A Good Clean Fight (22 page)

*   *   *

There was no time to recruit volunteers. On General Schaefer's authority, Major Jakowski took one hundred and fifty men from a reserve regiment of German infantry and led them into the desert in a convoy of forty vehicles, which was ten more than Schaefer had promised, but Jakowski decided he needed the extra margin of safety. The desert was big and he planned to be away for at least two weeks, maybe three.

“Leadership and discipline,” Jakowski told the men when they assembled, back-lit by the orange glow of dawn. He was standing on the tail-gate of a truck and wearing a soft cap with goggles pushed up onto his forehead, just like Rommel. “Leadership and discipline can defeat anything and anyone, and that includes the Sahara desert and the British raiding parties.” He spoke quietly but firmly. “You and I, we're going to secure this territory with the same guts and determination that have made Germany the master of most of Europe and half of Russia. Leadership and discipline will always beat pirates or cowboys or outlaws, which is what the enemy raiders are. So far the desert has been their shelter. No longer. From now on the desert is our property and the enemy our prisoner.”

Jakowski's delivery was good but his timing was bad. These troops had all had experience of battle. As they dispersed to their vehicles, one soldier said to another: “He talks as if we've won before we've started.”

“Not worth going then, is it?” said the other man. “Will you tell him, or shall I?” But they spoke cheerfully. After the sweat of training exercises and the grind of guard duties and the tedium of kit inspections, this was an adventure. With extra rations, too.

The column barreled briskly along a good road that skirted the western edge of the Jebel el Akhdar. Most of the vehicles were short-wheelbase canvas-topped trucks, Fiats or Mercedes with the odd Ford, each armed with a heavy machine gun mounted on a swivel; moreover,
Jakowski had chucked General Schaefer's name about pretty freely in the motor parks around Benghazi and he had collected a heavy breakdown truck (with a big winch), a petrol bowser, three supply trucks to carry food, three water-tankers, a radio truck, an ambulance, a command vehicle in which to hold briefings, and a small mobile bakery. After he took the bakery he had doubts; but then he told himself that a hundred and fifty men would need a lot of feeding. And certainly when they saw it, the men were pleasantly surprised. Fresh bread in the desert was a great luxury.

By eight a.m. the column had rounded the Jebel el Akhdar and the road was turning into a track. It had been much battered by the tank-treads of both sides, and some of the tanks lay about, fire-blackened, holed, capsized. “They remind me of the pieces moved to the sides of the board in a game of chess,” Major Jakowski said to his driver, who nodded. They looked to him more like a damn good reason to stay out of panzers, but you couldn't tell an officer that. He wiped his hands on his trousers. The palms were sweating so much that they kept slipping on the wheel. If it was this hot now, what would it be like at noon?

“Turn here,” Jakowski ordered.

The column bumped over the broken edge of the road. A broad, shallow gully pointed roughly southeast, which should take them into the desert, where Jakowski hoped to find evidence of the British raiding patrols. Even if he didn't find evidence, his men would get valuable experience of searching the desert. At best, of course, they would intercept a raiding party and wipe it out.

The gully forked, and forked again. It deepened too: they were still in the edge of the foothills of the Jebel and these wadis had been scoured out by the flash-floods of a hundred thousand years. It was possible to pick a path down the middle and after forty minutes Jakowski was
reasonably pleased with their progress when a harsh metallic twang made him jump. Bright metal showed through the camouflage paint two feet in front of his driver. They were being shot at. “Stop!” he shouted. They stopped.

The order took a full minute to work its way back up the column. Long before then, Jakowski's driver was spraying machine-gun fire against the right-hand side of the wadi. It made a furious, stuttering racket that echoed and reechoed. The trouble was he couldn't see what he was firing at. All the dust raised by the vehicles behind him was drifting forward, thickened by exhaust fumes. He aimed from memory, upward at where the skyline had been. The gunner in the truck behind joined in; the infection spread; gunners throughout the column were sprinkling little bursts amongst the invisible rocks, believing they must be under attack because everyone else was firing. Meanwhile Jakowski, thinking hard, realized that the bullet could as easily have come from the left as from the right, and he ordered the driver to hit that side, too. He swung the gun, rattled off fifty rounds into the drifting haze, and looked to Jakowski for fresh orders. “Cease fire,” Jakowski said glumly. He walked to the next truck and shouted at them to stop. “You,” he ordered. “Go back and tell all those idiots to cease fire.” The man set off, moving very carefully and shouting very loudly.

The dust drifted away. The air cleared. No attackers were to be seen. Everything was silent. The drivers had switched off their engines: overheating came fast in this temperature. The column sat in the wadi like a parade waiting in a side street.

Jakowski found the nearest lieutenant and told him to see what damage had been done. While that was happening, he climbed the wall of the wadi and looked at the terrain. It told him nothing. It was all hillocks and ravines, and the hillocks were all lumps and bumps, dotted with
rocks, spotted with thorn-bushes, fringed with silvery grass. Everything else looked gray-brown. It looked dead: baked to death. Nothing moved except the grass, and that had a constant, nervous shimmer, as if flinching away from the hot wind.

The lieutenant was waiting below. Jakowski scrambled down.

“One bullet-hole, sir,” the lieutenant said. “In the canvas. Driver swears it's new, I'm not so sure. No casualties.”

“That's all?”

“Yes sir.” He thought:
Now the old bastard's pissed-off because nobody got killed. Can't win, can you?

“We must have fired off five thousand rounds,” Jakowski said bitterly. “Just for one lousy sniper. And I bet he was out of sight before we even started.”

The lieutenant said nothing. There was nothing to say.

“For God's sake, let's get out of this bloody dump.” Jakowski waved at his driver to start up.

“One truck has a puncture, sir,” the lieutenant said quickly. “They're mending it now.”

“Get the other officers,” Jakowski ordered. “I want them here. Now.”

The lieutenant returned with two captains and two lieutenants. Jakowski led them down the track, out of earshot of the troops. His driver strolled over to a friend, who said: “What's happening?”

“They're getting pissed on from a great height,” the driver said.

“I wouldn't mind getting pissed on, in this heat. Bloody old Jacko can piss on me every hour on the hour, if he likes.”

Jakowski said to his officers: “Leadership and discipline. Remember? One smelly Arab takes a pot-shot at us and everyone goes berserk. We must have wasted ten thousand rounds on these damn rocks.”

“I honestly thought we were under attack, sir,” a captain called Rinkart said. “It certainly sounded like it.”

“Those were all our guns, you bonehead.”

“We couldn't tell that, sir,” said the other captain, whose name was Lessing. “Not in all that dust.” Jakowski gave him a hard, wide-eyed stare. One of the lieutenants murmured: “The fog of war.” Jakowski switched the stare to him. “Figure of speech, sir,” the lieutenant said.

“Fog of intelligence,” Jakowski barked. “From now on, nobody opens fire unless I give the order.”

“We'll never hear it,” Lessing said. “Not over the noise of the engines.”

“Red signal flare,” Jakowski said. The officers looked at each other. “I take it we did bring signal flares,” he said heavily. His nostrils twitched like a rabbit's.

Rinkart said: “I think I saw a box being loaded, but God knows which truck they're in.”

“Find them,” Jakowski told a lieutenant. “Meanwhile I'll give the signal to open fire by sounding the horn of the vehicle I'm in. A loud continuous blast on the horn. Think you can hear that? Short blasts mean cease fire.”

“What if we get fired on, sir?” Lessing asked. “And you don't hear it?”

“Use your initiative.”

The drivers restarted their engines, all except one of the water-tankers, which whined and kicked but would not start. Major Jakowski ordered it to be towed. The column moved on. After a mile it began to leave a thin trail of water. The air was so full of dust that nobody noticed.

*   *   *

God got the blame for the first casualty.

Major Jakowski knew all about the Tariq el 'Abd; his map clearly indicated those stretches which had been sown with thermos mines (by the German army, so the map
ought to be accurate); and he kept well to the north of it until he met a camel track that crossed his path. It was a broad, well-trodden track, and several vehicles had followed it too. He turned right. By now his column was out of the broken foothills and into something that looked like real desert. The heat was cooking up mirages. A palm grove shimmered. A rock apparently as big as a hotel trembled in the distance. Jakowski was not fooled.

It was about ten or twelve miles before they reached the Tariq. They saw it from a long way off. On the bare and barren desert, the skeleton of a camel stood out like a monument. A dozen skeletons littered the Tariq.

Jakowski put down his binoculars. “Go easy,” he told the driver.

Further on, the tire tracks and the camel tracks all converged. “This must be the place to cross,” he said. “Go where they went.
Exactly
where they went.”

The last vehicle in the column, several hundred yards away, was a food truck, packed high with cases of tinned stuff plus three soldiers. Two were veterans of the Afrika Korps, Oskar and Bruno, aged twenty-two or twenty-three; the third was a recent replacement, aged twenty. His name was Caius. Oskar and Bruno were whiling away the time by educating Caius. “You don't want to worry about those British Commandos, kid,” Bruno said. “They're not so bad.”

“Right,” Caius said. He hunched his shoulders.

“Well . . .” Oskar spat out a date-pit. They were all eating from a box which Oskar had discovered was broken open after he kicked it hard. “Depends, doesn't it?
Some
aren't so bad. I mean, I personally don't believe that story Sergeant Nocken told.”

Bruno picked his teeth with his tongue. “You mean the one about the British Commando who tore off the stormtrooper's arm and beat him to death with it? That story?”

“No, no,” Oskar said irritably. “He had witnesses for
that, didn't he? I mean the story about the little Commando who stood on the oberstleutnant's feet and screwed his head round and round until it . . . You know.”

“Well, it's possible,” Bruno said. “Don't you agree it's possible, kid?”

“No idea,” Caius said, and looked away. He really didn't know, and he didn't want to think of it. He had heard of men, infantrymen, who had gone all through the last war without having to fire a single shot at the enemy. Not one.

“I suppose it's no different from taking a stiff cork out of a bottle,” Oskar said. The truck moved. “Off again,” he said.

“Anyway, what I meant was the Arabs are a bloody sight worse than the Commandos,” Bruno said. “You want to watch out for the Arabs, kid.”

The first three vehicles made the narrow crossing over the Tariq without difficulty. Then the driver of the breakdown truck paid too much attention to the NCO standing in front and waving him on. He made a bad gear-change and stalled the engine. It restarted promptly enough, but the driver was angry with himself and he punished the engine by over-revving it. The wheels spun and dug twin pits in the sand. Hot rubber smoked. The NCO shouted. The driver whacked the gear-lever into neutral and cursed.

“Brilliant,” the NCO said. “Now see if you can get it out backward.”

The driver tried to reverse and merely lengthened the pits. Eventually, by rocking the truck back and forth he lengthened them so much that he could charge forward and smash his way up and out of trouble.

A couple of men shoveled sand back into the holes. Waste of time. The next few drivers, determined not to make the same mistake, went hard and fast into and out of the crossing, and made the holes worse than ever. Soon they merged into one sharp dip. The harder the trucks hit it, the deeper it got. And vice versa.

“Extremely cunning, your Arab,” Bruno said. “I mean, take those things they carry water in.”

“Goatskins,” Oskar said.

“He knows that. He's not stupid.
You're
stupid. He's very intelligent. He's got brains written all over his face.”

Caius ducked his head to hide a blush. He was very conscious of his boyish good looks and what's more Bruno had been wrong: Caius hadn't known that Arabs carried water in goatskins.

“Last time we took Tobruk,” Oskar said, “I saw a New Zealander with brains written all over his face. He couldn't have been very clever, because they were his brains.”

Bruno waved this reminiscence away. “Question is, how do they do it?” he said. “How do the Arabs get the goat out of his skin without slitting him up the belly?” He raised his hands in wonder at this native trick.

“That's why you never want to get caught by the Arabs, kiddo,” Oskar told Caius. “They'll do the same to you.”

“Very clever fellow,” Bruno said, “your average Arab.”

“I heard they pour ants down your throat and let them eat you up,” Oskar said. “Those desert ants, they've got jaws like crabs.”