyf fel efyddyn seinio neu symbalyn tincian.’

Taffy’s jaw dropped. ‘That’s Welsh,’ he said.

Bradshaw smiled. ‘Yes. And you’ll perhaps know what it means? It means, “Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal.” First Corinthians, Thirteen, verse one.’

Taffy’s eyes were popping. ‘You speak Welsh, man?’

‘Welsh is the language of Paradise, Taffy bach.’ Bradshaw’s voice was suddenly thick with Celtic intonation.

‘It’s Welsh you are yourself?’

Bradshaw’s smile became a broad grin. ‘But not such a bloody welsher as you are, Taff.’

The troops were praised by the general, specialized equipment was drawn, and ways and means of getting ashore were worked out.

To tell his men what they were going to do and where they were going to do it, Hockold used the general’s method and had them sit down round him in a little amphitheatre of sand in one of the wadis. Captain Amos had produced a blackboard with a rough plan of Qaba drawn on it.

‘Qaba,’ Hockold said, jabbing with a billiard cue. ‘Two hundred miles away, fifty east of Mersa and twenty west of Fuka. There’s a prisoner of war cage there that contains two thousand of your chums whom we hope to set free.’

The information put an immediate expression of interest on their faces. They all knew someone who’d been slipped into the bag and the thought that they might release a few friends was good for their morale.

‘Our object: to destroy a fuel dump, a spare parts depot, and these four ships here. I know they’re there because I was in Qaba a week ago.’

It was news to them that Hockold had been behind the German lines and they regarded him with new interest. Previously he’d been just an ordinary sort of half-colonel, brusque in manner and difficult to approach, who’d been appointed to push them around.

‘We shall be split up into several parties,’ he went on. ‘And every officer and sergeant will be given a map of the town. I want you all to look at them and familiarize yourself with the details so that if anything happens to your officer or sergeant, someone else can take up where he left off. We shall go in by ship, so that when you’ve done your job, you will make your way to the beaches or the mole and return aboard as fast as possible. Any way you can. Swim --’

‘I cad’t swib,’ Waterhouse yelled from the back.

‘Then you’ll have to take a running jump,’ Murdoch said and there was a yell of laughter.

Hockold was glad to see the growing cheerfulness, and he was just beginning to feel that he had them in the palm of his hand when they became aware of a cloud of dust approaching. Almost immediately, without warning, they found themselves facing the new general. The briefing was hurriedly postponed and the general climbed to the seat of his car, squinting into the sun like an actor under a spotlight. ‘Come closer,’ he said, gesturing. ‘As close as you can. So you can hear me.’ Then he told them everything, his plan for the coming battle and what he expected of his men.

‘When I assumed command of this army,’ he said, ‘my orders were simply to go down into the desert and destroy Rommel. And that’s exactly what I intend to do. So give your minds and your hearts to your jobs and do them with all your might, so that with God’s help we can throw the Germans out of Africa and set about cleaning up the mess they’ve made in Europe.’

And that was it, and he was tossing out packets of fags handed to him by an aide. ‘Have a smoke,’ he said. ‘Enjoy them. With luck before long you’ll be smoking German cigars.’

While they were still scrambling for the cigarettes the car drew away. Rabbitt hurriedly called them to attention and Hockold stood at the salute with Murdoch and Sergeant Bunch - set in concrete as usual - and someone raised a scattered cheer. To one or two of the cleverer ones like Bradshaw it was obvious that the chat -- not quite so spontaneous as it seemed -- was a calculated attempt to get their tails up; but to most of them it was just the Old Man, coming down among his pals, the swaddies, the chaps he knew had to do the dirty work. And any general who came and talked without spit and polish and without you having to stand in the hot sun for an hour while he had a pink gin with the colonel, any general who told you what he was going to do and chucked fags about, was all right.

The next day the equipment lorries arrived, containing everything they wanted. Working on the principle that the army never gave you half what you needed, Hockold had indented for twice as much as he thought he’d get, and when it came it was twice what he’d expected, twice as many Brens, twice as many radios, twice as many Tommy-guns, binoculars, compasses, pistols and Stens.