The Iron Stallions (22 page)

The new man didn’t look much like a commander. He wore a jersey instead of a bush jacket and, instead of the normal peaked dress cap with its red band that most senior officers favoured, preferred a tank corps beret which endeared him to his armoured troops at once. He wasn’t even a desert veteran, but since so many desert veterans had made a hash of things, perhaps it wasn’t a bad idea to bring in somebody from outside who might see things differently.

‘Chap called Montgomery,’ Rydderch said. ‘Has a habit of sacking brigadiers and telling the other ranks what he wants them to do and why.’

Josh’s first impression of the new general was of a thin ascetic face. Already they had learned that he neither drank nor smoked and had cut himself off from most of the normal diversions of life, but that he possessed the ruthless determination of a missionary competing against the forces of darkness, which was exactly how he regarded the Nazis. He believed in drastic surgery and a few of the senior officers who had been unwise enough to support the box system or got rid of tanks in penny numbers were replaced by newer, more aggressive men, among them Brigadier Leduc.

With his arrival, the Eighth Army recovered its spirit. The things it had lacked had been a clearly defined purpose and a genuine leader; and Montgomery had one and had the look of the other.

The troops took him to their heart at once. He was a showman who went around wearing caps with two badges, which he adjusted according to the men he was going to meet. When he harangued them like an Old Testament prophet, a few of the old school considered it rather bad form but Montgomery was cleverer than they realised and gave the impression that the Eighth Army was not under orders from Cairo or even from London but was an army on its own, an independent striking force that he was going to lead into the desert before long – not to hold Rommel but to knock him for six clean out of Africa.

If it was a little schoolboyish for some tastes, to the men from the back streets who made up the ranks it was something they could understand. And what pleased the armoured men was that this time they were going to attack not in full daylight but by night, and instead of the armour bearing the brunt of the guns and the minefields, this role was to be undertaken by the infantry, the aircraft and the artillery.

‘You know,’ Josh said to Reeves, ‘I have a feeling that this time we might pull it off.’

For the first time in months, there was a clear air of confidence abroad and time at last to think of letters home.

Josh’s mother wrote, praying that he was well and safe, and giving him all the news from Braxby.

‘The house at least is alive under the influence and noise of those two dreadful children,’ she wrote. ‘They are at last learning how to behave, how to speak without swearing, and are a total delight. What a pity they aren’t your own.’

Jocelyn’s letter contained no reference at all to the children, and she was chiefly concerned with the fact that one wing of the house had been taken over by the Inland Revenue, who’d been evacuated to Braxby.

‘They’re well enough behaved, of course,’ she wrote, ‘chiefly because they’re either too old or too unfit to be anything else. They’ve taken over part of the stables for their files and stacks of documents and you’ll be happy to know they’re paying a pretty sound rent. Their inspector, a man called Davis, goes out of his way to be pleasant and if nothing else it pays the bills.’

The letter had the usual rushed look about it and ended, ‘Yours, Jocelyn.’ It seemed abrupt and lacking in affection but he assumed that she was busy. Braxby was a big place and needed a lot of attention.

There were also enclosures in the form of a limp-looking pressed flower from Kitty as a birthday present and a drawing of a tank, flying a monstrous Union Jack from Rosanna.

‘This is yew,’ it said underneath.

For some time Reeves had been looking strained and ill and Josh suggested he should try to get leave in Cairo.

‘No, thanks,’ Reeves said. ‘Something’s coming. I want to be in it.’

‘It might not be yet.’

‘On the other hand, it just might.’

The sun was slipping away and the scorched earth was cooling. The breeze was moving a little now and the flies, which normally crawled up your nose, fed on the moisture at the corners of eyes and lips and flew into your mouth when you spoke, were losing their persistence. Spirits were high and morale good despite the recent mauling, and there was none of the discontent and disillusion that might have been expected, only the little nagging hurts caused by the death of friends.

Reeves remained morose and quiet and in the end he came to Josh’s tank to say he’d made a will.

‘I’ve left it all to you,’ he said.

Josh looked startled. ‘What in God’s name for?’

Reeves looked lost. ‘Well, you can’t leave all that lot lying around loose, and something might happen to me. I’ve nobody else. Not a soul in the bloody world. Besides–’ he gave an embarrassed smile ‘–I always felt sort of guilty about you getting expelled from school. I know it was the other cowardly buggers who wouldn’t help haul you up, but I’ve often felt perhaps I ought to have owned up that it was my idea and got the push with you.’

Josh smiled. ‘Have you thought you might suddenly fall for an ATS girl in Cairo?’

Reeves smiled. ‘Or a Gyppo bint.’

‘Especially, if you went on leave as I think you should.’

Reeves shook his head. ‘Too late now,’ he said. He cocked his thumb. ‘There’s a shell or a bullet over there somewhere that has my number on it.’

‘Nonsense. You’re just tired.’

Reeves smiled. ‘I know, old boy. And I know also that Uncle Erwin’s bound to have another go at us before long because he wants to get to Cairo. And this time it’s our last chance, because if we make a cock of it this time we’ve had it.’

Despite being so close to Cairo, the British position had been well chosen, with the sea to the north and the Qattara Depression to the south. Where the 7th Armoured waited, Alam el Halfa was the key point because Rommel would never dare by-pass it and it was even hoped to lure him into a gap with British tanks and artillery dug into the hillside above. The new general seemed quite certain that Rommel would be defeated.

New equipment began to arrive, new weapons, new vehicles, self-propelled guns, and new tanks – Shermans, some of them, capable of twenty-five miles an hour, with a crew of five, armour twice as thick as before, and, above all, a gun that would match anything the Germans possessed. No longer would they have to go in for Balaclava charges to get within range but could sit hull-down in safety and blast away at their own range. For the first time, they felt they had a chance.

Aubrey had actually seen one. ‘Over thirty tons,’ he enthused. ‘Four hundred horsepower engine. And a damn great 75 mill. gun.’

Josh smiled, finding it hard to disillusion him. ‘I’ve got news for you, old son,’ he said gently. ‘We’re not having them in 7th Armoured.’

The German attack came when the new commander had been with his army for only a matter of a fortnight, but there was little of the normal tension and a remarkable absence of panic messages from headquarters. Montgomery seemed to be awaiting the attack with complete confidence.

When the gunfire started it was soon clear that the Axis forces were driving at the southern end of the line, and were intending a swing to the coast to cut off the Eighth Army before advancing to the Nile. As part of the reserve, the 19th were not involved because Montgomery had ordered that the reserve was to be held back for his own attack, and several of them watched with Rydderch and Leduc from behind the Alam el Halfa Ridge, their radios tuned to the frequencies of the regiments taking part.

Light tanks of a yeomanry regiment were moving backwards in a cloud of dust, keeping just out of range and manoeuvring quickly and skilfully. Through his glasses, Josh could see the bigger enemy tanks coming straight up the line of telegraph posts which crossed their front, firing at the retreating British who were making a wide sweep so as not to give away the position of the defences.

‘That’s a devil of a gun they’ve got there,’ Rydderch commented, peering through his binoculars.

‘New long-barrelled 75,’ Leduc said. ‘Can knock out a heavy tank at three thousand yards. Intelligence have been on to it for some time.’

The German tanks were all turning left now and beginning a slow advance. Gunfire began to roll across the desert and, almost at once, it seemed, half the retreating yeomanry were burning as the new guns took their toll. The situation suddenly began to look serious and there seemed to be a complete hole in the defence, but the line of anti-tank guns waited until the German tanks were within a few hundred yards and, as they crashed out together, all along the line the Germans lurched, wheeled and stopped, some of them with smoke pouring from them. As they tried to move forward, an artillery barrage fell on them and, as they were checked again, several of them began to swing away.

It was time now, Josh knew, for the British heavy tanks to join in, the classic cavalry situation with the enemy disabled and confused. His father and grandfather must have acted in such a situation a dozen times with horses. But there was no sign of tanks coming over the ridge and they could hear the infantry yelling for the artillery again.

‘We seem to be a little on the slow side today,’ Leduc said dryly. ‘Somebody should get out their whips.’

Even as he spoke, 22nd Armoured appeared over the crest to the north. Pennants flying, dust streaming, as they bore down with squealing tracks, they reminded Josh for all the world of the famous picture of the charge of the British cavalry at Waterloo. The light was just beginning to fade but the Germans were beginning to mill round in confusion and shot was whistling all over the desert in the usual cloud of smoke and dust. Directly in front two Mark IVs were burning and on the right a British tank went up with the crash of a shot which cleared the equipment from the hull.

It was frustrating not to know what was happening, but the British armour, aided by the Desert Air Force, was not only holding Rommel but was also destroying his tanks. Far from his bases and short of petrol, in the end he was obliged to withdraw, leaving behind him over fifty tanks, several hundred vehicles and a great many dead.

‘First blood to us,’ Packer said.

Dodgin, looking like the Old Man of the Desert, gave him an amused look. ‘Come off it, lad,’ he said. ‘First blood was ages ago. 1940, when I was young.’

There was a great deal of satisfaction at the outcome of the battle, and training started for their own attack, under a different concept of battle planned by the new general. The desert mentality was deeply concerned with outflanking movements, but Montgomery’s idea was for a head-on clash against fixed defences, the tanks geared to the speed of the men on their feet.

Whole divisions were pulled back and retrained, and slowly the desert thinking fell into a new mould. Even the older hands, with experience in plenty, began to appreciate that the old slap-happy attitudes would not do.

7th Armoured were established in the soft sand of the Ragil Depression. They were skilful and battle-wise, but mechanically they were run down. Their tanks had seen long and hard service and their wheeled vehicles, after much wear and tear, were being maintained only with difficulty. Because of this and the fact that they had no Shermans, it was not to be their rôle to tackle the Germans head-on when the time came but to be part of a feint to draw the Germans away from the main attack.

‘It would be more to the point,’ Reeves said dryly, ‘if the main attack drew them away from us.’

They weren’t sure how to take it. Nobody liked the thought that they weren’t up to standard, but the idea that they were being kept back for further operations satisfied them because they’d come to think they were élite troops not to be wasted in a simple slogging match.

As the date drew nearer, a vast deception was practised. Enormous numbers of dummy tanks, guns and lorries were built in the south and it was possible for the Germans to see huge numbers of genuine tanks, armoured cars, guns and trucks astride the tracks leading in that direction while wireless traffic kept their monitoring service busy. It was nothing but a sham. The radio traffic meant nothing, the new water pipeline was made of old petrol tins and the armour the Germans had seen moving south had swung north after dark and left more dummies behind them for the German aircraft to spot.

Towards the end of the month, senior officers were called to a Cairo cinema to hear the plan. It was a day of revelation and Josh came away impressed by Montgomery’s professional skill. There were no heroics as he told them he intended to destroy the enemy with a hard slogging fight. They were going to destroy his forces methodically without ever relaxing the pressure. He expected it to last a matter of twelve days. The case-hardened old desert hands, with sand between their toes, had arrived clinging to the loyalties of the past and with no high expectations, but they came out – Josh among them – absolutely convinced. At long last they began to feel that somewhere just ahead was the end of it all, the end to the endless flogging up and down the desert, that Alex and Cairo with their fleshpots and squalors were finally about to be put behind them for good and all.

The following day, Rydderch held his own battle conference, his men sitting in a hollow in the sand while he explained what was wanted. They looked incredibly young, but remarkably tough. Later, Montgomery himself appeared, riding in a staff car, tossing cigarettes to anybody who wanted them and blowing like a fresh breeze through the tired old habits.

During the evening, sandstorms blew up, and empty petrol tins bowled along with the dust and scraps of paper and torn-out camel thorn, banging away like bombs as they went. As dusk came, men and machines began to move to their assembly areas. Tanks, guns and vehicles slipped into the positions occupied by the dummies and remained under cover through the blazing heat of the next day. No fires were allowed, no washing, no airing of bedding, no digging, and all the tracks they had made were carefully obliterated.