Killing Rommel (23 page)

29

I AM A FATHER. Rose has given birth. A daughter. Jock doesn't know the child's name.

He tries to get me on a truck, but I won't leave Ehrlich.

“You've got a ticket out,” he says. “I can get you back to Cairo, even Haifa. You're not going to play the hero, are you?”

Jock looks hale and trim. He's on division staff, he says. He draws up a petrol-tin and takes a seat. He has no more news of Rose, except that she's well and so is the baby. Word has come by victorygram, fifteen words maximum. We toast our new arrival. “You look grand, Jock.”

He can stay only a minute, he says; he's hunting up a wounded officer of the Camerons. Seeking this man's name, he stumbled on to mine. Jock tells me he can pull strings, get me out of here, maybe even by hospital ship. “Pneumonia's good for two weeks at Lady Lampson's rest house on the Nile and a month or more for recupe. For Rose to see you will mean the world.”

I ask Jock what's coming up for Eighth Army.

He confirms it will be the Mareth Line. We're now in mid-December; by February Rommel will have consolidated his position round Gabès and Sfax in Tunisia. The Mareth Line protects these. If I'm healthy, Jock tells me, I'll be back with my old tank regiment and have become a cog in the assault, which looks to be a bloodbath. Jock says he'll find a way to get me out, to a staff job if he can; if not, then to some post out of harm's way.

My brother-in-law means well. I love him as a friend. Heaven knows he has earned the Military Cross on his lapel, fighting his way out of Tobruk behind fixed bayonets. But the more he speaks of getting me out, the more clearly I know I must stay.

Ehrlich listens. He understands. Later, when Jock has gone, he and I talk.

If I take this ticket out, the one Jock can arrange for me, I'll never see my comrades of the LRDG again. Royal Tanks will catch me up. Am I daft to resist this? I tell Ehrlich of the Italians at Benina. He says nothing, which makes me believe he has experienced the same. “They will pin a medal on you for this,” he says. I tell him of Standage and Miller. He understands that too.

An orderly appears to clean Ehrlich's wound and change his dressing. There are plenty of bandages, apparently, but no morphia—for him or for anybody. Ehrlich utters not a peep. He lies very still for a long time, so long that I start to fear he has stopped breathing.

“Chapman…”

“Yes.” I roll towards him at once.

“Will you permit me an observation about your countrymen?”

I wish very much to hear this, because I suspect he will address my dilemma. But, I tell him, I can't stand to see him in pain from the exertion of speech. He smiles and rolls on to one elbow so that our eyes meet.

“You English are loath to embrace the virtues of the warrior. Such an act embarrasses you. You prefer to see yourselves as civilians summoned reluctantly to arms, as—what is the word?—‘amateurs.'” He chuckles at this term, which sends a stab of agony through his guts. Long moments pass before his breath returns.

“But you
are
warriors, you English.
You
are, Chapman. Trust me, who has faced you in the field.”

I tell him I don't understand.

“Do not be afraid,” Ehrlich says, “to take that decision which a warrior would take—and for a warrior's reasons.”

He falls asleep. I do too. When I wake after dark, another wounded officer lies in Ehrlich's bed. Overnight two more, a Rhodesian and an Australian, take the cot and die in it. I have to get out of here. I decide simply to walk away. Find LRDG headquarters and report for duty. Let the army put me on a charge, I don't care. My only fear is that the system, when it can't find me, will notify Rose that I am missing or dead. How to prevent this? I hunt up the South African major who originally checked me in. I find him outside with two other physicians, between surgeries, grabbing a smoke. He understands my fix before I get out two sentences. “Get on,” he says. “I need the bed.”

He tells me where to pick up a victorygram sheet; the fifteen words will be delivered to anyone I want. The hospital, he says, is forty-eight hours behind on paperwork; that will be my head start. “Travel from dressing station to dressing station. That way, if you fail, you won't just die by the side of the road.” I dash off the following to Rose:

In hospital saw Jock safe and sound cracking carelove to you and baby.

The South African major is coming in as I head out. He stuffs a packet of pills into my fist. “You're the one I saw before who had pneumonia, right?” He probes my belly and the ribs round my liver. “You've got jaundice too.”

In a pile at the precinct entry are hundreds of boots, belts, headgear and coats—property, apparently, of men who no longer need them. I grab a pair of hightoppers and a new tropel greatcoat. Two hours later, I'm on a 3-tonner lurching towards the front.

30

BEFORE I TAKE OFF, I go looking for Nick Wilder. He's gone. I can't find Tinker or Popski. Someone tells me the LRDG's forward base has been moved up to Zella oasis, where I flew in from, a hundred fifty miles southwest of El Agheila. I bum a ride to Wadi Matratin on a five-ton Bedford loaded with tinned cherries and Christmas hams.

Every vehicle is moving west. Mussolini's Via Balbia is nose-to-tail with trucks and guns. At Matratin I run into a man I rowed with at Oxford named Jeffers, now a captain in the RASC; he gets me out of the rain into the cab of a 3-tonner. I gulp chalk solution like a pup on a teat. It does nothing. My bowels empty every twenty minutes. Half the troops in the trucks are in the same state. An orderly lectures us: “Keep drinking, it's the dehydration that kills you.” He gives us salt tablets, so our systems don't short-circuit for want of electrolytes. We take a spade for a walk at every stop. One sees the same faces, so to speak, again and again.

As chaotic as the retreat to Cairo had been last year, this advance is worse. Thousands of men have been separated from their units; entire columns of vehicles lumber aimlessly forward with no idea of their destination. All that the drivers know for certain is that there is only one road; the traffic is all going the same direction; and no provost will put you on a charge for heading
towards
the front.

By midnight I'm beginning to wonder whether I haven't made a serious blunder quitting the hospital. Two o'clock comes; I'm clinging to the bank seat in the cab of a canvas-sided lorry, freezing rain sheeting in through the zip-up window. I curl on to myself like a sick cat. Behind in the canvas-covered truckbed ride two squads of South African infantry, each man seated miserably on the inward-facing benches with his rifle upright between his knees and his tin-hatted head lolling on to his forearms, hanging on to the barrel of his Enfield like a drunk on to a lamp post.

A matching image enters my mind and refuses to leave—a dark image, of the Italian soldiers we gunned down at Benina. I keep seeing them. I have never felt less like a military man. The insignia on my shoulder, the uniform I wear—beneath them, I am still me. I cannot excuse my actions of that night by citing such notions as “war” or “enemy.” And yet this
is
war.

I realise I am having a moral crisis. At the same time I'm so fevered that the experience seems to be happening to someone else. I strain to make my mind blank, but the insides of my eyelids keep lighting up like cinema screens, playing the same newsreel over and over. My crisis is happening inverted. The army is trying to send me to the rear, where I can be with my wife and baby, that union which I desire more than anything in the world, yet here I am hastening, against all common sense and the expectations of my peers, towards the front. Why? Because I feel guilty for killing the enemy, which is exactly what I am supposed to do and what I agree I'm supposed to do. When I get to the front, how do I hope to redeem myself? By killing more enemy, or taking such actions as will lead directly or indirectly to the deaths of as many of the enemy as possible, as if by this further crime I will absolve all previous crimes, which are not crimes at all but actions for which my country will honour me and in which I in later years no doubt will take secret and perhaps not so secret satisfaction. Am I mad? On the one hand, I cannot and will not let myself believe that what I have ordered and performed at Benina is “right.” It isn't and never can be. I can't simply block it out and carry on as if nothing has happened. At the same time I
must
carry on—for my mates, for England, for Rose and for our child. The alternative is unthinkable. With this, I understand the perverse logic of war and the true tragedy of armed conflict. The enemy against whom we fight are human beings like ourselves, individuals with whom each of us might have been friends except for the deranged fictions of nation, doctrine, race and religion, and whom now we must murder (as they seek to murder us) in the name of those very same fictions. And yet, knowing all this and understanding it, still, in some depraved and ineluctable way, we and they must live it out to the bloody finish.

I have stopped keeping my diary. All I can do is mark each day with a tick. On the third tick—a bright, windy noon—I stagger into an ADS, an Advanced Dressing Station, and simply sit down among the wounded. There are no tents, no beds, no shelter. Germans, English and Empire troops sprawl side by side across an open flat half the size of a football pitch. Someone gives me an injection. I have no clue what's in it but I feel better. I wake in the lee of a canvas windbreak where two bandaged Indian troopers are cooking chapatties on a flat stove made from a petrol tin. An orderly is noting my name from my AB64 pay book. The winter sun slants down. As far as sight can carry, the desert is littered with wrecked tanks, trucks and guns.

“What happened here?”

“The Jerries put up a scrap at every wadi.”

The road runs west along the coast. I can see a blown bridge; tapes mark a lane through a minefield. A column of lorries low-gears up a freshly bulldozed sand ramp, where the bridge used to be, and back on to the highway. Thirty yards from me, on the desert side, lies a German Pak 38 anti-tank gun with “288” stencilled on the gun shield. The weapon sprawls on its side amidst acres of other junk, with its breech blasted and six white rings painted round its muzzle. Each ring represents an Allied tank or truck knocked out.

“Where are we?”

“Nofilia.”

“Is that all?” It has taken me three days to go forty miles.

The orderly looks into my eyes. He gives me another shot.

When I wake again, Sergeant Kehoe kneels beside me. Nick Wilder's chief NCO. “You're supposed to be dead,” he says.

I'm so glad to see him. “Where is everybody?”

31

Zella is the LRDG's new forward base. It's a ragged oasis two hundred miles into the desert. I ride in on Sergeant Kehoe's jeep. Kehoe has been sent to Nofilia not for me, but to pick up Jake Easonsmith, who was supposed to fly in from Cairo on a mission to the Americans, who have now landed in Algeria under Eisenhower and Patton, but instead flew directly to Marada and caught a truck the rest of the way.

The camp at Zella is three marquee tents and an under-construction Nissen hut serving as a motor repair shed, the lot ringed by slit trenches and sheltered by a berm topped with stunted date palms. There's water from a good well and even a ten-by-ten-foot pool for bathing, called Little Cleopatra. Trucks in various stages of refitting poke their noses under camouflage netting that pops and bucks in a hard, sandy gale. We pull in just at suppertime. Two sixty-foot wireless masts tower over the camp but there's no radio shack, just a pair of wireless trucks parked side by side behind a canvas windbreak, with desks on the sand and map boards taped to the trucks' flanks, under more camouflage nets, with a Cummins generator thumping away like a torpedo boat. I note Colonel Prendergast's WACO biplane with its wings tied down against the wind. “Come on,” says Kehoe. “Let's belly up to the trough.”

The mess is a single table under one wing of a marquee, beneath a flysheet snapping in the gale. Grub is sandwiches in wax paper, held down by stones. Each is, as the saying goes, “more sand than wich.” I don't care. I have come back to life. Jake is here, with his shoulder wrapped, directing the show.

“Chapman,” says he, “do you know I have orders to place you under arrest?”

But he grips my hand with warm emotion, which I return. “Are you all right, sir?”

“Never better.”

The last time I saw Jake he had a broken collarbone—at Bir el Ensor, Sore Thumb, in the aftermath of the Rommel raid.

I ask after Collie, Punch, Oliphant and Grainger. “Have you got a job for me, sir?”

Jake sends me to the medical tent instead. I'm given a bunk in the third of three shelters, alongside Lieutenant Ken Lazarus, whom I've never met and who is away on a patrol. I sleep for three days. Throughout this interval, trucks keep coming and going; patrols are mounted and sent out while others limp in, returning. A corporal named Hartley looks after me. He is best mates with one of the wireless operators. All signals are designated Most Secret, but in a unit so small everyone knows everything. Hartley tells me that my old outfit is keen to retrieve me, now that my assignment with LRDG is over. Tank officers are in urgent demand for Monty's next westward push. At the same time, Hartley reports, XXX Corps has sent Jake a despatch announcing the arrival at Zella of two RAC lieutenants, to accompany patrols with an eye to evaluating the going between here and Tripoli. In other words, my original job! When I'm fit enough to get out of bed, I put this to Jake straight out.

“Jake, how can XXX Corps demand my return, when they're sending you two other tank officers on the identical assignment I'm here for already?”

“How do you know what XXX Corps wants?”

I clam up.

“Hell's bells, is there one bloody thing that stays secret round here?!”

The next day Collie, Punch and Oliphant arrive from Jalo; we have a grand reunion. When they hear I'm being sent back to the Armoured Division, they demand to speak to Jake. I forbid this.

Then on Christmas Day, my seventh at Zella, an updated operations sheet is posted on the board in the company office. Below “Wilder T1” and “Tinker T2,” I see

Chapman T3

I make straight for Jake to thank him, but he's already gone, off to Algeria, having flown out at dawn. Bill Kennedy Shaw, now in command, shows me the signal Jake has sent to XXX Corps regarding my status:

Operation still in progress. Will restore officer immediately upon completion.

Now LRDG's advance HQ moves forward from Zella to Hon. Another group of oases. We go with it. Patrols are being sent out from both sites. The first wave are to reconnoitre the going west of Sirte, Wadi Zem Zem and Misurata, scouting a left hook round Tripoli. The second will probe farther west, into Tunisia, seeking a way round Gabès and the Mareth Line.

The following, copied from the Operations Sheet, comes from my notes dated 26 December 42. I can't remember why I took it all down, unless perhaps I sensed something historic in the offing. It names the patrol commanders and their patrols.

I am given three trucks and six new men, all elite infantry of the 6th Battalion Grenadier Guards, fresh from a training course at Faiyoum under our old schoolmasters Willets and Enders. The remainder will be our old crew: Collie, Punch, Grainger and Jenkins but not Oliphant, who has come down with an eye infection and been evacuated to Cairo.

Hon, to which we move on Boxing Day, is the plushest HQ yet, a colony of miniature oases that have been headquarters for the Auto-Saharan Company, the Italian counterpart of the LRDG. Hon has a barracks, a hospital and airfield, even a tennis court. Where is everyone?

Popski, I hear, has just arrived at Zella, preparing to join S1 patrol under Lieutenant Lazarus, my tentmate, to reconnoitre the Jebel Nefusa south of Tripoli. Lieutenant Hunter with Y2 is there too, readying to depart immediately after New Year to recce the same left hook. Nick Wilder will set off from Zella as well, but bound for Tunisia. His T1 patrol will be the first to scout the Mareth Line. Tinker with T2 is still conducting a road watch east of Tripoli.

Eighth Army have sat down for Christmas just west of Nofilia. Monty is short of petrol; his engineers are repairing the port of Benghazi and building all-weather airfields as fast as they can. Rommel, we are told, with 21st Panzer Division and 90th Light Division is preparing defensive positions at Beurat and Wadi Zem Zem. 15th Panzer Division remains forward.

Dearest Rose,

This may be the last letter I can post for a while, though of course I shall write every day and keep the lot till the next drop. I forgot to tell you, I still have Stein's manuscript! I left it behind at Jalo and believed it gone forever. At Christmas, however, it found its way back to me, courtesy of Sgt Collier, who discovered it with other items of my kit.

The men see 1943 in with an all-night boozer. After my bout with jaundice, I can't touch the stuff because of my liver. I don't mind. The weather has broken, as has my fever. I'm well except for desert sores on my legs and arms and a still-queasy stomach. I'm grateful these are the only things wrong with me. Days are windy now, nights ungodly cold.

As patrols are launched and others scurry about in preparation, everyone gets into everyone else's business. Officers grill officers for the latest griff; other ranks interrogate their own. We all want to know what's out there and how bad it's likely to be.

The first clue comes from Tinker, whose patrol limps in from Geddahiah a few days after Christmas. T2 has been shot up by planes and armoured cars, losing six men missing and two trucks. On nearly the same day in almost the same spot, Captain Tony Browne's patrol runs on to Teller mines and loses one officer killed and Browne himself gravely injured. He is replaced by Lieutenant Paddy McLauchlan who, a few days later, is ambushed near Wadi Tamet by German armoured cars; McLauchlan loses one truck and four men captured. A few days later, Hunter's Y2 will be plastered by ME-110s and armoured cars and have to turn back before it reaches its area of operation. “Things are getting dicey out there,” says Kennedy Shaw, who relays the observation from Tinker's report that he, Tinker, noted the numeral 288 on both 8-wheelers chasing him.

I've never seen an officers' mess more competitive than that of the Long Range Desert Group. On the one hand, patrol commanders readily hazard their lives to aid their brother officers, but at the same time they can't stand to think of a comrade getting one-up on them. Each officer believes his patrol the best and he himself the only man for the job.

My old bunkmate Tinker is the fiercest competitor of all. Nick Wilder's early start for the Mareth Line has put him into a blue-balled sweat. Tinker is barely back in the barn before he commences lobbying to be sent out again. He gets his wish on 16 January when he and T2 depart Hon, escorting two 3-tonners carrying fuel and a mob of Popski's Arabs and demolition men (but not Popski himself, who is already at large somewhere round Wadi Zem Zem), with orders to deliver these bandits to their master, who will rendezvous with Tinker at a location of which Tinker will be advised by signal. Then Tinker and Popski will make for the Mareth Line together.

As for my own group, we're ready to roll by 3 January, with the addition of a new Willys jeep and Trooper Holden, Collie's original driver. But orders keep changing for another fortnight. I'm grateful for the delay; it's precious hours to regain weight and strength.

The Mareth Line mission has become everything to me. I spend hours each day poring over the nearly-worthless French and Italian maps that are the only ones we have for Tunisia and conferring with the other patrol commanders and NCOs who are putting together their packages at the same time. Kennedy Shaw and his two keen corporals are feverishly draughting their own maps, based on daily signals from those few patrols—mainly Nick Wilder's and David Stirling's of the SAS—that are out there recce-ing the area right now.

In a nutshell, our next wave of patrols will be operating three to four hundred miles behind the present front east of Tripoli. We'll proceed west across all Tripolitania, crossing into Tunisia south of the Jebel Nefusa, the great crescent-shaped ring of highlands whose northernmost range, narrowing in towards the sea south of Gabès, is called the Ksours de Mons, the Matmata Hills.

Our job is to find a way through those hills.

East of them lies the coastal plain, bottle-stoppered south of Gabès by the Mareth Line. West of the hills spreads a second plain, deserted and undefended according to our French maps, that could lead round the entire defensive front.

This second plain is the one Monty wants to know about.

He wants to know whether a thousand tanks and guns can get there. Are there routes through the hills? Has Rommel fortified the passes? How good is the going on the other side? Are the Germans there and, if so, in what strength?

Kennedy Shaw has sliced this pie into sections, each one half the size of Ireland. Our patrols will take a section apiece and explore it. Each will prepare a “going map” of its assigned territory.

“This is it,” says Kennedy Shaw. “This is the Big Show.”