The Sword of Fate (24 page)

A week after the capture of Tobruk, the bulk of the prisoners there having been dealt with, I was again ordered to rejoin my battalion, but by the time I reached Derna I found that this fine town, which the Italians had converted in recent years into a fashionable pleasure resort, had already fallen. That was on January the 30th, and it now seemed that the Italians’ Libyan Army was cracking up in all directions. From February the 1st onwards it was one wild, tireless drive by tanks, Bren-gun carriers, armoured cars and lorries to catch up with the fleeing Italians.

I had lost all trace of my battalion, so I simply went on into the blue, picking up lifts as I could and snatching an hour or two’s sleep whenever I felt too utterly worn out to go any further. Except for sandy stretches here and there, we were now mostly free of the desert, having passed into the pleasant fertile region of Western Cyrenaica, where there were grazing herds, fields of crops and groves of date palms.

At every village through which we passed the little groups of Arabs never seemed tired of cheering and thrusting presents of fruit and sticky sweetmeats upon us. We rarely saw an Italian
except for strays and small detachments who wished to give themselves up, but for the time being we were too occupied in pressing on without wasting a single moment to bother with them. On February the 3rd the old town of Cyrene, which in Roman times had been the capital of the province, was taken, and three days later there was a great tank battle in which Major-General Martel, having raced right across the inland desert almost to the bottom of the Gulf of Sirte, cut off and smashed the retreating Italians. That night, Thursday, February the 6th, Benghazi surrendered, and the whole of Cyrenaica was in British hands.

From start to finish it had been a magnificent feat of endurance on the part of the troops and a supremely brilliant demonstration by our General Staff of the art of waging war. Only too often in the Boer War, and in the 1914-18 War, our generals had received completely unmerited praise, titles and high decorations for flinging their troops against positions held strongly by an enemy or standing to fight a desperate battle in the most adverse circumstances. It does not need forty years of specialised training, staff courses and experience in command to order men to attack—or fight with their backs to the wall. Any fool can fling troops against a hill or require them to stand and die when he has made a mucker of his job; but it needs real brains, imagination and enormous organising ability to direct the spearheads of a small force with maximum striking power against the weak spots of a vastly superior enemy, and to do it again and again until his whole army is broken up in confusion and his strong places destroyed. That was what our generals had done; with a force of little more than sixty thousand men they had utterly routed an army a quarter of a million strong and overrun a territory nearly as big as England. We were immensely proud of them and not without pride in ourselves to think that, with our sweat and drive, we had been among those who had contributed to re-establishing the prestige that the British Army had lost in Norway, France and Belgium.

During those exhausting days of questioning prisoners for hour after hour, writing reports for despatch-riders to rush off to Intelligence, and thrusting forward day after day, across territory which a few weeks previously we had never dreamed that we’d be able to reach, I had little time to be anxious, as I otherwise should have been, about Daphnis.

After leaving Fort Capuzzo I had made up my mind that I must not expect to hear from her. In an open warfare offensive
of this kind it is utterly impossible for the Army postal service to keep in touch with constantly moving units and sometimes mails get hung up for weeks before, at last, reaching their destination; but actually I fared much better than I expected, as I got a first letter from her while we were still outside Bardia.

In it she told me how utterly shattered she had been when she had learnt that I had been taken prisoner, and of how all her old fears about the prophecy that a sword lay between us and that we were fated never to belong to each other had possessed her mind to the exclusion of all else until her parents had feared that she was going to have a breakdown. Then how Teddy Bannister had arrived one morning and seen her mother, after which they had broken the news to her that I was alive and free.

While I was in Bardia itself I had two more letters from her, all glowing with love and confidence in our future happiness. After that there was an interval of over a fortnight, at the end of which five letters turned up in one bag of mail that reached us at Tobruk. From that point on the postal people lost me, and I certainly can’t blame them, as I never slept in the same place twice until I arrived in Benghazi two days after its capture.

All through those weeks I wrote to her, when, how and where I could in ink or pencil, and when I had run out of ordinary paper, on the backs of Army forms or anything I could get hold of. Only once did more than three days elapse without my being able to get a few lines off to let her know that I was still alive, well and unwounded, and whenever I could keep myself awake to do so I scribbled long screeds of adoration.

On my second day in Benghazi the mails caught up, and I received another batch of letters from Daphnis. As I read them through, my fingers trembled so that I could hardly hold the sheets. Every line of them radiated a love that rivalled my own, and I knew, now that a halt had at last been called to our victorious progress, I should be able to get leave and be with her very soon again.

We were once more dealing with prisoners as hard as we could go, and thousands of them had been concentrated in great wire cages just outside the town, near one of which I occupied a hutment. But on the morning of the 11th I chucked work, collared one of the innumerable little Fiat cars that we had captured, and drove over to the New Zealanders.

I had not been with them during the most desperate fighting, and to my distress I learned that my friend Jack Benham had been wounded. A shell-splinter had entered the fleshy part of his
leg above the knee, but it was hoped that he would not suffer any permanent disability from the wound.

Reports said that ‘Long Willie’ had proved the sort of Colonel that every subaltern dreams about. Caked with filth and covered in blood, he had apparently gone without sleep for days at a stretch, while he tirelessly directed his men or actually fought with them at any point where the fleeing enemy turned to offer resistance. But when I found him he was as clean and immaculate as ever, the same tall, rather stooping mild-mannered man with a ready grin that had kept us at it, yet from grumbling without cause or openly quarrelling, when our tempers had been frayed to rags by the blistering heat during those ghastly months at Mersa Matruh.

When I asked him about leave, he said: “I know how anxious you must be to get back to your fiancée, Day, but I’m afraid it’s no longer my pigeon. Now that we’re consolidating here I could let any of my own boys off in a case like this, but you fall into a different category. There are still such shoals of these Wops to be dealt with, and as long as they have to be sorted out you’ve been lent to Division. I’ll raise no objection, of course, but I’m afraid you’ll have to get a chit from someone higher up before you stand much chance of leave to Alex.”

I tried to hide my disappointment as well as I could, and after leaving him it occurred to me to go into Benghazi and see the staff captain whose Intelligence work I admired so much.

Having driven into town, I ran him to earth in one of the hotels that had been taken over as a part of the Area Headquarters. When I had put my case to him he said, at once:

“You’re quite definitely needed here, but I do sympathise, and if I possibly can I’d like to do something for you. Your own work has been absolutely first-class, and I was speaking to the General about you only the other day. It’s over a year now since you received your commission and I suggested that he should put you up for your second pip.”

“That’s most awfully kind of you, sir,” I stammered. I certainly hadn’t expected any such bouquet as even in wartime it’s generally eighteen months or two years before an officer is promoted to full lieutenant unless he proves specially valuable.

The Captain sat smoking thoughtfully in silence for a moment, then he went on:

“As a matter of fact I’ve no doubt at all that your promotion will go through, but I’m equally certain that the General wouldn’t grant you leave at the moment. Still, I think I see a way round
that. As you know, we’ve sent over a hundred thousand prisoners back to Egypt already. At least two-thirds of them have not been grilled as yet, so there’s still a mass of stuff to be picked up as a result of skilful questioning. How would it suit you if, instead of leave, I had you transferred to Alex to carry on the good work there?”

“But that would be absolutely magnificent!” I exclaimed. “I’d be able not only to get married and have a honeymoon, but take a flat and live in it with my wife for a month or two anyway. I’d be most terribly grateful if you could, sir.”

“All right,” he smiled. “I’ll see what I can do. It may take a few days, but if it comes off I shall expect a piece of the wedding-cake to put under my pillow!”

That splendid temporary chief of mine was as good as his word. Three days later orders came through for me to report to the senior commandant, Prisoners of War Camps, Alexandria. I was now more than double the distance from Alex than when I was stationed at Mersa Matruh, and as yet there was no organised transport for casual passengers, but I set off in my captured Fiat, and in spite of the military traffic on the road, and the endless trudging lines of prisoners, I was in Alexandria two afternoons later.

Tired and dusty as I was, I drove straight to the Diamopholi house. There had been no means of letting Daphnis know that I was coming, but I was absolutely bursting with the splendid news I had for her. If I had been granted even a fortnight’s leave it would have meant that either there would have been no time at all to prepare for the wedding or we should have had to cut our honeymoon down to a bare week, whereas now that I was to be stationed in Alex I should have no cause to grudge Daphnis a little time to issue fresh invitations and arrange the big reception that she wanted. Graziani’s army had been so thoroughly defeated that, so far as one could possibly see, all menace had been removed from Egypt, and it seemed that the glorious prospect of starting our married life in almost peace-time conditions lay before us.

It was about half past five when I arrived at the house. Daphnis and her mother were both at home and Alcis was with them. Daphnis’ eyes looked as big and as round as half-crowns when I was shown into the room. She dropped some work that she was doing, but her surprise gave way to a shout of delight. Rushing at me, she flung her arms round my neck and clung to me until I thought that she would never let me go.

My own joy and excitement were hardly short of hers as I gathered her to me, quite regardless of the two onlookers, and felt her lovely face once more pressed against mine.

It is said that all the world loves a lover, and our feelings for each other were so obvious that my mother-in-law-to-be could only smile indulgently. When we had recovered ourselves a little, she spoke to me very kindly, saying how exciting our romance had been, and how, since we loved so much, she felt quite certain that I would make her daughter happy. Then she kissed me on the forehead and said that henceforward she would regard me as her son. At such a happy moment I could feel no animosity towards Alcis and I called her ‘Cousin’ as she held out her hand for my formal kiss of greeting.

The later details of that evening are only vague in my memory. I remember old Nicholas Diamopholus coming home from his office and being kindness itself to me. I remember lots of Diamopholi relatives and friends who had been called up on the telephone coming in for an informal party. Champagne flowed the whole evening; innumerable toasts were drunk and I put away buckets of it; but fortunately there are two states in which it is impossible for any man to get tight. He cannot do so if he is utterly and completely miserable through the loss or betrayal of a woman, and he cannot do so if he is deliriously happy and in the company of one whom he loves wildly, and by whom he knows himself to be beloved. It was very late when I reached the Cecil, where somebody had telephoned during the evening to reserve a room for me. But when I went to bed in the small hours of the morning I sighed with utter contentment, feeling myself to be the luckiest fellow in the whole world.

Next morning I was at the Diamopholi’s by ten o’clock to discuss the hundred and one things that needed settling before the wedding. Since Daphnis wanted a large wedding I had not the least objection, providing that fixing it up was not going to take too long, but there seemed no fear of this, as the more lengthy matters, such as her wedding-dress, the bridesmaids, one of whom was to be Barbara Wishart, and their frocks, had all been agreed upon in the previous November.

Madame Diamopholus told me that I was now to consider myself free of the house, come there whenever I wanted to and stay as long as I liked, but I was still very much in the Army, and I knew that most of my days would be occupied with duties. That afternoon I took Daphnis out to see the Wisharts, who had played so large a part in our romance, and the following morning
I reported to the Senior Commandant at the vast prisoners-of-war camp.

In addition to the preparations for the wedding there was now the question of a flat to live in afterwards. We decided, as the war made the length of time we should be allowed to occupy it uncertain, it would be better to take a furnished apartment, and the day after I reported at the camp I got the afternoon off so that I could spend it with Daphnis and her mother looking round likely places.

Those few hectic days had passed like a dream between odd moments snatched whenever possible for love-making, a round of parties for me to be presented to the Diamopholi’s innumerable friends, and my new duties. I could hardly keep track of the days of the week, but it was on Wednesday, February the 19th, that having been to see suites of furnished apartments we had chosen a very nice one for our future home; and it was on that night that I parted from Daphnis after our usual lingering farewell, little knowing in what horribly perturbing circumstances I should see her again.