Take or Destroy! (16 page)

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 And Docwra, his eyes as distant as his native fells, and the aloof, withdrawn Cobbe, bolstered by the tradition of a regiment that went back to the time of Charles II; even little Tit Willow, with his willingness and ready smile.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. Waterhouse 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.

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.

For two years the British army had been facing the enemy across this same dusty wasteland, where, mummified by the sun or suffocated by sand, men had died not only of wounds but of loneliness, thirst, starvation and sheer weariness. Now, those who had been at Dunkirk or Norway or Greece or Crete, those war-weary men who’d been chased out of every country almost from the North Pole to the Equator, sensed that this time the Germans were going to do the running for a change.

The evening of 23 October came in quietly and they were all restless as they waited about the camp at Gott el Scouab. That morning they’d been paraded to hear Montgomery’s message read out to them by Hockold in his slow, unemotional voice. It was the usual exhortation to do and die, which they’d all heard before, but somehow this time it seemed different.

As the light began to fade and the desert turned silvery, there was a cold wind blowing from the sea to chafe the gritty dust against the skin. A few of the older hands were quiet and thoughtful, thinking of friends who already lay in the desert, beneath crooked crosses jammed into old petrol tins full of sand or sticking out of piles of snake-infested rocks.

Bradshaw was watching Sugarwhite as he clutched a pencil and pad. He was fulfilling an urgent need to write home to the girl next door. She meant nothing to him, never had and never would, but he couldn’t go into battle, he felt, without putting his thoughts down for someone.

‘How do you feel?’ Bradshaw asked him.

‘Frightened. It’s a big thing, a battle, isn’t it?’

‘It is a bit.’

‘What’s it like?’

‘As far as I can remember, hot, dusty and uncomfortable.’

‘Were
you
frightened?’

‘Mostly I was just so tired I only wanted to be allowed to go to sleep.’

It didn’t sound too bad and Sugarwhite felt satisfied he’d be able to cope. ‘After all, we’ve been trained for it,’ he said. He was trying to convince himself that the likelihood of survival was good when deep down he wasn’t so sure. ‘We’ve got a good chance, haven’t we? I don’t like to think of being killed.’

Bradshaw considered. ‘So long as they don’t put up memorials to us like they did after the last war, and half-baked intellectual poets don’t write all that bilge about “Friend Death”  and “Sweet Death”. I’d much rather read poems to sweet life. I’ve rather enjoyed mine.’

‘But your marriage -’ Sugarwhite was young enough to imagine that love was eternal, a deep romantic attachment consisting of sitting warm and comfortable at opposite sides of the fireplace, interspersed with frequently recurring periods of tremendous sexual passion where you were lifted to unimaginable heights of ecstasy. ‘Will you take her back?’

‘Shouldn’t think so.’ Bradshaw sounded terribly casual. ‘I think next time I’ll just look round for some warm-hearted child and live with her till I’m sure.’

For Sugarwhite, to whom love, even if not sex, was always legal and honest, it was hard to accept.

As zero hour drew nearer and the sky darkened, they noticed that the desert was growing quieter. Despite the vastness, there were always small sounds somewhere -- an unseen lorry’s gears grinding in the distance, the faint growl of a tank, the stutter of a machine gun or the thud of a far-off anti-tank weapon - but now even these small familiar noises were disappearing.

It left them with an uneasy feeling of half-formed anxiety that things might go wrong, that the battle might be lost, that it all might turn out like the last one, so they’d have to run back way beyond their own start line or even to India, that the bloody war might go on for ever and ever till they were all old men.

‘It winnae be that easy,’ Keely said, his dark Scots-Irish face worried. ‘There innae ony flies on Jerry.’

‘He is lying doggo just, to let us know he knows,’ Taffy Jones agreed uneasily.

With the rising of the moon Tenth Corps, which was to support Thirtieth Corps in punching the hole in the German line, began to move up to its start line, and an endless stream of vehicles began to rumble by. The coating of dust on the faces of the men inside and the impassive expressions they wore made them look as if they were wearing masks. Then, as the moon climbed higher into the sky - bloated and florid - all movement stopped and they experienced the strange sensation of the whole desert holding its breath. In the distance they could hear the drone of aircraft over the enemy’s forward positions, but over many hundreds of miles there was unbroken silence as though they hung in space. It was an illusion. The desert contained thousands of men, all within a short distance of each other, all armed to the teeth. They had been there all day, lying in holes in the ground, roasted by the sun and tormented by the flies, forbidden to move for any purpose whatsoever. Only as the sun had disappeared in its crimson fury behind the German lines had they climbed out, and now, with the stars like a million lamps in the sky, they were forming up with creaking equipment in sections and platoons and companies, and beginning to look at their watches.

The moon was high now, serene, illuminating the desert with a blue light. In the artillery gun pits, the order ‘Take Post’ had been given. The weapons were loaded and the layers had set their drift scales and range readers to the charge settings. The shells had been rammed home. Only an occasional Very light or a burst of fire from a light weapon broke the stillness. Outside Tent 7 they began to look at their watches.

‘Nothing can stop it now,’ Bradshaw said in a flat voice. ‘The guns are placed, the tanks ready, even the empty beds in the hospitals back in the Delta.’

Taffy looked at him. ‘You have got the wind up, Oxshott, man?’ For a moment he was hoping in his misery that he had found someone with whom he could share his fears.

Bradshaw shook his head. ‘Oh, God, no,’ he said, unaware of Taffy’s torment. ‘I’m as bloodthirsty as the next man. It’s just the thought that any moment now several thousand lives are going to be cut off - just like that.’ He snapped his fingers. ‘Quite deliberately. Ours and theirs.’

There was another silence. Sergeant Bunch, who could remember the big attacks of the First War, recalled how quiet it had been at Cambrai before zero hour. To Hockold, waiting in a forward gun position in the white moonlight, the silence came almost as a shock. Not a gun nor a rifle fired. The seconds ticked on. He had never heard such a silence before.

‘It’s too bloody still,’ an officer nearby said uneasily. ‘It’ll give the game away.’

A battery commander further back had obviously had the same thought and there was a series of sharp staccato cracks and the rush and whirr of shells going over.

‘Six-pounders,’ someone said. ‘That’ll make ‘em think. Solid shot bouncing around in their trenches.’

At Gott el Scouab the minutes continued to tick by. They looked at their watches again.

‘Now,’ D’ocwra said.

‘No.’ Taffy shook his head. ‘A bit longer, look you.’

He had just worked out the time and raised his head to inform them when the whole sky turned pink. For a moment the silence held, then the noise of the guns hit them in a solid wall of sound that shook the desert and split the sky in two.

It hadn’t the volcanic horror of the First War barrages, but there was a clamorous quality about it that they knew they would never forget, a strange assurance, a certainty that was irresistible, and they stood with their mouths open, entranced by the spectacle, their ears assailed by the violence, their minds awed by the racket and by the incredible confidence that seemed inherent in the din. To north and south the flickering lightning flashes played, fluttering round them, it seemed, like huge moths.

‘Over a thousand guns, man,’ Taffy said exultantly. ‘All calibres. One every twelve yards.’

As nearby batteries he hadn’t even suspected crashed out, Hockold flinched, watching the whole front sparkling with light. The night was seared with flame, convulsing the horizon with a ceaseless glare. Then he heard the clear-cut nonchalant bark of a German 88 in the maelstrom of sound, and saw the metallic spitting of machine-gun fire. There seemed to be little reaction from the Germans, just an occasional explosion as though an odd gun had got off a single round before it had been obliterated, and by now whole squadrons of aeroplanes were going over so that the sky was resonant with throbbing. The din was heartening and Hockold listened with a thumping heart.

A deep glow on the horizon marked the end of an Axis gun position, then there was a pause as the artillery switched targets and he knew that the infantry had begun to move forward. In. the distance he could see the periodic bursts of a Bofors marking the line of advance with tracer shell, and the beams of searchlights directed towards the sky as beacons, then somewhere in the darkness a voice called out. ‘Charge Two! Zero-three degrees two-oh minutes! Four-eight-oh-oh! Fire by order, five rounds gunfire! B troop, fire!’

As the battery crashed out, he saw waiting officers and orderlies trying to shelter from the concussion, then he heard the thin wail of bagpipes and saw line upon line of steel-helmeted figures in shorts and shirts moving up, their rifles at the high port, the moon glinting on their bayonets, and heard the chafing clink of tanks lurching warily forward.

As the bitter pre-dawn wind faded and the sun came up the next morning, the blue of the western horizon was blurred by smoke and dust and there was a strange reek of cordite in the air. When Hockold appeared by car in a cloud of dust, Murdoch was standing in the doorway of the signals tent, and he could hear the radio bleeping. ‘They reckon the Jocks have gained all their objectives and there’s no sign of a counter-attack,’ he said.

As he spoke, the guns, which had slackened during the night, started up again with sharp salvoes. Groups of British bombers escorted by fighters were sailing overhead and a few dog-fights started away in the distance beyond the German lines, with occasional rattles of firing and the long deepening drones of diving aircraft. The desert, which had been empty for so much of their stay at Gott el Scouab, was filled with vehicles now. There were more batches moving up behind them so that the route past the camp, normally gritty gravel, was powdered by the moving wheels to a substance as soft and fine as dry cement which lifted about the streams of vehicles in great man-made clouds.